David Foster Wallace is dead.

I mean, fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. FUCK. Fuck.

Killed himself too.

Fuck.

Juno – I’d say a Modern Classic, worthy of serious Academic Attentions.  But I come away from it with a sense of unease.  That kind of nebulous despair which leads people to various unapproachable Wars – on Terrorism, Crime, or anything which stands in for some sort of collection, any aggregation of concepts which exist only in language.  My war on the Po-Mo?  Perhaps, but if only it were that easy:

Juno seems to me to be that wasted blank page of potential scribbled upon by poor poets.  They reckon that the Stalin purges and genocides and gulags and et. al were all the end result of Communism;  to be just as sweeping, let’s say Juno is the end result of Democratic Principles.  “Poetry is made by all, not one” would be, as far as I know, currently the pervasive literary sentiment:  and implies the curiously unspoken corollary, that we are all free to talk, but few are worth listening to.  Poetry is made by an accumulation of breaths, syllables, expressions, sighs;  winds, currents, eddies; some baffling new hive mind muse.  Where are we now?  We have some new, external force which stands in for us.  God is Dead, perhaps, but has been instantly replaced by it’s shadow-form, a mirrored us, God not as flowing beard prophet, but fabulous androgynous metrosexual?  In that Scientific Rhetoric of Truth, we’re all essentially fragmented, borrowed and co-opted parts of everything else.  Our internal selves are essentially external.  We’re collaged, appropriated, counterfiet images.  Given that I can access anything constructed, thought, imagined, and commited to form at any point in time, from any other point in time, I’m not so much creating anew anymore but referencing anything that has ever been and re-assembling, my medium not necessary my hands or world rough hewn potentiality, but some external software filter.  My abstractions create abstractions.  There’s nothing created which stops still and stays itself;  everything morphs into everything else.  And outside ourselves, watching over it, that liquid form of ourselves which we borrow ourselves from.

So, this is who I reckon Juno is.  A complexity of competing, opposed parts.  A conversation about a subject in a language in which there are no words.  What the hell is she?  Feminist?  Hippie?  Girl?  She’s “different” – but from what?  All the people who can relate to her, being as they are, “different”?  She doesn’t refer to anything.  She’d probably like to be told that, but the edge to it is that she’s static.  She’s a neutral force, an oil upon water.  She may as well be nothing.

Good links from Ran Prieur this week.  Firstly a compelling essay by Naomi Wolf about the social implications of porn.  Here’s some good thought:

” But does all this sexual imagery in the air mean that sex has been liberated—or is it the case that the relationship between the multi-billion-dollar porn industry, compulsiveness, and sexual appetite has become like the relationship between agribusiness, processed foods, supersize portions, and obesity? If your appetite is stimulated and fed by poor-quality material, it takes more junk to fill you up. People are not closer because of porn but further apart; people are not more turned on in their daily lives but less so.”

Good shit.  Later on describes a process of isolation and alienation that I can only filter through the Modern Metaphor of Misunderstood Quantum Physics:  we all end up isolated and alone together, unto ourselves, drifting soundless and frictionlessly within voids.  I bring this up because it’s this Voice of the Vacuum that I hear when I read The Rainbow, and why that book excites me so much.  He got it;  he gets all this social fragmentation on a scientific level I’m so far ignorant of.

The other link is to an interesting review of The Dark Knight.  I am not allowed to watch these sorts of films.  Like the awful, awful Charlie Wilson’s War, such films are dangerous because they promote a shallow acceptance of terms, a general ignoring of fine print.  Oh, but it’s just a movie!  No.  It’s just a meme, a universally acceptable context.  We define ourselves on this sort of shit.  We shouldn’t promote bad politics and confused thought as entertainment.  But that ought be the end of my comments until I’ve actually seen it.

“I would like you to imagine yourselves somewhere in Southern Africa, standing in an Indian store, in a poor area, in a time of bad drought. There is a line of people, mostly women, with every kind of container for water. This store gets a bowser of precious water every afternoon from the town, and here the people wait.

The Indian is standing with the heels of his hands pressed down on the counter, and he is watching a black woman, who is bending over a wadge of paper that looks as if it has been torn from a book. She is reading Anna Karenina.”

Holy fuck.

Please read Doris Lessing’s Nobel Prize Lecture. It makes you want to grab that happy cellphone girl tripping down the street with her Supre bag and scream in her face “FUCK YOU!  FUCK YOU!”.

This music video is really quite extraordinary.  It’s a celebration of anarcho-primitivism, I think, by a band called MGMT, who want to bring back psychedelic music.  It also strikes me as being the Pulse of the World.

You ought to watch the hi-res version, but if, like me, it makes your computer cry, here’s the Youtube version.

“Some company recently was interested in buying my “aura.” They didn’t want my product. They kept saying, “We want your aura.” I never figured out what they wanted. But they were willing to pay a lot for it. So then I thought that if somebody was willing to pay that much for my ‘it’, I should try to figure out what ‘it’ is.

I think “aura” is something that only somebody else can see, and they only see as much of it as they want to. It’s all in the other person’s eyes. You can only see an aura on people you don’t know very well or don’t know at all. I was having dinner the other night with everybody from my office. The kids at the office treat me like dirt, because they know me and they see me everyday. But then there was this nice friend that somebody had brought along who had never met me, and this kid could hardly believe that he was having dinner with me! Everybody else was seeing me, but he was seeing my “aura”.

When you just see somebody on the street, they can really have an aura. But then they open their mouth, there goes the aura. “Aura” must be when you open your mouth.”

- Warhol, “The Philosophy of Andy Warhol”

All I hear about Andy Warhol is bad things. “I Shot Andy Warhol” sympathises with Solanas, and makes him about to be a vapid, voyeuristic creep who created shallow artworks in the name of fame. I have got a good deal from his “Philosophy” – I really think he was trying to do something underrated, underappreciated, and completely new.

This evening I received mysterious and impromptu communique from a certain alien entity. We corresponded through a throughly disagreeable method: from the mothership a kind of morse code crossed with telepathic braille beamed from his spaceship which made me quite dizzy, and on my behalf, semaphore on my roof with road cones on my arms (those fuckers are heavy). He tells me he is well and his orbit intact. His interplanetary mission to take A and deliver it to B is much the same as always and still only tangentially important. The problem lies in the freshness of the recruits. They’re all stale. It’s been six stardates already and still only seen so many stars… Singstar cures these wounds with the “pornographic orgy” approach to the bonding which occurs only in deep ritual humiliation… of course I am not sure this is the right approach. I suggest that rare conjunction of the celestials which brings those of certain eccentric patterns into appropriate orbit. I still believe in the star-crossed. He sounded well and I sounded well, or at least as well as can be given the mediums of communication. Gusts of solar lumiere winds blew his spaceship back to Reticuli before he lost Team Champion Points. I couldn’t get the road cones off my arms and attempted to write my essay on Fabliaux; I think the broken mess that is my keyboard and the onomatopaeic death rattle gargle all over my screen will work out better than my other plans in the end.

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.