I'll Let You Know When The Bodies Start Turning Up

Taken last week:

Taken today:

Top Bantz With The Ya̧nomamö

The Ya̧nomamö will do almost anything for honey, one of the most prized delicacies in their own diet. One of my cynical onlookers—the fellow who had earlier watched me eating frankfurters—immediately recognized the honey and knew that I would not share the tiny precious bottle. It would be futile to even ask. Instead, he glared at me and queried icily, “Sh
aki! What kind of animal semen are you pouring onto your food and eating?” His question had the desired effect and my meal ended.

 - Napoleon Chagnon, Ya̧nomamö: The Fierce People (1968)

If things had worked out differently, that guy could've been a Vine superstar.

Hard Boiled Athenians

In the absence of a public prosecutor, it was up to private individuals to take one another to court, and they would rarely do so unless they were motivated by personal hostility. Demosthenes was once charged with desertion by a group of his enemies, but the case never came to court. One of his prosecutors had allegedly been bought off, and was later found dead – brutally murdered and mutilated by a madman who, by some strange coincidence, had once been a friend of Demosthenes'.

Hans van Wees discusses Demosthenes 21.103 and Aeschines 2.148 in Greek Warfare: Myths and realities (2004).

Poststructuralists in Foxholes #1

The first in an occasional series.

"Baudrillard Was Here", painted on an abandoned bunker at Bnaider, Kuwait (Artist: Alia Farid).

Hotspur Press

Bad Film Night No.3: The Room (2003)

Can You Ever Really Trust Anyone?

Theme From "Burn Warehouse Burn"

We want to free this land from its smelly gangrene of professors, archaeologists, ciceroni and antiquarians. For too long has Italy been a dealer in second-hand clothes. We mean to free her from the numberless museums that cover her like so many graveyards.

Museums: cemeteries!… Identical, surely, in the sinister promiscuity of so many bodies unknown to one another. Museums: public dormitories where one lies forever beside hated or unknown beings. Museums: absurd abattoirs of painters and sculptors ferociously slaughtering each other with color-blows and line-blows, the length of the fought-over walls!

That one should make an annual pilgrimage, just as one goes to the graveyard on All Souls’ Day—that I grant. That once a year one should leave a floral tribute beneath the Gioconda, I grant you that… But I don’t admit that our sorrows, our fragile courage, our morbid restlessness should be given a daily conducted tour through the museums. Why poison ourselves? Why rot?

And what is there to see in an old picture except the laborious contortions of an artist throwing himself against the barriers that thwart his desire to express his dream completely?… Admiring an old picture is the same as pouring our sensibility into a funerary urn instead of hurtling it far off, in violent spasms of action and creation.

Do you, then, wish to waste all your best powers in this eternal and futile worship of the past, from which you emerge fatally exhausted, shrunken, beaten down?

In truth I tell you that daily visits to museums, libraries, and academies (cemeteries of empty exertion, Calvaries of crucified dreams, registries of aborted beginnings!) are, for artists, as damaging as the prolonged supervision by parents of certain young people drunk with their talent and their ambitious wills. When the future is barred to them, the admirable past may be a solace for the ills of the moribund, the sickly, the prisoner… But we want no part of it, the past, we the young and strong Futurists!

So let them come, the gay incendiaries with charred fingers! Here they are! Here they are!… Come on! Set fire to the library shelves! Turn aside the canals to flood the museums!… Oh, the joy of seeing the glorious old canvases bobbing adrift on those waters, discolored and shredded!… Take up your pickaxes, your axes and hammers and wreck, wreck the venerable cities, pitilessly!

- Filippo Marinetti, The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism (1909)

Writing Cheques You Can't Cash

An extract from LaVoy Finicum's self-published novel Only By Blood and Suffering (2015):

Video footage from Tuesday of LaVoy Finicum against two members of the Oregon State Police:

I Had To Phone Someone So I Picked On You

When I was about 8 or 9 I saw David Bowie on TV, it was the Top of the Pops performance of "Starman", and it must have been on a clip show of some sort. I was blown away, although I wasn't into music at the time, and wouldn't be until 1995.

It seems like a long way from there to here. 

Bad Film Night No.2: Low Blow (1986)

The Deadliest Weapon Is Still Your Fist.

Gary Cooper Is Dead

We’re not in a Frank Capra movie. Gary Cooper is not going to give Trump his comeuppance. He is not going to die of his own mania in a burning barn or find God and quit the race to become a missionary. He is not a grand conspiracy meant to sneak Hillary Clinton into the White House. Denial accomplishes nothing.

He’s not desperate and he’s not losing.

And retreating to the comfort of our curated peers on social media, where everybody knows Trump is a villain, gets us nowhere. We don’t need better or smarter or funnier or more marketable ways to call him a villain. We don’t need to split hairs on whether he’s a fascist or just an almost-fascist. We don’t need any more hyperbole soloing. That won’t change the mind of a single Trump supporter.

From Kaleb Horton's piece "On Donald Trump and Preying Upon Weakness".

Reduce Speed Now

Internet culture's ability to reexamine, remix, and reinterpret things is my favourite thing about it. Case in point: the Soundcloud account chipmunkson16speed, which plays cover versions from an old Chipmunks novelty record (a bit of internet research reveals that it's 1990's "Born To Rock") at 16 RPM rather than the correct 33 1⁄3 RPM. The results are surprising. Blondie's "Call Me" gains a distinctly doom metal feel:

Belinda Carlisle's "Heaven Is a Place on Earth", meanwhile, is transformed into some sort of Neil Young/Beach Boys collaboration:



And while it's not as good as the others, Michael Jackson's "Bad" played this way is very Trent Reznor at the start:

Bad Film Night No.1: Samurai Cop (1989)

You Have The Right To Remain Silent...Dead Silent.

A Very Dangerous Drug for Young Men

This is why Joy Division can be a very dangerous drug for young men. They seem to be presenting The Truth (they present themselves as doing so). Their subject, after all, is depression. Not sadness or frustration, rock's standard downer states, but depression: depression: whose difference from mere sadness consists in its claim to have uncovered the (final, unvarnished) Truth about life and desire.

The depressive experiences himself as walled off from the lifeworld, so that his own frozen inner life - or inner death - overwhelms everything; at the same time, he experiences himself as evacuated, totally denuded, a shell: there is nothing except the inside, but the inside is empty.
...
The Aesthetes want the world promised by the sleeves and the sound, a pristine black and white realm unsullied by the grubby compromises and embarrassments of the everyday. The empiricists insist on just the opposite: on rooting the songs back in the quotidian at its least elevated and, most importantly, at its least serious. 'Ian was a laugh, the band were young lads who liked to get pissed, it was all a bit of fun that got out of hand...' It's important to hold onto both of these Joy Divisions - the Joy Division of Pure Art, and the Joy Division who were 'just a laff' - at once. For if the truth of Joy Division is that they were Lads, then Joy Division must be the truth of Laddism. And so it would appear: beneath all the red-nosed downer-fuelled jollity of the past two decades, mental illness has increased 70% amongst adolescents. Suicide remains one of the most common sources of death for young males.

- Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on depression, hauntology and lost futures (2014)

Festival Number 6

The Dialectic In Action

Technically

Well, when you've run out of Toyota pickups... (Picture from the @HalaJaber Twitter account, and is apparently of an IS fighter in Libya).

Five Years

I'll Be There For You

Ross' behavior becomes more erratic. No one has seen Chandler for weeks. Ross keeps making stews. No one sees him go to the grocery store
— Jordan Shiveley (@jmshiveley) April 3, 2015

@jmshiveley Yet the stews continue. Ross eyes are dark wells and his gums start to recede. The stews continue.
— Jordan Shiveley (@jmshiveley) April 3, 2015

@jmshiveley Ross just mumbles incoherently about "THE DEEP KNOWLEDGE AND THE CRIMSON HUNTRESS MOTHER" when asked any question.
— Jordan Shiveley (@jmshiveley) April 3, 2015

@jmshiveley Joey has gone missing
— Jordan Shiveley (@jmshiveley) April 3, 2015

@jmshiveley The skin around Ross' mouth is grey and leathery. He doesn't seem to cast a shadow. All he does is make more and more stews.
— Jordan Shiveley (@jmshiveley) April 3, 2015

Rachel begins to delve into occult studies in response to Ross' change. She becomes thrice marked to the Crone and Crow, daughter of Shadows
— Jordan Shiveley (@jmshiveley) April 3, 2015

@jmshiveley She tries to enlist Monica to strengthen the binding rites of the Unsung Silent Ones. Monica threatens to tell Ross
— Jordan Shiveley (@jmshiveley) April 3, 2015

@jmshiveley Monica disappears. Rachel can now see the Forms that Move Beneath. It all becomes so clear. She knows what must be done.
— Jordan Shiveley (@jmshiveley) April 3, 2015

@jmshiveley Rachel treads the Mansions of Silence. The taste of iron on her tongue and lips crimson stained. There are no more boundaries.
— Jordan Shiveley (@jmshiveley) April 3, 2015

Phoebe merely sits atop the Throne on Nine Cold Flames in the Pit of Unending Eyes. Everything has gone according to her prophecies.
— Jordan Shiveley (@jmshiveley) April 3, 2015

Three Megabytes of Hot RAM

From over at Design Interactions comes an intriguing look at the social network you could've had in the 1980s:

I can't work out whether this is something people are actually doing, or an art project. Maybe that's the point? Either way, the idea of colonising the abandoned analogue frequencies is cyberpunk in its truest spirit. I'm told that Walter Benjamin saw surrealism as finding a revolutionary potential in obsolete things, in modernity's detritus. This seems a good example.