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WORD UP Y’ALL I MOVED OVER TO HERE:
TOPOLOGYOFTHEIMPOSSIBLE.COM/BLOG
I hit a streak where writing felt good and easy again and then I finished the text that was consuming my time and now I’m like “What am I doing.” Also sending out some stuff for the first time in like a year and getting lots of quick rejections. I like quick rejections better than prolonged rejections. I don’t mind either way, all that much.
But I guess I haven’t updated that most of the stuff I had forthcoming is now available:
At PANK:
LOOP, in the Queer Issue,
and an interview with me about the text.
At Lamination Colony:
Drawers, a story that moves from image to image that I wrote thinking about comix by CF & Hans Rickheit and also the movie Death Bed: The Bed That Eats.
In Artifice Issue 02:
Architecture, Anamnesis, a story that I actually didn’t end up reading at all during the 5 stops of the Artifice Mag MADNESS MUCH Tour I was on with awesome dudes. But I will tell you that it is a story I wrote after drawing a building after becoming obsessed with the architect Emilio Ambasz.
Also I am a participant in the MLP Stamp Stories project, which is cool. It’ll be included in a book too, which is awesome. The sentence is a modification of a sentence from a collaboration I did with the painter Christian Campos. I sent the collab to a chapbook contest with a $15 entrance fee, maybe ill-advised, who knows.
I guess I could have just saved some space and been like “here I updated my C.V.” but whatever.
Here is a link to all my HTMLGIANT posts so far.
Currently, I am pretty obsessed with Jannis Kounellis.
Particularly, I think I am obsessed with intentionally mis-reading Jannis Kounellis. He was a Greek dude who left Greece and moved to Italy where he became “part” of Arte Povera, which is the former obsession that lead directly here. He posits himself halfway between Klein & Manzoni, but Klein is more interesting to me because Klein was batshit insane and loved the noun “void” as much as I do. The point is I like to pretend Kounellis’s works are weird metaphysical environments for crazy shit to happen. They’re still really cool. Whatever.
Filed under: Other's Words | Tags: francesca woodman, sollers, the infinite
That reminds me of a hot summer night in New York during those years. I was on the twelfth floor with a young film actress, brunette and extremely attractive. The window was open, we’d smoked quite a lot of hash, we started to kiss–and she suddenly said to me, her eyes burning and empty, “Throw yourself out and see if it makes me come.” It wasn’t aggressive, it was more tender. To her disappointment, I led her back inside. She must have realised that I wasn’t attracted to her. Of course we didn’t see each other again. Such events are both serious and trivial, except when they become tragic, which can happen from time to time. Some of my friends “gave” themselves in such a way. Wrongly, it seems to me, since there is no reason to take such a dive in the name of a problematic female orgasm. Why imagine you need to be, so to speak, the plunging burden of love, or the one who comes to interrupt a bloodlust for the infinite? It’s better just to laugh.
–Philippe Sollers, in an essay on Francesca Woodman
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Sale is over! Tour was awesome! Thanks to everyone who helped out!
Hello. Next week, I am going on tour with Artifice Magazine to help promote the second issue, which has graciously published me. I’m really excited, and if you live in or near any of the towns we are visiting you should totally come visit us! However, I’m way poor, and because of this, I am going to attempt to sell some stuff before I go for rock bottom prices to help raise funds to pay for gas & food along the way. So! Buy my stuff! If there is anything you are interested in, leave a comment here with your email address or email me directly at doctor (at) topologyoftheimpossible.com (though obviously replace the “(at)” with an actual “@”). I’d really appreciate it, and you could feel like you were doing a good deed, because you would be both supporting the arts & getting cool shit!
“I wish to abandon imitation and illusion and enter directly into the higher drama of: celluloid, two dimensional strips; individual rectangular frames; the nature of sprockets and emulsion; projector operations; the three dimensional reflective screen surface; the retinal screen; optic nerve and individual psycho-physical subjectivities of consciousness. In this cinematic drama, light is energy rather than a tool for the representation of non-filmic objects; light as energy is released to create its own objects , shapes and textures. Given the fact of retinal inertia and the flickering shutter mechanism of film projection, one may generate virtual forms, create actual motion (rather than illustrate it), build actual color-space (rather than picture it), and be involved in actual time (immediate presence).”
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In list form.
- I have spent most of this morning reading my Google Reader feed. I am “sort of” caught up on most of the 50+ blogs that I “follow.” I feel weird, like I should have maybe been reading one of the six books in my backpack instead.
- My desk is freezing. I drank a “venti” iced-americano from Starbucks and now I’m really jittery. But still cold.
- Araina Reines’s blog reminded me that After Dark is a completely terrific magazine and I made the periodicals people go grab me all the volumes we have (which is just 4 years worth, three volumes). This magazine is wonderful but it’s also maybe making me lonely.
- I think I just can’t must enough to care about current pop culture, which is why that sort of ‘brand’ of contemporary theory, that is probably actually really great and engaging and intelligent, falls on completely deaf ears. It’s also possibly why I haven’t bothered reading Zizek. I’m not sure, I just have this idea that that’s alot of Zizek’s praxis. I could be wrong, because like I said, I haven’t read Zizek. I have a book by him about Lacanian Theory through Hitchcock’s films, or something. I could probably read that.
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Until August 18th you can buy a copy of A MIKE KITCHELL READER from Legacy Pictures. It is a piece of conceptual writing. Here is the “press release”:
For a limited time A MIKE KITCHELL READER is available from Legacy Pictures.
Legacy Pictures is a new boutique house specializing in custom-run editions of fine writing.
Please enjoy this release that relates to Niagara, Denton Welch, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, Joan Didion, Todd Hido, and will find its way out of print and into the secondary market very soon.
Also, this Saturday I’m doing a reading for the UNCALLED FOR READINGS series at the Rough House Theater in Chicago. Click this link for some details. This will be the first reading I have done outside of DeKalb. I have no idea what I will be reading at it yet, but I will be figuring that out soon enough.
I requested this article through interlibrary loan, and the PDF they sent me was almost impossible to read, so I retyped the whole thing for posterity. I thought I would post it here. From ARTLINK, Volume 10 No 4 Summer 1990-91, p. 60-61
“The slide from film to video may perhaps one day be compared to the move away from the alexandrine and toward free verse poetry- out of this there emerged a reflection of the literary fate of language, and the same is happening today for the image”.
–Raymond Bellour
Bellour’s words were written nine years ago. Today they resonate with tremendous force. Anyone who has been aware of the recent renaissance in the electronic arts, particularly video, will appreciate Bellour’s prophetic voice. Video has been, during the last two decades, expanding at a phenomenal rate in Europe and America. Locally video has been developing with a similar sense of experimental excitement-but only more recently-say during the last decade. Today our local funding and educational institutions are prepared to support the new dynamic forms and styles of electronic image-making
Bellour’s words are more prophetic when we consider that they were written in reference to one of video’s truly poetic and inventive originators, Thierry Kuntzel. Kuntzel’s videography has been criminally overlooked by Anglo-American commentators till today. Unless I am mistaken, aside from Bellour’s excellent essay, I can’t think of one article that has been written in English on this important voyager of electronic image-making.
You may ask why is Kuntzel’s art so central to today’s electronic arts? Why do his entrancing wordless tapes with their fluid dream-like abstractions of perception and hallucination, appearance and disappearance, remembering and forgetting and the impossibility of, to use Bellour’s helpful expression, “representing the unrepresentable” matter? Briefly put, Kuntzel’s extremely precise and delicately orchestrated videos constitute, in my mind, one of the most relentlessly inventive and sublime oeuvres of the artform today. This is not the place to spell out why I think this is so. Let us say that the following brief interview (perhaps the first in English?) should be seen as a useful introductory point of entry into his revolutionary thinking about images and what lies between them.
What interests me about Kuntzel’s work is his uncompromising search to find a singularly expressive and mobile form of electronic writing. His contemplative minimalist videos represent in their introspective authorial fluidity a “video-stylo” writing (to borrow Alexandre Astrud’s term of ‘camera-stylo’) in that they are concerned with the aesthetic and epistemological exploration of “the time time takes to pass” (Kuntzel). Primarily his videos manifest an exquisitely delicate unfolding of colour, time, form and light that denote a highly suggestive (almost painterly) calligraphy searching for new ideas and forms illustrating Kuntzel’s precarious quest to ‘make light visible’. In other words, what we are witnessing here is the creation of video as ‘fiction-reflection’ (Bellour), video as writing, video as a necessary reply to the artist’s previous significant work in film theory. Kuntzel’s videography can be read as a path-blazing aesthetic and theoretical adventure that was initiated by and went beyond his research interests in the filmic apparatus, the idea of ‘another film’ lurking inside the classical film text.
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I have only slept, maybe, 10 hours total in the last three days. I just drank a can of Coke which is like making a promise to my body to not go to sleep until 4am for no reason. I took the day off work tomorrow because having longer weekends than work-weeks makes living easier.
My plan was to watch movies until my eyes Would Not Stay Open but I can’t figure out what to watch. This is the problem I have, I always know what I want a movie to make me feel like but you can’t type feelings into search engines and expect results. I have seen or heard of everything probably, I wish this weren’t true honestly come on 1978-1983 give me something new.
Instead of looking through movies I have that I haven’t watched I have kind of been staring at my computer screen, a blank browser window, hoping that maybe something will happen, while listening to the 1982 Alan Parsons Project album Eye in the Sky. The first four tracks are pretty much perfect. I’m up to track six now, and tracks five and six have not been as good, I’m a little sad about that.
Before I listened to this I listened to Meredith Monk’s Turtle Dreams which was actually completely perfect and I don’t really know why I’m not just listening to that again right now. There is a 3 minute or so sample from the titular track on UBU web from some comp, and I have listened to that probably 200 times without ever considering that the entire song (yet alone album) that the track is from would be something easily accessible.
Allmusic.com just inadvertently pointed out to me that, probably, my favorite mood in music is “dramatic.” I wish there were a way to do some sort of search on Allmusic where you could combine “moods,” I would type in “dramatic,” “evil,” “completely fucking terrifying,” and “dear fucking god let me drone the fuck out.” Maybe, I don’t know. I try not to think about music that often because it is difficult.
In an interview Liliane Giraudon says that intellectuals read more than three hours a day. I don’t feel any necessity to attain the title of “intellectual,” but I would like to be able to spend at least four hours a day reading. And yet right now I am still listening to Alan Parsons Project and staring at a screen, but at least the screen is not currently blank.
I will stop for now.
Filed under: Other's Words
MC: In a conversation with Mark C. Taylor Jabès once said, “As I probed more deeply I began to realize that Judaism is an extended lesson in reading, which involves an endless questioning of the writer. Adorno once said that after Auschwitz we can no longer write poetry. I say after Auschwitz we must write poetry, but with wounded words.” The Adorno quote is quite famous, and has engendered, ironically, an enormous response. As a child of Nazi Germany, I wonder what your response is to the injunction?
RW: Obviously I side with Jabès. Adorno’s statement is uncharacteristically unintelligent. I understand the emotion behind it, but it betrays a shallow conception of poetry. I don’t think Adorno’s later recanting is to the point either: “perennial suffering has as much right to expression as a tortured man has to scream; hence it may have been wrong to say that after Auschwitz you could no longer write poems.” “Right to expression” is not the point. We must write poetry because we must pay attention to language because it constitutes our identity as human beings. But we must write with “wounded words:” we must be aware of— and responsive to— the horrors as well as the beauties. We must not sequester ourselves.
