Blog-girls post “Behind These Hazel Eyes” in earnest;  Stew finds a relatively obscure poem and finds that everything, everything is Illuminated, right here, summed up, immortalised in a Tarot archetype, the sum of the Postmodern world and his own paranoid place in it:

“there is nothing inside me but a large wound,
a hollow place where no one goes,
a windowless present, a thought that returns
and repeats itself, reflects itself
and loses itself in its own transparency,
a mind transfixed by an eye that watches
it watching itself till it drowns itself
in clarity:”

- Octavio Paz, “Sunstone”

The latest episode of New Artland should be shown on international aircraft;  it should be put on repeat.  It’s a perfect summation of our weird, bumbling, transitional culture.  An effeminate artist returns to his humble birthplace in Christchurch to install a plaque to commemorate his early life.  He meets the bemused owners, empty happy inarticulate Hobbit types, who agree more to the contract of manners and cameras than the idea of the artwork itself.  He’s greeted by confused kids at his old primary school and a Principal who asks “So, is it just a plaque, or what?”.  The plaque is installed, and is veiled by - perfectly - a recycling bin.  There’s an unveiling ceremony;  there’s more vaguely Maori ceremonial dancing by confused children, a bunch of gruff farmer types taking a break from their workshops for free sausages, a Mayor who spouts gibberish about “allowing us to celebrate his journey” or somesuch, and a Mr. Whippy van.  Along the way, Chris Knox smiles a lot and we’re treated to some “artistic” camera work which ends up feeling more like a drunk cameraman filming a ship during a storm.

van Hout’s final comment contains that quality of disingenuousness that seems to be the discourse of NZ Art - something along of the lines of “the nature of the artwork has changed:  it’s now a memorial of a day”.  I know his medium is the self-portrait, and that his idea was questions of commemoration:  who is celebrated, and who choses the celebrity:  but the fact is that the celebration is just as much of a commemoration as plaque:  they both inform each other.  The celebration commemorated the idea of the childhood van Hout wanted to immortalise more than the plaque.  I’m impressed with his artwork:  but I’m starting to wonder to what extent the episode of New Artland is the artistic document, and not the plaque itself.

I hesitate to comment on music, given my previous post, a gushing note on the Mars Volta album that I was astonished by for two hours, and haven’t listened to since.

Meshuggah’s new album “Obzen” is what I was trying to say before.  Bleed is astonishing.  The other day, when some people were gathered at my house, one of them decided to load up Disturbed in Itunes.  Drunk as I was, I cast doubt as to their assumed sexual preferences.   When I was informed that they were pretty heavy, I loaded up Bleed, and pretty much cleaned the room out.  It was too “angry”.  I think it’s the best metal album since Mastodon’s “Blood Mountain”.

Jon Chang’s “twitch metal” is among the best music I’ve ever heard, and I’ve been following him since I discovered Discordance Axis a couple of years ago.  It sounds to me like the heart of the world beating - the result of a Hellenic imagination in a world of glass and concrete slabs, perhaps?  The petite sensations of the electric pulse Wikipedia head shot remote control society?  I know I’m being wanky but I think there’s some poetic legitimacy here.  He wears his influences on his sleeve:  his vision is of a Philip K. Dick uneasy dystopia crouched inside a utopia, ghosts in the machine screaming out short bursts of static, blocks of text like a code revealing brief snatches of hazy mirage hints at something that maybe was once real, official live footage brutalised and destroyed by it’s own medium, “Pikadourei” like watching the perception of every possible viewer at once…  When I play it, the response is always a grimace, and a shrug.  I get a lot out of Chang’s twin projects, “Hayaino Daisuki” and “Gridlink“.  Both have albums out shortly!

Also been listening to an exceptionally eccentric metal album by Frederick Thordendahl’s Special Defects:  “Sol Niger Within:  Version 333″.  I like it because it’s not Tool’s easygoing Eastern Mysticism - it’s more like a drug trip with no reference to anything but itself.

So I thought I might as well give it a go at some point. I didn’t have anywhere really appropriate, like an altar or anything, but I do have a beautifully framed print of Caspar Friedrich’s “Tree of Crows” which I have yet to hang up, so I laid the cards upon the glass surface. I’m using a Rider-Waite deck, as it seems fairly synonymous - although I’d rather be using the Tarot of Marseille. And as I’m using the Rider-Waite I thought it only polite to use the Celtic Cross. What we have is A, over which B is crossed, then C, D, E, F, in the position of East, South, West, then North. G, H, I, J ascend from the bottom to the top to form a pillar to the East. The meanings of these positions becomes hazy and intuitive. An excellent explanation by Waite himself is worth reading. Anyway, here’s the reading:

A= Judgement

B= VI Cups

C= The Star

D= The Lovers

E= King of Cups

F= King of Wands

G= Page of Cups

H= The Tower

I= IV Pentacles

J= King of Cups

I thought I ought to ask myself the Prufrock Question, from the famous poem:

And here’s some of my thoughts on the results: Firstly, I screwed up. I ought to have picked for myself a Significator rather than have one accidentally turn up. But it works out well, being Judgement. It’s all transcendence into the divine or inner nature, and I suppose that was mostly my question. VI Cups is about the transitional nature of childhood, and as an obstacle I suppose that transcendence is being limited by frameworks which need to be revised; habits which need to change. The root of all this is The Star, which I read as a muse figure, translating the universe into life through her language. Supposedly this is my unconciousness, while my conciousness is the King of Cups, who represents creative intelligence. The past, which I should let go, is The Lovers, which I read to suggest that ideals must perish, that a loss of innocence must occur. The counterpoint, King of Wands, seems to be a guardian, cloaked in his beliefs, who communicates through his staff. He seems priestly, and like the Knights looks off into the distance, as though already elsewhere.

My present self, or possibility, is Page of Cups, of whom Waite’s description is so awesome it needs to be writ in full: “A fair, pleasing, somewhat effeminate page, of studious and intent aspect, contemplates a fish rising from a cup to look at him. It is the pictures of the mind taking form”. Yes. But the next card, representing how I am seen by others, is troubling. The Tower is generally an unhappy card. I reckon in this aspect, it’s an Icarus story. Waite quotes: “except the Lord build the house, they labour in vain that build it.” Perhaps I am seen to be building a Tower of Babel while figuring myself to be building an Ark. Retribution will gather itself from accumulated failure in strike in some kind of embolism/mental breakdown and topple my Crown of Intellectual Thought and down will topple my twin selves of Artistic Judgement and Withered Humanity. In other words, it may be seen that I am being a dick. Moving on though: my Hopes and Fears, my Guidance, or possibly Overlooked Factor is represented by IV Pentacles. Seems to be a card of obsession. The guy is walking in Pentacles: is crowned by it and clings to it. Maybe I hope that I have a path; maybe I’m overlooking a certain inheritance, an obligation. But certainly I am focused.

The result of all this, the last card, is Knight of Cups. He carries his cup with unhurried dignity. What does this mean? Am I to be a bearer of a standard? Is this some kind of relay, passing along the cup to someone else? It is an obligation, and it is an obsession. He sits tall in his saddle with a surety of those who have decided upon a path, and decided that it is the only path worth walking. He is the bearer of a standard and this standard consumes him. It consumes his innocence and his humanity. The standard is the vessel which carries the stuff of life to that which needs to be born. The journey is a quest towards that muse, that one who can use the standard to actually manifest reality. Will it be me? Or will I die and pass it on to someone else?

Well that was fun!

Auckland yesterday offered itself in beauty. Twilight was eerily sepia toned. Slipping out from under The Quad stairs, I noticed Rod Serling, who said “I put it to you that freak atmospheric conditions in conjuncture with convenient positioning of the Sun created a brief zone of illusion - a zone very much like The Twilight Zone“. I said, You’re probably right. As we sat stoned while the credits rolled I remarked that someone must have got laid in Heaven tonight for the sky to produce such beautiful afterglow.

The present is 88 miles per hour, not a second faster or slower.  Question is:  how can long can you maintain the DeLorean, balancing on that precipice between past and future? When one slight itch of the gas pedal leads you into some interminable trajectory away from either?

Read this article. Then tell me whether it is paranoid of me to suggest that we start up a trust fund to buy and distribute 24,000 copies of “1984″. Or that the parallels between Himmler’s “SS” - basically a secretive Army within an army - would be a paranoid connection. Or when Solzhenitsyn was imprisoned for being a poet. I can imagine Ginsberg, if he were still alive, writing a poem about how Sept. 11 emasculated America. And then some Fortune 500 accountant carts him off to a Gulag while he goes home to his white picket fence.

“One business owner in the United States tells me that InfraGard members are being advised on how to prepare for a martial law situation-and what their role might be.”  And when I read that line, I’m reminded of the Jews who’d usher their peers into gas chambers, for the reward of a few more weeks before their turn.
Freedom isn’t free. But it’s not that you have to work for it. You have to conform to it.

Theroux’s Weird Weekends is some of the best, and most fucked, TV I’ve seen.  I’ve watched all the ones I can find, and would have to say in order of fucked, these are the ones to watch:

1. Thai Brides

2. Westboro Baptist Church

3. Swingers

4. San Quentin
5. Neo Nazis

6. Vegas

7. Porn Industry

8. Legal Nevada Brothels

The first three are there because they strike me as people doing something patently wrong; something hideously unnatural.  I’m sure that Theroux is, like me, not exactly prudish, but I share his sentiment when he encountered the Orgy Room at a swinger party: a nightmarish, writhing cacophony of flesh;  not so much DH Lawrence as HP Lovecraft.  The Thai Brides episode seems to take all the detritus of society, the aggregate oppurtunity cost of our post-Aryan gleaming refridgerator white culture of affluence, grind it up, and bake into a turd-flavoured Big Ben Pie of Despair.  San Quentin is a purgatory;  it’s between worlds, full of not-quite dead, not quite living souls, who are so lost as to make limbo their home, so without reference to anything outside their own inherited guilty conscience that they find it easier to do the time then commit to either heaven or hell.  The Westboro Baptist Church is a concentrated anti-matter nugget of pure crazy that’s just been thrown in a supercollider inside a DeLorian from the future.  Vegas is a place where friends are knife-recepticles and a smile costs several million dollars, where the thrill of the win costs more than the thrill of owning of your own home.  And surprisingly enough the porn industry and the legal brothels don’t really bother me so much.  The only difference between the brothel and San Quentin is in the decor and the subtly of despair.  The porn industry is something I guess I’m so desensitised to;  it’s like your redneck neighbours who kick their dogs;  it’s terrible, but meh.

So yeah, watch Louis Theroux.

What we have here is half a thought.  It’s critically hailed as a literary text, poetically told.  The lingering shots, the lighting, scenery, weather.  It’s pretty and interesting and reflective and moody.  Good things.  But it is not extended, and seems kinda… nailed down by it’s narrative.  It wants to soar away to vistas.  But we end up with Brad Pitt.  I feel like I am watching a film which has been better expressed before.  I keep wanting to watch Dead Man again.

I think we need to have a version of Lord of the Rings as a Western.  Legolas:  “Do you ever wish you were the moon?”.  Sauron telling his Ringwraiths:  “And I want that pinto back”.  I would buy the DVD.

Juno suffers from hyper-conformity, a condition which affects hipsters who struggle with their desire for individuality, but conform anyway.  Don’t fight it.  Just turn the pretentiousness down from 11 and stop thinking so hard.  Be the calm ocean!