Pandacam. (via Click Opera)

Hannah and Martin--the Movie. (via Aldaily)

Twice today i saw the grayness pierced by cars of a color that i always think of as "Chrome Yellow" (although it can't be)--& i remember a time when, after reading about this obsolete precursor to Cadmium Yellow, i tracked down some in order to paint with a retro color. So far, i think, the paintings i used it on have not fallen prey to the old blackening it used to occasion; perhaps modern pigments are of a higher standard of purity? --And i still haven't read the Huxley novel (misspelled), though i have a nice old copy on the shelf.

Turtle Man + His Shell.

Listening to: Charles Koechlin- Les Bandar-Log.

Snow the width of my palm deep, on my car's hood, windshield, & roof. I go back into the house for sunglasses.

For Purity Day.

Got some bulk White Peony tea. Yum!

Ape City.

I would distinguish less between artists & non-artists, than between those who have learned self-discipline, and those who only had the forms imposed on them. This distinction is clearest, however, when the self-discipline is one that society actually frowns upon. So freedom-loving people gravitate to art, even if they have no specific talent. It's a way of definition (and sometimes a lying one--).

Artists are more mistaken about non-artists than the converse. Mainly because with them it's a religious conviction--in defiance of collective dogmas & rites. But isn't it odd how monotheists keep calling other monotheists, atheists??

Any society which does not have multiple norms, is a violent society. Perhaps the majority of all violence is thus unnoticed--or at least, blamed on something else. And then self-hatred is a natural response to self-violence--from the other side, so it's never conscious (consciously, perhaps, [as] despair--self-hatred which renders any other hatred simply a matter of fitting the right projection...

Reasoning: using the mind's patterned chatter to weave a cover for what you don't want to admit--debating on an unspoken question. Premises can be deduced, perhaps, but maybe not even his closest family can track down the source of a philosopher's system--like an ulcer into the 4th dimension--. And maybe it's something perfectly simple in his relation to the world--only it's so new it hasn't been named till now and all this is its first identification, which will later be abbreviated (so that people quote anything he said, just to bring up his name) by others when that private blight has become a plague (i am thinking of philosophers like Nietzsche whom following generations adopt as prophets for their special kind of angst)--or else it could be said simply, but for the philosopher it's too important to leave off speaking about it then, he goes on & on like a madman...
   --How is this different from art? Art also is compensation. But it's born much more of pleasure, philosophy from pain. Take away the element of play--of voluptuousness, and glamour, and pride in skill--and you might have something resembling that drab, closely woven canvas of philosophy: Art sans paint.
   When i read philosophers, it's like a squirrel cracking acorns for their kernel. I don't consider the outside as anything but impediment, certainly not from the tree's point of view. And when i start using those words, it's with no more reverence than a hermit crab moving into an empty shell. (True, some hermit crabs have made theirs a public shrine; but i've grown to dislike the smell of such places, and seek out a shell that's long uninhabited...) Considering shellcraft, i might say that to make what is to the ego's petty opinions, habits & preferences, what a cathedral is to a tin hut, it takes a much greater nakedness--or shame...(truer and falser philosophizing?)

A nice write-up of one of my favorite flicks.

Godzilla movies that never were. (via Kaiju-Fan)

Cowpie Clocks.

The difference between Italy & the United States is when something like Enron happens there, bosses go to jail.

A beautiful essay on the lessons China can learn from what went wrong in America. (via Click Opera)

They're coming!

The Virus Community.

A Straussian Memory.

North Korea, 1996. (via Consumptive)

Werner Herzog has a new film this spring, a documentary about the Jupiter mission called Wake for Galileo.

"Hidden Referrer"??

Looks like the Moonies are trying a new tack. A few weeks ago a couple of cute teens were hitting up people for money in a restaurant my wife & i were eating at; they say they're collecting funds for a "church group" (they count on nowadays a lot of people don't know what they are--a pernicious cult). Today, i threw a kid out of the store doing the same thing. Shit.

Momus has started a blog!

Beginning of the new McCarthyism?

The "Grey Album". (I suspect this will spawn a whole genre.)

One of Riverbend's relatives is held for ransom...Imagine if you had to come up with $15,000 in three days.

Tenderness is the treasure. As long as you still have tenderness, they have not won.

When i visited Germany, my tour group was shown the meathooks the conspirators against Hitler had been hung upon.

    Orphaned lacustrine
 explain arse poetica
    as a meta poem

      02 13 04

Perhaps i was wrong to, although i always did, read the comma-poems as a more spatially economical way of representing a series of single-word lines.

Just think how many jobs would be created, & frustration alleviated, if all the corporations were required to replace their labyrinthine voicemail systems with lots & lots of human operators.

Before "The Triplets of Belleville" (which was a lot of strange fun), we saw the long-pending Dali/Disney collaboration (!) "Destino". It was about what you'd think, but i was glad to have seen it. And maybe this is what Dali's metamorphic paintings were actually evolving toward, only the technology hadn't developed quite in time. Someday i want to write about all the artists who preceded their media...

There is a moment near the end of The Man Who was Thursday (i am now rereading) when the five or six police detectives are fleeing, pursued by a crowd they think are anarchists, & themselves the last just men in the world. But the crowd is on their side & thinks the detectives are the anarchists. I let my fancy (for a moment) figure that tiny fanatical band of Red-assed Baboons, as if they believed their own rhetoric, beleagured by a world that is actually seeking only justice, but in Red-Assed Baboon eyes a rising tide of anarchy they must quell at all costs. It's all just a simple misunderstanding! --Then the moment passes, & all i can do is hope we will be rid of these prosaic brigands as quickly as possible.

02 13 04

   "Scissors Too Dull to Cut Paper"

"If not you, who?" So i start canvassing for Kerry on my block. The first ten houses have nobody home. Next, some kids playing hooky--they're too young to vote. At the next, a voice shouts, "Kerry? That commie pinko fag!" & so forth. In the background i hear Rush. The next, they shoot me.

02 08 04

'Nothing matters: a great discovery, if ever there was one, from which no one has been able to gain any advantage.' --Cioran, The New Gods tr Richard Howard

Careers in Art are not at an end, but their meaning is.

Nothing is so base a spectacle as the mass ejaculation of programmed sentiments.

'What was remarkable in paganism is that no radical distinction was made between believing and not believing, having faith or not having it.' --Cioran, ibid

It is probably not an uncommon experience to find one's body a little ill-fitting, but how many people find their mind, all of a sudden, like trying to drive someone else's car?

'And just as paganism was to give way before Christianity, so this last God will have to yield to some new belief. Stripped of aggression, He no longer constitutes an obstacle to the outburst of other gods; they need only arrive--and perhaps they will arrive. Doubtless they will not have the countenance nor even the mask of the gods, but they will be no less fearful for that.' --ibid
[Of course, what more naturally happens is that the nature of a god changes, while continuing to carry the same appearances; thus, modern Christians who do not realize they are worshipping Mars, the God of War, instead of their erstwhile Prince of Peace--& who find their old-school brethren insufficiently "Christian " for new realities.]

I'm there.

Wikipedia's History of Language Poetry.

Quantum Poetry.

The MADI Museum in Dallas.

The New Earnestness.

How do you tell when your techno CD is stuck? when your Tuvan CD is skipping??when your Cajun cassette is dragging??? when your Harry Partch record is warped???? (--things that have really happened to me)

O'Reilly recants. (via Orcinus) As had Andrew Sullivan...Peggy Noonan...George Will...

The Saragossa Manuscript. More.

Ellipticism defined. (note to myself)

A link to poems from World on Fire, a new Bernstein book that is in some ways a response to "9-11". (via Silliman's Blog)

   Pod People Blogs

Someone named "Mark Blogger" (mark_blogger@yahoo.com) asked me to trade blog linkage, so i agreed. It turns out this is just a new sort of spamistry! (I should have guessed when the blogroll of his pseudo-"Iraq War Blog" started out with a gambling link!). I googled on "Ilia Dreams Blog" & found this. So bloggers beware!

'When these maidens met, Mercy and Truth,
Either asked other in awe and wonder
Of the din and darkness, and if day were dawning,
And what light it was lay on the lids of hell.'
--Piers Plowman modernized)

Idea: Ego as passport.

"Amis: 'Victor Gollancz told me a very interesting remark of [David] Lindsay's about [A Voyage to] Arcturus; he said, "I shall never appeal to a large public at all, but I think that as long as our civilization lasts one person a year will read me".' " --C S Lewis, 1947

"I took a hero once to Mars in a spaceship, but when I knew better I had angels convey him to Venus." --ibid

An artist who professes pure rationality is also a mystagogue. --And of course, some people call themselves artists who are only superstitious--occultism would suit them much better.

"Wee seeme ambitious, Gods whole worke t'undoe;
Of nothing hee made us, and we strive too,
To bring our selves to nothing backe; and wee
Doe what wee can, to do't so soone as hee."
--Donne, An Anatomie of the World

Your most shameful memories, your gravest fears must be spoken or else vitiate your art at the source.

Were there none who, on the thronged road to this or that savior, became disgusted with the common craving for salvation, saw their own weakness then as what it really was, and went home, enlightened without having reached the holy one?...

As long as i confuse two situations: that of there no longer being useful roles (good work [in Schumacher's sense]), and my own, which sometimes seems to me the ironic case of an obsolete vocation (from day to day its exact identity varies; i think i might've made a pretty good a-lot-of-neat-things...), i'll always confuse this age's real tragedy with my own self-pity.

'Insomnia's role in history, from Caligula to Hitler. Is the impossibility of sleeping the cause or the consequence of cruelty? The tyrant lies awake--that is what defines him.' --Cioran

Does the fact that there are so many more artists [now], mean each of them has a smaller share of Art? Or is that only how art-history has to be written?

Perhaps freedom only has meaning applied to a group, for how little they coerce each other. If you use it individually, that creates all kinds of illusory possibilities which don't in fact exist: in a "totalitarian" state one can be completely "free" by becoming an outlaw-- even if they live but 5 minutes that way. But most won't, and that's where freedom finds its limit. Americans like to talk about freedom as if it's a matter of being able to choose among different name-brands (that being the kind of thing they can always show a skeptic). But when you must choose starvations or letting corporations rape your body with lethal chemicals (the choice very many city-dwellers face, who aren't rich or enlightened enough to try to hunt down good food), that's nothing to brag of. Our freedom of speech & job are also like that. Just because there's not (usually) police to shoot you down the moment you step out of line, doesn't mean you're exempt from slower, more subtle but no less certain reprisals. in a depression, the threat is more naked and the fear more open, that's all.

What's illegimate about music as religion is that it's a religion mainly of nonmusicians. But isn't that true of all religions, past a certain point?

The artist is the clothes-maker who's always naked.

I write my Odes as follows: first, i decide what time span to cover. Then i go through all those poems i wrote, selecting the best lines. I add some computer or plagiarized lines for seasoning. And from this list i compose a cento, connecting consecutives or music, sense (or disjunct frisson), & my mood.

02 06 04

To be quietly, rationally desperate: yes; whether or not i play at making plans. The real struggle, though, is managing a laugh.

To know something worth knowing, is to make oneself an Enemy of the State.
--saying of Asmodeus

Censure his ass.

A Clear Channel station playing "Party Like It's 1999".

Listening to- Messiaen: Oiseaux Exotiques; La Bouscarle; Reveil des Oiseaux.

Dubya disciplined.

On Coffee: What is not thereby banalized? For me, only the interlocking patterns of thought; more precisely, the flow of my voice in an orderly sequence. On coffee, only talk is real. Skepticism. Mechanical activities: body-talk. Or, chatter. No other voice is listenable, you turn away in irritation, wanting not to be interrupted (you drive on freeways to avoid red-lights)-- it is not such a huge distance to that point of wanting to Liquidate the One Who Stands In Your Way. And not out of anger. Out of logic. The reptile brain, the left hemisphere? Or rather, an anesthesia of intuition...... But: good driving in a speed-situation, all reflexes--is that intuition also? Well, maybe speed-&-distances is a quantitative relationship, and you lack the qualitative... The words: just; nothing but; only;: and all totalities fall apart in these X-ray eyes--they're just--Poetry. The sense that ego is everything, not even suspecting a depth to experience; no resonance, nostalgia, detachment, play, fantasy; you're serious and you desire above all else closure, which becomes your only motivation. Efficient as a bulldozer, you use up all your minutes and throw them away. There's an infinite supply--because all you know is the pinhole present.

   "Nipplegate"

The new volcanic island
As if it had never been
Vanishes beneath the waves;
And slaves turn back to the wall.

02 06 04

Against the long poem as such. Like when your favorite band does a concept album, & half the songs stink because they were written to order.