Fake Fire
The real trick here— the most important thing, supreme above all else— is maneuvering yourself into an ecstatic relationship with all Creation.
February 24, 2010
February 18, 2010
The New Weird
A dirge from the Lawrence Welk Show.
The Lawrence Welk Show is the favorite television program of both myself and my grandmother, but for fairly different reasons. What we have here is a case of a single style, embraced by two widely divergent sensibilities. One set of elements apprehended from opposite ends.
February 1, 2010
November 8, 2009
The Dialects of Experience: on Drugs and Madness.
August, 2009. Shawn Kornhauser and I tried our hand at touring, roughly based on the musical model. I lectured. He showed a short film. We followed the tour through the South— Virginia, North Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Tennesse, and back to Philadelphia, testing the waters in various venues.
I in flight; the Institute, in phase change.
The plaster bust was a welcomed gift from Shawn Kornhauser
Yesterday was Halloween, with sheets of rain. Halloween: what an apt night for the Philadelphia Institute for Advanced Study to shed its earthly coil; leaving behind the bulk of its brick and mortar and planks and drywall. I sat for a while, in my office— my Studium— for the last evening ever; pondering a plaster bust of myself… Three years, nearly, given over. And yet, I couldn’t find room for sentimentality. I was only thinking in terms of release.
October 29, 2009
Hyperion.
“Si les vers ont esté l’abus de ma jeunesse, les vers seront aussi l’appuy de ma vieillesse. S’ils furent ma folie, ils seront ma raison.”
“If poetry has been the abuse of my youth, it will be the support of my old age. If it was my folly, it will be my reason.”— Joachim Du Bellay.
October 24, 2009
The Land After Time.
Metal and metempsychosis. Rich and I scrapped metal yesterday. We had long awaited this day. To gather up refrigerators, pipes, cabinets, nuts, bolts, random jagged metal laying around the Institute, and haul everything around the block to the massive, nearby metal yard. So, we did. We filled Rickie’s truck up and over and dragged a half-ton of metal over to Berks, and came back with how much cash? Two-hundred dollars? No. Three hundred dollars? No. Try, forty six dollars.
Merciless
October 19, 2009
The Blackened Sun. The Electric Blanket.
Rapacity was long the engine of history— at least as it’s canonically retold, the history of Kings and Conquests. Not rapacity for the sake of acquisition— for the accumulation of goods and resources, for zeal or even glory— but rapacity in and of itself. When I was younger, I always thought of human history as a work of ideals emerging out of the Darkness and now look at me: no longer able to believe that greed and cunning are even enough to explain the mess. The brutalities of history— the battle, plunder, burning, torture, decimation— once seemed like the unwanted effects of human struggles over land and resource… As if self-preservation was the highest end of the human tribes… As if power ever really cares about the ideal…
October 12, 2009
The Birthday: one day closer to Eternal Darkness.
Yes, a birthday. Me-day. The Solipsistic Holiday. Am achten Oktober. The gang spoiled me again. An early-nite excursion to an indoor waterpark, nearly empty save for us. Last year, it was a fun zone; a zone for fun rather than a park for water. What a substance, water— a fun substratum. What are the conditions for fun? What are its ambiguities, its failures? What is its relation to the broader Spieltrieb, or play-drive in the large, Schillerian sense?
October 1, 2009
What is Cold? What is Color?
It is said that we reveal the most in trifles. Tiny actions— simple glitches— can reveal the hidden whole. After another day of Study, I met Sienna outside her work and we climbed aboard the Frankford Blue Line heading home… Around ten o’clock, then…. Even before entering, we noticed something was spooking the passengers. Necks were craning to look into the next car. “It’s someone with a mask,” Sienna mutters to me. I peer in the next car over, to see some guy stiffly moving about in a white mask that was halfway between Michael Myers and Scream, partially cloaked under his hoodie. There was a Ghoul on the train. He was clearly freaking everybody out, and for good reason— the guy was crazy enough to antagonize North Philadelphian tough guys all by himself… And all his signifiers were too crossed for easy interpretation. Inwardly I was thinking, “just keep your distance, Colombine.” But he didn’t. He moved from that car to ours, pausing in the passageway between, behind the glass, in a real piece of horror-film device. Lights from the tunnel lit the mask in flashes.
