Cannibal Manifesto, by Francis Picabia, read by Andre Breton in March 1920

What are you doing here, planted on your backsides like a load of serious mugs...

... you serious people, you smell worse than cow dung

DADA, as for it, it smells of nothing, it is nothing, nothing, nothing

It is like your hopes: nothing

like your heaven: nothing...

like your politicians: nothing...

like your artists: nothing...

On Existenalism

From Waking Life, by Richard Linklater:

The reason why I refuse to take existentialism as just another French fashion or historical curiosity is that I think it has something very important to offer us... I'm afraid were losing the real virtues of living life passionately in the sense of taking responsibility for who you are the ability to make something of yourself and feel good about life. Existentialism is often discussed as if it were a philosophy of despair, but I think the truth is just the opposite. Sartre, once interviewed, said he never felt once minute of despair in his life. One thing that comes out from reading these guys is not a sense of anguish about life so much as a real kind of exuberance, of feeling on top of it, it’s like your life is yours to create. I’ve read the post modernists with some interest, even admiration, but when I read them I always have this awful nagging feeling that something absolutely essential is getting left out. The more you talk about a person as a social construction or as a confluence of forces or as being fragmented of marginalised, what you do is you open up a whole new world of excuses. And when Sartre talks about responsibility, he's not talking about something abstract. He's not talking about the kind of self or souls that theologians would talk about. He’s talking about you and me talking, making decisions, doing things, and taking the consequences. It might be true that there are six billion people in this world, and counting, but nevertheless -what you do makes a difference. It makes a difference, first of all, in material terms, to other people, and it sets an example. In short, I think the message here is that we shouuld never write ourselves off or see each other as a victim of various forces. It's always our decision who we are.

G.K. Chesterton

Here are a few quotes by G.K. Chesterton:

“Keep in some sense before the mind that civilization itself is the most sensational of departures and the most romantic of rebellions ... it is the agent of social justice who is the original and poetic figure, while the burglers and the footpads are merely placid old conservatives, happy in the immemorial respectability of apes and wolves. [The police romance] is based on the fact that morality is the most daring of conspiracies.”

"The same lesson [of the pessimistic pleasure-seeker] was taught by the very powerful and very desolate philosophy of Oscar Wilde. It is the carpe diem religion; but the carpe diem religion is not the religion of happy people, but of very unhappy people. Great joy does not gather the rosebuds while it may; its eyes are fixed on the immortal rose which Dante saw."

Refugee Blues by WH Auden

Say this city has ten million souls,

Some are living in mansions, some are living in holes:
Yet there's no place for us, my dear, yet there's no place for us.

Once we had a country and we thought it fair,
Look in the atlas and you'll find it there:
We cannot go there now, my dear, we cannot go there now.

In the village churchyard there grows an old yew,
Every spring it blossoms anew:
Old passports can't do that, my dear, old passports can't do that.

The consul banged the table and said,
"If you've got no passport you're officially dead":
But we are still alive, my dear, but we are still alive.

Went to a committee; they offered me a chair;
Asked me politely to return next year:
But where shall we go to-day, my dear, but where shall we go to-day?

Came to a public meeting; the speaker got up and said;
"If we let them in, they will steal our daily bread":
He was talking of you and me, my dear, he was talking of you and me.

Thought I heard the thunder rumbling in the sky;
It was Hitler over Europe, saying, "They must die":
O we were in his mind, my dear, O we were in his mind.

Saw a poodle in a jacket fastened with a pin,
Saw a door opened and a cat let in:
But they weren't German Jews, my dear, but they weren't German Jews.

Went down the harbour and stood upon the quay,
Saw the fish swimming as if they were free:
Only ten feet away, my dear, only ten feet away.

Walked through a wood, saw the birds in the trees;
They had no politicians and sang at their ease:
They weren't the human race, my dear, they weren't the human race.

Dreamed I saw a building with a thousand floors,
A thousand windows and a thousand doors:
Not one of them was ours, my dear, not one of them was ours.

Stood on a great plain in the falling snow;
Ten thousand soldiers marched to and fro:
Looking for you and me, my dear, looking for you and me.

Godzilla in Mexico

GODZILLA EN MÉXICO

Atiende esto, hijo mío: las bombas caían
sobre la ciudad de México
pero nadie se daba cuenta.
El aire llevó el veneno a través
de las calles y las ventanas abiertas.
Tú acababas de comer y veías en la tele
los dibujos animados.
Yo leía en la habitación de al lado
cuando supe que íbamos a morir.
Pese al mareo y las náuseas me arrastré
hasta el comedor y te encontré en el suelo.
Nos abrazamos. Me preguntaste qué pasaba
y yo no dije que estábamos en el programa de la muerte
sino que íbamos a iniciar un viaje,
uno más, juntos, y que no tuvieras miedo.
Al marcharse, la muerte ni siquiera
nos cerró los ojos.
¿Qué somos?, me preguntaste una semana o un año después,
¿hormigas, abejas, cifras equivocadas
en la gran sopa podrida del azar?
Somos seres humanos, hijo mío, casi pájaros,
Héroes públicos y secretos.

English:

GODZILLA IN MEXICO

Listen carefully, my son: bombs were falling
over Mexico City
but no one even noticed.
The air carried poison through
the streets and open windows.
You’d just finished eating and were watching
cartoons on TV.
I was reading in the bedroom next door
when I realized we were going to die.
Despite the dizziness and nausea I dragged myself
to the kitchen and found you on the floor.
We hugged. You asked what was happening
and I didn’t tell you we were on death’s program
but instead that we were going on a journey,
one more, together, and that you shouldn’t be afraid.
When it left, death didn’t even
close our eyes.
What are we? you asked a week or year later,
ants, bees, wrong numbers
in the big rotten soup of chance?
We’re human beings, my son, almost birds,
public heroes and secrets.

Copied from this excellent blog

Wobblies.

“The working class and the employing class have nothing in common. There can be no peace so long as hunger and want are found among millions of the working people and the few, who make up the employing class, have all the good things of life. Between these two classes a struggle must go on until the workers of the world organize as a class, take possession of the means of production, abolish the wage system, and live in harmony with the Earth. ... Instead of the conservative motto, 'A fair day's wage for a fair day's work', we must inscribe on our banner the revolutionary watchword, 'Abolition of the wage system.' It is the historic mission of the working class to do away with capitalism”.

Stella Maris by Arthur Symons

Why is it I remember yet
You, of all women one has met
In random wayfare, as one meets
The chance romances of the streets,
The Juliet of a night? I know
Your heart holds many a Romeo.
And I, who call to mind your face
In so serene a pausing-place,
Where the bright pure expanse of sea,
The shadowy shore's austerity,
Seems a reproach to you and me,
I too have sought on many a breast
The ecstasy of love's unrest,
I too have had my dreams, and met
(Ah me!) how many a Juliet.
Why is it, then, that I recall
You, neither first nor last of all?
For, surely as I see tonight
The glancing of the lighthouse light,
Against the sky, across the bay,
As turn by turn it falls my way,
So surely do I see your eyes
Out of the empty night arise,
Child, you arise and smile to me
Out of the night, out of the sea,
The Nereid of a moment there,
And is it seaweed in your hair?

O lost and wrecked, how long ago,
Out of the drownèd past, I know,
You come to call me, come to claim
My share of your delicious shame.
Child, I remember, and can tell,
One night we loved each other well;
And one night's love, at least or most,
Is not so small a thing to boast.
You were adorable, and I
Adored you to infinity,
That nuptial night too briefly borne
To the oblivion of morn.
Oh, no oblivion! for I feel
Your lips deliriously steal
Along my neck and fasten there;
I feel the perfume of your hair,
And your soft breast that heaves and dips,
Desiring my desirous lips,
And that ineffable delight
When souls turn bodies, and unite
In the intolerable, the whole
Rapture of the embodied soul.

That joy was ours, we passed it by;
You have forgotten me, and I
Remember you thus strangely, won
An instant from oblivion.
And I, remembering, would declare
That joy, not shame, is ours to share,
Joy that we had the will and power,
In spite of fate, to snatch one hour,
Out of vague nights, and days at strife,
So infinitely full of life.
And 'tis for this I see you rise,
A wraith, with starlight in your eyes,
Here, where the drowsy-minded mood
Is one with Nature's solitude;
For this, for this, you come to me
Out of the night, out of the sea.

Autumn Day

Lord: it is time. The huge summer has gone by.

Now overlap the sundials with your shadows,

and on the meadows let the wind go free.

Command the fruits to swell on tree and vine;

grant them a few more warm transparent days,

urge them on to fulfillment then, and press

the final sweetness into the heavy wine.

Whoever has no house now, will never have one.

Whoever is alone will stay alone,

will sit, read, write long letters through the evening,

and wander the boulevards, up and down,

restlessly, while the dry leaves are blowing.

by Rainer Maria Rilke

Semiotic.

A quote from the Amazon.co.uk review of Faith in Fakes: Travels in Hyperreality by Umberto Eco:

But the point is that a near random juxtaposition of elements eventually becomes an art form of its own, able to make statements in its own terms. Copying from one learned text is called plagiarism, Copy from fifty and it's called research. Use one cliché and it's culpable. Use a hundred and it's called Gaudi. It's a brilliant point.

As a film, Casablanca, he argues, never inhabits a single genre, never communicates merely a single message. It is presented almost as a series of unrelated tableaux, where the characters do as required by the passing scenario. It thus becomes a pastiche where there's something for everyone, where it can become more entertaining to spot, categorise, recognise and then discuss the loosely-related vignettes than to appreciate the whole, because there is no whole to appreciate.

McLuhan advised us that the medium had become the message. Eco takes us further, illustrating how mass media are no longer conduits for ideology because they themselves have become the ideology. So now, when we watch television news that concentrates on celebrity and the entertainment industry, we ought to be rendered keenly aware of the motives and interests at play. When, come to think of it, did you last hear a wholly negative film review? So where lies the line between reviewer and promoter?

Persona

Quote of the now:

"I understand, all right. The hopeless dream of being - not seeming, but being. At every waking moment, alert. The gulf between what you are with others and what you are alone. The vertigo and the constant hunger to be exposed, to be seen through, perhaps even wiped out. Every inflection and every gesture a lie, every smile a grimace. Suicide? No, too vulgar. But you can refuse to move, refuse to talk, so that you don't have to lie. You can shut yourself in. Then you needn't play any parts or make wrong gestures. Or so you thought. But reality is diabolical. Your hiding place isn't watertight. Life trickles in from the outside, and you're forced to react. No one asks if it is true or false, if you're genuine or just a sham. Such things matter only in the theatre, and hardly there either. I understand why you don't speak, why you don't move, why you've created a part for yourself out of apathy. I understand. I admire. You should go on with this part until it is played out, until it loses interest for you. Then you can leave it, just as you've left your other parts one by one".

From Persona by Ingmar Bergman.

I talked to somebody today who I had not talked too for a long time. I didn't massively want to, but now I am stuck with him for at least another two weeks.

The little turns that life takes never cease to amaze me. I feel like Golyadkin in Dostoyevsky's The Double. After shutting myself in for so long, life trickles in, like water, and all I can do is react.

Very odd.

Canta la noche

In one of the final scenes of En la ciudad de Sylvia, we see a brief shot of a bored barmaid, who absentmindedly puts a flower in the front of her blouse.This shots lasts about six seconds, but it it is key to understanding the rest of the film. A barmaid with a flower in the front of her blouse echoes one of Manet's most famous paintings, Le Bar aux Folies-Berges.

The theme running throughout Manet's most famous paintings, like Le dejeuner sur l'herbe and Olympia, as well as the previously mentioned Le Bar aux Folies-Berges, is that of voyuerism.In Le dejeuner sur l'herbe, we are looking in on a situation that is pretty suggestive. The woman in the picture returns our gaze. In Olympia, we see a naked young woman, spread out on a divan. The suggestion is that she is a prostitute, and that we are about to be her next client. Le Bar aux Folies-Berges is less sexually suggestive, but still retainst the theme of voyeurism. We see a barmaid, standing behind the bar, with the curious flowers in her blouse.

It is this little detail that ties it to the shot in Le Ciudad de Sylvie and emphasizes the theme of voyeurism in the film (among others).

Why is this important? Many films have a theme of voyeurism.

The director, Jose Luis Guerin, has also professed an interest in Walter Benjamin. (As an aside, it is interesting to note that the main character is also a quintessential Flaneur). Benjamin suggested, as Brecht did, that art should not only try to affect an awareness and possible change of social relations in the audience, but also try and affect the medium itself. Guerin attempts this by focusing on the theme of voyeurism. Some parts of the film are mildly uncomfortable; we see the main character follow a woman through the streets.But we, as the audience, are also gazing at this woman, following her. Earlier in the film, we have gazed upon several other woman, along with the main character, looking for the elusive sylvie.

An interesting article here also discusses some other ideas:

The unnamed hero/stalker’s ambiguous, uncertain search even seems to touch the heart of the woman who has been trying to elude him, and she offers him a fleeting kiss as she gets off the tram. She remains iconic, the one to be pursued. As elegant as Guerín’s new film is(22) – and his films are always thought-provoking – this is no tale of Dante and Beatrice, despite the fact that the protagonist stays in a hotel named “Paradise”. If the artist/protagonist descends into hell – and the bar Les Aviateurs he revisits after his failed attempt to reconnect with “Sylvia” seems close to an inferno of shallow temptations – then he needs to continue his journey upwards, and not just in outward forms.

Youth Against Fascism.

From Violence by Slajov Zizek pp 84 - 85

"Jacques Lacan claimed that, even if the patients wife is sleeping around with other men, the patients jealousy is still to be treated as a pathological condition. In a homololagous way, even if rich jews in the Germany of the early 1930s 'really' exploited German workers, seduced their daughters, dominated the popular press and so on, Nazi anti-Semitism was still emphatically 'untrue', a pathological ideological condition. Why? What made it pathological was the disavowed libidinal investment made into the figure of the Jew. The cause of all social antagonisms was projected into the 'Jew', the object of perverted love-hatred, the spectral figure of mixed fasicnation and disgust".

Sonora

I have been having the strangest feeling recently. Something I can’t quite put my finger on, I can only loosely describe as a feeling of impending doom. Not for me personally, but for humanity generally. I have finished 2666 by Roberto Bolano, and I am going to read Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy soon. They are (very) broadly similar, set in the same place, dealing with a vague, systematic anonymous violence, out in the desert on the US/Mexico border (both within the Sonoran desert specifically).

There is something incredibly dark about there as a place. The hundreds of women murdered in Ciudad Juarez. The drug wars between the cartels and the Mexican government. Go further back in history, the frontier, and the massacres of Native Americans, mass scalping. Go further back, the conquistadors and the conquering of Central America, and the Aztecs and human sacrifice. It is almost as if something terrible and malevolent exists in the air and the soil.

I thought about this when I read reviews of The White Ribbon by Michael Haneke, (which recently won the Palm D’Or). It is a film set in a small German village in the years just before WW1. The village becomes plagued by small acts of horrific and inexplicable violence. I have not seen it, but it struck a chord with me, with the idea of violence woven into the very fabric of existence, systematic and anonymous. The film is meant to foreshadow what was to come for Germany. Part of the Roberto Bolano book was set in Germany as well.

It seems to me that the most important artists, the ones who are saying really saying something important, at the very cutting edge, all seem to be saying the same thing. That something terrible is coming, just like in the years before the World Wars in the 20^th century. It is in the air of the world we live in right now, and evident in every action. Things have been set in motion that we as a society/species cannot turn away from.

But, to lighten this up, I will say, that it is amazing that civilization even exists at all. I will quote G.K Chesterton, who said it better than I could, who remarks that detective stories...

“Keep in some sense before the mind that civilization itself is the most sensational of departures and the most romantic of rebellions ... it is the agent of social justice who is the original and poetic figure, while the burglers and the footpads are merely placid old conservatives, happy in the immemorial respectability of apes and wolves. [The police romance] is based on the fact that morality is the most daring of conspiracies.”

You're, by Sylvia Plath

Posted just because.

You're

Clownlike, happiest on your hands,
Feet to the stars, and moon-skulled,
Gilled like a fish. A common-sense
Thumbs-down on the dodo's mode.
Wrapped up in yourself like a spool,
Trawling your dark as owls do.
Mute as a turnip from the Fourth
Of July to All Fool's Day,
O high-riser, my little loaf.

Vague as fog and looked for like mail.
Farther off than Australia.
Bent-backed Atlas, our travelled prawn.
Snug as a bud and at home
Like a sprat in a pickle jug.
A creel of eels, all ripples.
Jumpy as a Mexican bean.
Right, like a well-done sum.
A clean slate, with your own face on.

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

Whilst I am here, I will also quote my favourite lines from Prufrock, by TS Eliot:

And would it have been worth it, after all,
After the cups, the marmalade, the tea,
Among the porcelain, among some talk of you and me,
Would it have been worth while
To have bitten off the matter with a smile,
To have squeezed the universe into a ball
To roll it toward some overwhelming question,
To say: ‘I am Lazarus, come from the dead,
Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all’—
If one, settling a pillow by her head,
Should say: ‘That is not what I meant at all.
That is not it, at all.’

And would it have been worth it, after all,
Would it have been worth while,
After the sunsets and the dooryards and the sprinkled streets,
After the novels, after the teacups, after the skirts that trail along the floor—
And this, and so much more?—
It is impossible to say just what I mean!
But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen:
Would it have been worth while
If one, settling a pillow or throwing off a shawl,
And turning toward the window, should say:
‘That is not it at all,
That is not what I meant at all.’

No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;
Am an attendant lord, one that will do
To swell a progress, start a scene or two
Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,
Deferential, glad to be of use,
Politic, cautious, and meticulous;
Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;
At times, indeed, almost ridiculous—
Almost, at times, the Fool.

I grow old . . . I grow old . . .
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?
I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.

I do not think that they will sing to me.

Ingmar Bergman, Summer Nights

A little while ago we had a short burst of summer. Hot days, and sticky nights.

It only lasted for a few days, but each night, as I couldn't sleep, I ended up watching Ingmar Bergman films. The first film I watched was Persona. After that, I watched Wild Strawberries, and then lastly, my favourite, Summer Interlude.

There are more famous Bergman films. The Seventh Seal is probably the most famous, followed the two mentioned above, as well as others like Cries & Whispers. But Summer Interlude is my favourite Bergman film by far.

It is a very simple film, and beautifully shot. A ballerina, played by Maj-Britt Nilsson, remembers a summer thirteen years before, her first love, which ends in tragedy. The film portrays carefree young love, and it portrays how things can stay with you, and shape you. She has built up walls to protect herself, but those walls only serve to keep the ghosts of her past inside. That shutting yourself off from the world is no way to live. I have something to learn there.

It is a small, perfectly formed tale of remembered intimacy, and regret.

It was only the summer before last that I started watching Ingmar Bergman films, and it seems that I only really watch them on long, hot, summer nights. Bergman has a reputation for gloom, but I cant think of a better way to while away a summer.

Gosh.

I didn't even realize I had a blog.