No. 22 - Yves Klein

Le Saut dans le Vide (1960)

No. 21 - Antichrist (2009)

Mind numbingly beautiful and brutal. One part Necromantik, one part Kurosawa's Dreams. Essential for anyone interested in the darker side of narrative art house, even if von Trier is sort of a jerk.

No. 20 - Tartar Lamb 2

From Kickstarter: "Tartar Lamb 2 is like the sound of a whale swallowing a comet, spouting a cloud of ice from its blowhole, and the shards raining down and slicing up your face."

Go here and make a donation. If they get $6K in the next two and a half months, we get another amazing album. Oh and plus you get crazy merch for donating if it all pans out.

No. 19 - The Gift (1921)

The Gift (1921), early readymade by Man Ray.

No. 18 - Entr'acte (1924)

Part 1

Part 2

No. 17 - DFW at the HRC

Yeah, I know you probably know already, but if you don't-

DFW at the HRC

No. 16 - DFW on Williamson on Borges

I was just so excited to find another uncollected David Foster Wallace piece that I wanted to share it.

DFW on a 2004 biography of Borges

No. 15 - Coyote

Check out Time Out New York's great write up of Kayo Dot's new album, "Coyote" - made all the better by the inclusion of a preview track.

Lots of trumpets and bass!

No. 14 - DFW

Do the world a favor and read some David Foster Wallace today. You'll be better for it:

DFW on Federer

DFW on the hidden language war

DFW on David Lynch

DFW on cruise ships

DFW on growing up a (near) tennis prodigy

DFW on Kafka

No. 13 - Po-Mo

In my spare time, I read about postmodernism (p-r-e-n-t-e-n-t-i-o-u-s!). I find particularly interesting the differences between modernism and its bastard son. LET'S LEARN!

From "approaches to po-mo":

Modernism/Modernity	Postmodern/Postmodernity
Master Narratives and metanarratives of history, culture and national identity as accepted before WWII (American-European myths of progress). Myths of cultural and ethnic origin accepted as received.	Suspicion and rejection of Master Narratives for history and culture; local narratives, ironic deconstruction of master narratives: counter-myths of origin.
Faith in "Grand Theory" (totalizing explanations in history, science and culture) to represent all knowledge and explain everything.	Rejection of totalizing theories; pursuit of localizing and contingent theories.
Faith in, and myths of, social and cultural unity, hierarchies of social-class and ethnic/national values, seemingly clear bases for unity.	Social and cultural pluralism, disunity, unclear bases for social/national/ ethnic unity.
Master narrative of progress through science and technology.	Skepticism of idea of progress, anti-technology reactions, neo-Luddism; new age religions.
Sense of unified, centered self; "individualism," unified identity.	Sense of fragmentation and decentered self; multiple, conflicting identities.
Idea of "the family" as central unit of social order: model of the middle-class, nuclear family. Heterosexual norms.	Alternative family units, alternatives to middle-class marriage model, multiple identities for couplings and childraising. Polysexuality, exposure of repressed homosexual and homosocial realities in cultures.
Hierarchy, order, centralized control.	Subverted order, loss of centralized control, fragmentation.
Faith and personal investment in big politics (Nation-State, party).	Trust and investment in micropolitics, identity politics, local politics, institutional power struggles.
Root/Depth tropes. Faith in "Depth" (meaning, value, content, the signified) over "Surface" (appearances, the superficial, the signifier).	Rhizome/surface tropes. Attention to play of surfaces, images, signifiers without concern for "Depth". Relational and horizontal differences, differentiations.
Crisis in representation and status of the image after photography and mass media.	Culture adapting to simulation, visual media becoming undifferentiated equivalent forms, simulation and real-time media substituting for the real.
Faith in the "real" beyond media, language, symbols, and representations; authenticity of "originals."	Hyper-reality, image saturation, simulacra seem more powerful than the "real"; images and texts with no prior "original". "As seen on TV" and "as seen on MTV" are more powerful than unmediated experience.
Dichotomy of high and low culture (official vs. popular culture). Imposed consensus that high or official culture is normative and authoritative, the ground of value and discrimination.	Disruption of the dominance of high culture by popular culture. Mixing of popular and high cultures, new valuation of pop culture, hybrid cultural forms cancel "high"/"low" categories.
Mass culture, mass consumption, mass marketing.	Demassified culture; niche products and marketing, smaller group identities.
Art as unique object and finished work authenticated by artist and validated by agreed upon standards.	Art as process, performance, production, intertextuality. Art as recycling of culture authenticated by audience and validated in subcultures sharing identity with the artist.
Knowledge mastery, attempts to embrace a totality. Quest for interdisciplinary harmony. The encyclopedia.	Navigation through information overload, information management; fragmented, partial knowledge; just-in-time knowledge. The Web.
Broadcast media, centralized one-to-many communications. Paradigms: broadcast networks and TV.	Digital, interactive, client-server, distributed, user-motivated, individualized, many-to-many media. Paradigms: Napster and the Web.
Centering/centeredness, centralized knowledge.	Dispersal, dissemination, networked, distributed knowledge
Determinacy, dependence, hierarchy.	Indeterminacy, contingency, polycentric power sources.
Seriousness of intention and purpose, middle-class earnestness.	Play, irony, challenge to official seriousness, subversion of earnestness.
Sense of clear generic boundaries and wholeness (art, music, and literature).	Hybridity, promiscuous genres, recombinant culture, intertextuality, pastiche.
Design and architecture of New York.	Design and architecture of LA and Las Vegas
Clear dichotomy between organic and inorganic, human and machine.	Cyborgian mixing of organic and inorganic, human and machine and electronic.
Phallic ordering of sexual difference, unified sexualities, exclusion/bracketing of pornography.	Androgyny, queer sexual identities, polymorphous sexuality, mass marketing of pornography, porn style mixing with mainstream images.
The book as sufficient bearer of the word. The library as complete and total system for printed knowledge.	Hypermedia as transcendence of the physical limits of print media. The Web as infinitely expandable, centerless, inter-connected information system.

No. 12 - SMiLE (a reconstruction)

SMiLE. Brian Wilson's "teenage symphony to god" - a journey across America, starting in the Northeast and ending on the beaches of California - the notoriously unreleased Beach Boys response to Sgt. Pepper. After getting un-crazy, Brian Wilson rerecorded the entire album in 2003. But it lacks Carl, Dennis, Mike, and Al. THIS is a 'reconstruction' of SMiLE from the original Beach Boys studio takes, brought to you by the audio-engineering magic of the 21st century. To put it more urgently, this is an album that shouldn't exist but it does exist and it's hauntingly perfect.

just SMiLE

No. 11 - T.S. and me

I might be getting a chance to work on a new critical edition of T.S. Eliot's complete works as a student researcher at the Harry Ransom Center. I'm absolutely ecstatic at the possibility. And for that, here's an Eliot prose-poem:

Hysteria

As she laughed I was aware of becoming involved in her laughter and being part of it, until her teeth were only accidental stars with a talent for squad-drill. I was drawn in by short gasps, inhaled at each momentary recovery, lost finally in the dark caverns of her throat, bruised by the ripple of unseen muscles. An elderly waiter with trembling hands was hurriedly spreading a pink and white checked cloth over the rusty green iron table, saying: "If the lady and gentleman wish to take their tea in the garden, if the lady and gentleman wish to take their tea in the garden..." I decided that if the shaking of her breasts could be stopped, some of the fragments of the afternoon might be collected, and I concentrated my attention with careful subtlety to this end.

An interlude

Finals. I'll be mentally prepared to write anything that's not about brides in English drama or Guy Crouchback in a few days, bear with me. For now, here's a picture from pg. 3 of Zak Smith's "Pictures showing what happens on each page of Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow":


"A screaming comes across the sky...Above him lift girders...the carriage, which is built on several levels...drunks, old veterans...hustlers...derelicts, exhausted women with more children..."

No. 10 - "The Night Porter" and Charlotte Rampling

Alright, so I've currently been watching films that deal with post-WWII Nazism for my German history course, and have come across a real jewel. Directed by Liliana Cavani, The Night Porter is about the reunion of an SS concentration camp officer and his former victim/lover. It's ridiculously atmospheric, sadistic, erotic, and powerful and strikes me as a more Italian version of Polanski; it's also one of the first films to explore the fetishism of military violence and the third reich (which would eventually give us Ilsa [see: No. 7]). But the film only accomplishes all of this through then young actress Charlotte Rampling, whose performance is beautifully ethereal and haunting. Watch it for yourself, it's out on Criterion.

No. 9 - Camels

There is seriously some logic to this picture. Ten dollars to anyone that can guess it. Christ, I'm getting antsy.

No. 8 - Dockery and Son

For tonight, the poem I just finished a paper on:

Dockery and Son
by Philip Larkin

‘Dockery was junior to you,

Wasn’t he?’ said the Dean. ‘His son’s here now.’

Death-suited, visitant, I nod. ‘And do

You keep in touch with—’ Or remember how

Black-gowned, unbreakfasted, and still half-tight

We used to stand before that desk, to give

‘Our version’ of ‘these incidents last night’?

I try the door of where I used to live:

Locked. The lawn spreads dazzlingly wide.

A known bell chimes. I catch my train, ignored.

Canal and clouds and colleges subside

Slowly from view. But Dockery, good Lord,

Anyone up today must have been born

In ’43, when I was twenty-one.

If he was younger, did he get this son

At nineteen, twenty? Was he that withdrawn

High-collared public-schoolboy, sharing rooms

With Cartwright who was killed? Well, it just shows

How much ... How little ... Yawning, I suppose

I fell asleep, waking at the fumes

And furnace-glares of Sheffield, where I changed,

And ate an awful pie, and walked along

The platform to its end to see the ranged

Joining and parting lines reflect a strong

Unhindered moon. To have no son, no wife,

No house or land still seemed quite natural.

Only a numbness registered the shock

Of finding out how much had gone of life,

How widely from the others. Dockery, now:

Only nineteen, he must have taken stock

Of what he wanted, and been capable

Of ... No, that’s not the difference: rather, how

Convinced he was he should be added to!

Why did he think adding meant increase?

To me it was dilution. Where do these

Innate assumptions come from? Not from what

We think truest, or most want to do:

Those warp tight-shut, like doors. They’re more a style

Our lives bring with them: habit for a while,

Suddenly they harden into all we’ve got

And how we got it; looked back on, they rear

Like sand-clouds, thick and close, embodying

For Dockery a son, for me nothing,

Nothing with all a son’s harsh patronage.

Life is first boredom, then fear.

Whether or not we use it, it goes,

And leaves what something hidden from us chose,

And age, and then the only end of age.

_______________________________________

Gives you chills, aye? No one does the human lacking like Larkin.

No. 7 - Ilsa, She-Wolf of the SS

Ilsa is the Commandant for Special Camp 9, the medical research branch of the SS - you remember, that one branch that was composed completely of female SS soldiers who slept with all of the prisoners then castrated them. No? Me neither. The film was an underground phenomenon in the 70s, and help to kick off a whole wave of Nazisploitation films, the like of which included Gestapo's Last Orgy, Love Camp 7, and SS Experiment Camp. Most of these films are as/if not more extreme than Ilsa, often centering around the concentration camp brothels and medical experiments in sexuality. But I can't imagine a time when Ilsa really would have been horrifying. I mean, it's excessively gory and sexual, and I suppose there are some pretty disturbing images in light of its historical context, but come on. My favorite part is when the SS general has her pee on him in honor of her great medical breakthroughs. Well worth a rental.

No. 6 - Eli Roth's "Thanksgiving"

I figured it would be appropriate today to bitch about the fact that "Thanksgiving" will always remain just a trailer in Grindhouse. It certainly has the potential to be a great campy kind of horror film.

Watch it here

The best part about the trailer is the narration. Robert Rodriguez is going ahead with the film "Machete," which started as a just a Grindhouse trailer, so maybe there's hope. Enjoy the mock poster:

No. 5 - Iran - "The Moon Boys"

Fucking finally! I've been searching for an Iran cd for the last year and finally found "The Moon Boys." For those who aren't in the know (and frankly, who isn't with Tumult releases), Iran is a beautiful indie band buried beneath layers and layers of fuzz. Imagine the beautiful simplicity of the Beatles pumped through Slogun's amps. Or Throbbing Gristle writing catchy pop songs. Any way you wanna take it, Iran is badass and overlooked. The two members are obsessed with black metal and are responsible for the upcoming documentary "Until The Light Takes Us," which seems like it's shaping up to be awesome as well. I also think one of the members is in TV on the Radio, but who keeps count these days?

Check out their myspace. They won't dissapoint:

http://www.myspace.com/iranband

edit: They have a new single out, "buddy," of which I'm not entirely sure. I'll investigate further.

No. 4 - One of these things is not like the other

Yes

Yes

Yes

No