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13 Nov 2009 06:23
CradleBenny Andrews1967
November 13, 2009
Adriaen Pietersz van de Venne 1589 - 1662
Oasis 1 and 2Oasis 3 Barbara Mor ctheory the small blue man a small man tends the door,he wears a blue jacket,all is glassy silence bldgs &parkinglotEmpty,the sun exists at some angle to the sky the small blue man is almost not there,he is Tokwah who opens the door as many years,the close world,vinous enclosed &moistured green film,earth enwrapt in its sweat &thick creations,who is mouth,stink &eating who is water(jaguar,Fire) in a jungle of entropic things he thinks he is many dreams all sensate cells,all skins explode,Omnivorous of desire elderly blue person,or shrunk white man,all thats left, arthritic &hypnotic,at the turnstyle inside the door(inside the plaza inside the wonder)aGreeter,can barely stand or move yet humbly mechanical for the job,the doors of automatic sliding glass,of hisEyes,open beyond mortality &theSilence everywhere that was aWorld flesh floor,liveMezzanines of air,anaconda flowers rain eyes lickt day&night w/ paradise,bodies consuming the display of bodies rapturous or w/out commentary,except orange purple yellow noise explosions in anOracular skull he counts fireants crocodiles bats millipedes piranhas,ecstatic merchandise heThinks bright red blood eyes as a bird flies up this parrot screeching words &becomes a clever man there was aTree,ocean in aTree,Tokwah hooks out a great flood & everything drowns,rivers pour out his orificesPissing& preachingFever his monkey tricks penetrate himself,a slippery muscle poison always lustful always hungry &mens milk,intercourse w/ toads,a thorn in the squirmy anus extrudes secretion abundantly,dipt w/petals on penis& theMind he makes semen the invention of(adultery &murder) so that you remain dead,so that you are dead,he madeDeath,thisBrain glows in the dark,binocular &cruel,scares away return ofGhosts until theWorld closes,now they come
The Lady from Shanghai
Is it Written in the Stars?Global Finance, Precarious Destinies Brian HolmesContinental Drift
This essay inquires into the workings – and indeed, the work force – of a variety of capitalism that has spread outwards from its Anglo-American core to reshape the entire planet. At the center of contemporary capitalism is a set of financial instruments called derivatives, and a group of people called traders. The text draws links between their highly abstract formulas and the aesthetics of lived experience in the world’s major cities. For that it begins not with the azure sky, but with the curve of a dark horizon.(....)
Jodi DeanToday it is the mirror-maze of the speculative economy that lies in ruins, and the question is how to forget the impossible desires projected from the financial stars above, how to imagine other destinies. Yet what seems likely, if the current political passivity continues to reign, is that the multitudes of artificial lifeforms that flourished briefly in the glass-house environments of the financial capitals will now just fade away like the swarms of lesser creatures in Black Shoals, leaving the major predators with their weapons intact, still firing at each other. The danger is that the present crisis – with a magnitude comparable at least to that of the 1970s, if not the 1930s – will be resolved by those at the top of the social hierarchy, who are now attempting to reboot the speculative economy. In that case, the profound reshaping of social institutions required to end the crisis will be decided exclusively by them. If we want to make an egalitarian change in our world model, it’s urgent to understand what happens in the boom-bust cycles – before they are used against us once again.(....)
The lifeform of the financial markets is now animated by these meta-commodities, which lend the new cityscapes their dazzling character. But what the pulsating lights of the central business districts hide is the privatization of the social state – indeed, the privatization of government. Gentrification is the fetishism of severed democratic relations.(....)
The kind of “play-labor” celebrated by the pundits of Web 2.0 may have had transgressive connotations in the 1960s, but today it is only a grotesque parody of Huizinga’s homo ludens, or of the sublimated sexual drives that Marcuse explored in his revolutionary book, Eros and Civilization. What has disappeared from the networked cultures of casino capitalism is the willingness to engage in political conflict – even while the civilizational forces of Thanatos, or unbridled aggression, bear down on the biosphere. Now it is those aggressive drives that must be sublimated and channeled into a necessary struggle. Rather than draping aesthetic and epistemological veils over blatant expropriation, shouldn’t artists and knowledge workers seek political confrontations with those who set the rules of the game?
Dolor Theodore Roethke I have known the inexorable sadness of pencils, Neat in their boxes, dolor of pad and paper-weight, All the misery of manilla folders and mucilage, Desolation in immaculate public places, Lonely reception room, lavatory, switchboard, The unalterable pathos of basin and pitcher, Ritual of multigraph, paper-clip, comma, Endless duplication of lives and objects. And I have seen dust from the walls of institutions, Finer than flour, alive, more dangerous than silica, Sift, almost invisible, through long afternoons of tedium, Dropping a fine film on nails and delicate eyebrows, Glazing the pale hair, the duplicate gray standard faces.
Robert Louis Stevenson November 13, 1850–December 3, 1894 playing his flageolet
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