Written in response to the Green Lantern Press’ new book, The North Georgia Gazette, a reproduction of a newspaper produced by arctic explorers almost 200 years ago. Everything comes from other sources in the following piece-if you’re interested in knowing what all the source material is, let me know and all post along.

The musical’s grand opener is called, “We belong to the night,” and then there’s the famous actor Hooper, done up in a pelt but looking like a bat, bounding on all fours, giggling, his back to the curtain, trying to find a dark, circular, puzzle image. There is a detachment in his gambol, a kind of stoicism of the present; the alternately accusing and mutely questioning face of a dead man is all that describes his strange twisting associative dance. All features belong to the actor, Hooper, himself: a force utterly deployed in the world at any given moment, entirely characterized by its full set of features.
§
Ever since the philosophers distinguished the living from the non-living children have seemed to display an extensive capacity for awe and wonder along with their horror, a horror that remains distinctly consistent, arising from an experience of cognitive dread which cannot be escaped or evaded. At times Hooper’s actions on the stage suggest that all humans takes things “as” what they are, the actor claims that even blindly using a hammer takes it “as” a hammer. It was such an unusual and unlikely event, this musical; like when the centaur is mated with the cheetah, and their off-spring is not some hellish monstrosity, but a thoroughbred colt able to carry us for half a century and more.
§
In the autumn of 1853 Victor Hugo’s family began talking to ghosts. The American habit of table-tapping had reached Europe a few months earlier and the Hugos, bored and in exile, began by contacting their child Leopoldine, who had drowned in a boating accident ten years earlier. At first a sarcastic patriarch, Victor became enthralled by the practice and eventually would talk to Dante, Shakespeare, Moliere, Aeschylus, Galileo, Moses, Jesus Christ, St. Augustine, Voltaire, and Death itself.
§
Its aim is precisely to make itself invisible, and it has been used to finesse an already established model of reality. Everything changed. Slumping like Quasimodo under heavy air, Hooper cut through the curiosity of the crowd with a twist of his neck. He hung on to the microphone stand like a man caught in a wind tunnel: ice, paper cups, coins, books, hats, and shoes, flew by him as if sucked up by a vacuum …the octopus appeared, was there, next to him and the octopus baited the crowd; two fans climbed on to the stage and bloodied its nose. Streaked with its own gore, an arm bandaged, the cephalopod was, in a strange way, hardly there at all: this was actually not happening. The stage was full of ghosts; song by song, Hooper ground his teeth down to points.
§
Closer to fireworks than ‘soul’, Hooper’s vocals had been hurtled beyond expression into the realm of abstract urgency, outside the syntax of desire. Sampled and modulated on a keyboard, his body moving across the stage in a pelt that made him look like a bat, they, Hooper and the octopus became a barrage of intensities without pretext or context, shudders and shivers that are not so much inhuman as infra-human. Their dancing didn’t bump and grind from the hip; it abandoned the model of genital sexuality altogether for a kind of polymorphous perverse frenzy. It was a dance of tics and twitches, jerks and spasms, the agitation of a body broken down into individual components, then re-integrated at the level of the entire music hall.
§
There was no sufficient daylight. Attila the Hun, dead of a burst artery on one of his countless wedding nights, 453 A.D., aged about 47. A vivid description of the reaction of his horde to the death:

“According to their national custom, the Barbarians cut off a part of their hair, gashed their faces with unseemly wounds, and bewailed their valiant leader as he deserved, not with the tears of women, but with the blood of warriors. The remains of Attila were enclosed within three coffins, of gold, of silver, and of iron, and privately buried in the night: the spoils of nations were thrown into his grave; the captives who had opened the ground were inhumanly massacred; and the same Huns, who had indulged such excessive grief, feasted, with dissolute and intemperate mirth, about the recent sepulchre of their king.”
§
Victor Hugo also talked to the Ocean, even managing to get a piece of music out of the speaking water. Here’s one of the things the ocean says to Victor Hugo: “You have to understand the language of inanimate objects to be able to understand things like me who haven’t got a visible form. That’s how flowers see souls. There are dialogues between perfumes and essences. In such a way does a rose converse with the dead, and a jar of jasmine on an attic window-sill commune with all the sky”
§
Hooper begins singing to the octopus. “It is you who are in error”; “Dædalus is the foundation; Orpheus is the wall; Hermes is the edifice–the whole structure. Come whenever it please you,” he sings, “I will show you the particles of gold left in the bottom of the crucible. I will instruct you in the secret virtues of the Greek word peristera. But before all things, you shall read, one after another, the letters of the marble alphabet, the pages of the granite book.” he sings, “We will go from the doorway of Bishop Guillaume and of Saint-Jean le Rond to the Sainte-Chapelle, then to the house of Nicolas Flamel in the Rue Marivault, to his tomb in the cemetery of the Holy Innocents, to his two hospices in the Rue de Montmorency. You shall read the hieroglyphics with which the four great iron bars in the porch of the Hospice of Saint-Gervais are covered. Together we will spell out the façades of Saint-Côme, of Sainte-Geneviève-des-Ardents, Saint-Martin, Saint-Jacques-de-la-Boucherie–”
§
The octopus raises up, has eight torches/suns; two eyes which are always open; an enormous head, but very light; a long but very slender body; it doesn’t eat solid material, but rather liquid; it doesn’t breathe, but shines instead; it has a spouse.
§
But we’ve forgotten about blasphemy. What is blasphemy in regard to the forms of life-negation found in the Inferno? Returning to the burning desert, Capaneus, noticing Dante’s inquiring gaze, shouts back to him: ‘What I was once, alive, I still am, dead!’ Nowhere is this more. In its modern variants blasphemy strives to become an ontological principle as well.
§
The New World illuminated by a sunburst, the World of the Notion, being already annexed from the conceptual inertia of the “outwardly actual”. A “new face” = a “new people”; the black night resurgent? Do we conquer grey with blackness, or illumine it from within, glaring white? Is it light (“formless whiteness”) or darkness (“the night…”)? Chemistry derives from the Egyptian word for ‘black.’
§
The two, Hooper and the octopus, now knowing they ‘cannot vanquish each other’. “I knew nothing, then, of what I am writing now but simply repeated to myself: ‘Nothing can be reduced to anything else, nothing can be deduced from anything else, everything may be allied to everything else’. This was like an exorcism that defeated demons one by one. It was a wintry sky, and a very blue. I no longer needed to prop it up with a cosmology, put it in a picture, render it in writing, measure it in a meteorological article, or place it on a Titan to prevent it falling on my head […]. It and me, them and us, we mutually defined ourselves. And for the first time in my life I saw things unreduced and set free.” Every human and nonhuman object now stands by itself as a force to reckon with. No actor, however trivial, will be dismissed as mere noise in comparison with its essence, its context, its physical body, or its conditions of possibility. Everything will be absolutely concrete; all objects and all modes of dealing with objects will now be on the same footing.
§
The two, Hooper and the octopus, now knowing they ‘cannot vanquish each other’. Hugo is nowhere more Weird than in his admirably clear insistence that octopuses, ‘killjoys of the contemplator’, demand a rethinking of philosophy. Though distinguished from the chimera, the octopus is identified with the Medusa, demon, and, repeatedly, with the vampire, reacquainting it, if unstably, with ‘traditional’ teratology, an abnormality of development to be studied. The octopus is obsessively depicted as evil –indeed, such a ‘perfection of evil’ that its existence is a vector of heresies of a double god, a cosmic parity of good and evil. Although, in a more subterreanean moment of French cephalopodia, Lautréamont deploys the octopoid to mock moralism, as when ‘legions of winged squid […] scud swiftly toward the cities of the humans, their mission to warn men to change their ways.’ Hugo’s dialogue is a visionary rumination on the horror of octopus-ness. The creature is described in a vomit of aghast and contradictory metaphors and similes: ‘a rag of cloth’, ‘a rolled-up umbrella’, ‘disease shaped into a monstrosity’, ‘a wheel’, ‘a sleeve containing a closed fist’, ‘birdlime imbued with hate’, ‘a pneumatic machine’ – and on and on. There is no rejection of ‘tentacle’: the word and its derivations appearing twenty times in the short piece. God is confronted by the man ‘changed into an octopus, clamp[ing] eight monstrous tentacles about his body’, the two, Hooper and the octopus, now knowing they ‘cannot vanquish each other’.
§
The octopus raises up, has eight torches/suns; two eyes which are always open; an enormous head, but very light; a long but very slender body; it doesn’t eat solid material, but rather liquid; it doesn’t breathe, but shines instead; it has a spouse. The New World illuminated by a sunburst, the World of the Notion, being already annexed from the conceptual inertia of the “outwardly actual”. A “new face” = a “new people”; the black night resurgent? Do we conquer grey with blackness, or illumine it from within, glaring white? Is it light (“formless whiteness”) or darkness (“the night…”)? Chemistry derives from the Egyptian word for ‘black.’
§
Victor Hugo also talked to the Ocean, even managing to get a piece of music out of the speaking water, which proved to be a bit of a problem, as the Ocean wasn’t detailed enough in his dictation to give the family the key of the piece. After asking what key to put it in (the family had been trying to arrange the piece for flute) the ocean responds:

“Your flute pierced with little holes like the ass of a shitting brat disgusts me. Bring me an orchestra and I’ll make you a song. Take all the great noises, all the tumults, all the fracases, all the rages that float free in space, the morning breeze, the evening breeze, the wind of the night, the wind of the grave, storms, simoons, nor-easters that run their violent fingers through the hair of trees like desperate beings, rising tide on the beaches, rivers plunging into seas, cataracts, waterpouts, vomitings of the enormous breast of the world, what lions roar, what elephants bellow with their trunks, what impregnable snakes hiss in their convolutions, what whales low through their humid nostrils, what mastodons pant in the entrails of the earth, what the horses of the sun neigh in the depths of the sky, what the entire menagerie of the wind thunders in its aerial cages, what insults fire and water throw at each other, one from the bottom of his volcanic yap the other from the bottom of his abysmal yap, and tell me: here is your orchestra—make harmony from this din, make love from these hates, make peace from these battle, be the maestro of that which has no master.”

I thought I turned you off. Such a historicizing of the echo. I don’t know what reason to give, why I was so aggressively cerebral. Geoffrey, his legs spread, wearing my underwear, for once. A contempt for the flesh overrides attachment. Remember him, Geoffrey, for his drum sounds, his drum samples, not this. Here, in the radio station. Adam is leaving the apartment. The attention paid to ongoing experience. It’s time for a change of image, soft as spiral honey, brass drums, white noise, and bassheart, laughing, moving to Berlin in a month. He wrote in pencils, both sides sharpened. You, you darling in a puff of lemon smoke—the movement homage to limitless possibilities of digitized sound, the aeolean harp hung outside in a tree and the wind rustling through. The first time you heard her voice in the kitchen. “Yeah, yeah—yeah, that’s 2-2-73, yeah, yeah—yeah, that’s 2-2-73,” Kathryn’s ear to the phone two sevens, two sevens painted on her legs, her stockinged legs.

“The people’s heads Tim, the people’s heads so full of holes.” Or, there was Dad in the deckchair and Mom making sandwiches, making sandcastles with the children when the 1964 boys took over the beaches, the boys in their anoraks and haircuts. Couldn’t find anything else a week later. Satie’s nickname, excuse me, “Satie’s nickname was ‘The Velvet Gentleman’ for the twelve grey suits he owned and wore.” The numbers of the electronic machines, the electronic music machines, the electronic music machine numbers:
101
202
303
404
505
606
707
808
909.

Who’s it was, the ballet pressing infinitely long. Opera is a shoddy refuge for emotional dishonesty. “I’m not waiting till I grow up to be a woman, the musicians evolve,” Kathryn, in the kitchen stringing the cord, the yellow cord through her fingers, twirling the cord through her fingers, the yellow cord twirling through her fingers, the yellow cord, the yellow cord twirling through her fingers, the yellow telephone cord twirling through her fingers, the yellow telephone cord, telephone cord, cord twirling through her fingers, the yellow telephone cord twirling through her fingers heatwave hurricane running through my head, it’s a question of love? NO! It’s a question of temperature! Geoffrey will be remembered for his drum sounds, she does not claim encore. The commodification of experience is not a metaphor played out at the level of ideology and combatable with ideological means, but a concrete neurological reality. This is the meaning of the last instance. It’s because them change the board, so them get fucked. To elucidate the searchin’ thang, the fabulous Johnny Cash. I want to raise my arm because I want the bus to stop. I was gonna set my alarm so I could get my username Tim. You end his book with the husks of burnt out stars. Spirituality is a congeries of modalities, not an it. Inventing rhythms from pre-recorded tape. The lesson that happens in defense of prodigality / who never was a momentous occasion. Here, in the radio studios:
Henry Flynt
Joe Meek
Iannis Xenakis
Spike Jones
Dizzy Gillespie
First Episode of Dr. Who
The Last Bugs Bunny Cartoon Produced For Theatrical Release
Rock is essentially modal.
Hovah’s New Single, The Death of The Autotune-“Like wearing throwback jerseys, back in the day, rewrite history without a pen, Sinatra at the opera—bring a blonde.”
The first voice is saying, Tim visiting Japan / internet persona of a white male from New Hampshire. “The world of techno music is anonymous,” Kathryn thinks to herself, standing, pressed back against the counter in the office, waiting for her fax to come, waiting on her old fax machine, her old fax machine. “It’s time for a change of image, soft as spiral honey / brass drums / white noise / and bassheart.”

“We had two two-track machines—Leah, the girl next door, found, recorded with no logic, no particular song in mind; the logic of the ready-made! What many associate with our language, Leah, the girl next door, resorting, sometimes, to concrete imagery. The drums and the saxophone recorded onto magnetic tape. Leah, the girl next door, Leah, the girl next door, Leah, the girl next door, recorded, saying “I’m right here in your picture-frame, I’m a million miles away,” she said.” It’s not really my habit to intrude, in the “no there, there” places. Cranes resembling radio towers or a ready-made (pretension of a futurist Margaritaville!).
“Less mirror than lamp.”
“The man-eating Isolde.”
Or, Kathryn, lounging in her slip in the living room, talking on the phone to Tim, “All objects Tim, all objects.” Tim in boxer briefs on the other end, zebra-striped watching prisoners perform a Don Juan play on YouTube. “Temporary stabilities Tim, temporary stabilities,” and she gestures at you with her glass and you dump ice and scotch into her glass you dump ice and scotch into her glass you dump ice and scotch into her glass.
The strangeness of that blooming iridescent corpse / when book covers speak / that bullish maleness the men in flip-flops complain they’ve lost / a self-effacing cataleptic.

Also in the mix is a self-effacing cataleptic.

“They are strict with me, please…”
”I love you.”

Just a look at her as God, oh just a look at her as God, can’t you see it baby, wanna get together, wanna get together, wanna get together—the intimacy of music, between the social as symbolic project and the disruption of the face to face wanna get together, it’s always hot magic, it’s always we are champions my friend,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,, One often dreams, or often, fantasies, you’ve got a super wicked style, show it to you baby, if you get down and you quarrel everyday, like saying prayers to the devil everyday, make it much easier, the genre is of course well suited to explore the (moral, existential, theological) problems posed by “odious deaths; the deaths of those who have met their selves prematurely, whose death is not the proper conclusion of a life but its violent curtailment; and as they moved away from the uneasy combination of genre trappings, period signifiers, Angry Young Man homage and brutality, the drum sounds were simultaneously drawn towards actuality and theology, as if the proximity of the one entailed the other. All we are doing is exploring the two faces of what remains a face to face—like a coin which only know its obverse. How is one to interpret an ancestral statement? It cannot be anyrhing else, since its referent, taken literally, is unthinkable. That which is given in the present retrojects a seemingly ancestral past. It carries out repeatable experiments with a view to external referents which endow these experiments with meaning. A necessary condition for the contingency of every entity. Thought episodes are “in” language—using animals as molecular impacts are “in” gasses not as “ghosts” are in machines. This is not to be maudlin or macabre but at least I do; these audio/visual clips are profoundly excellent sources of research. I guess I got to find a new game to play. Magazine is slightly more moody and not as sunshiney as the first record, but it is still fairly light, approachable West Coast-ish psych/folk/pop. You can’t have me, you can’t have me, you can’t have me.
Recall, guiding star, lost and someday words and music. We watched our old friend on the internet and she laughed like her mom did when she met us with the family Kathryn asked to be apart of. He wore white pants I could see him wearing in church, on an off day. There is a room in the house where she lives that I’m not sure she knows about. I lay there watching vampires on television, not sure I should go out, remind me students of the myths to be inherited. Sharply, her voice in the kitche, with Tim, and their band, their band you will never be a part of, except in Maine in fourteen years. Touch my face. Who is time?? Slow as it has been to obtain the recognition it deserves. A microphone wails across the room and a spotlight hits the heavy red curtains at the back of the stage. The man in front of the doors with blinds who needs a better microphone, introducing the speaker for today, on the video, on the internet.

“Then you will know that that frontier can be a cold and inhospitable space,” you must have noticed how full of exageration his introduction was, smashing onto the cement mound that held the clothes, tree, pole, falling softly onto the snow and making black pitmarks, he could hear the music of a Peter and the Wolf orchestra of icicles, icicle flutes and icicle oboes, icicle violins and icicle bassoons: a fragile glittering transparent world of icicles melting, falling, dissolving, dripping away, pierced by the sadness of icicles! “What guests come to your dark room? she said and the next thing that happened a car went over my backpack and tore everything apart. Voluntary acts are initiated by myself. I am interested in the moment when the rubber hand becomes your own hand—we are living in an exciting time.”

Everywhere officially disavowed
but to pastiche and retrospection, the nostalgia mode
a single gesture remaining, “I’m a duppy conqueror”

we invent you / look a ghost / decmber / treachery / terminus / demons sing love songs / off this century / one lick less / scarlette / october all over / summer freeze / radio gra / below the salt / whpo cares

I wanna show you the different emotions. It can suppose being as a condition. However, to rely on a philosophy of language at this point tends to mystify what has happened. Such a historicizing of the echo. I don’t know what reason to give why I was so aggresively cerebral. “Drinking electricity” vs. “Drinking beef,” here in the radio studios:
“Opera in a garden,” the strangeness of Geoffrey’s blooming gestures, his tan, his dark tan, his dark, dark tan, his dark, tan, his dark, tan, his dark tan, tan, tan, his tan, his dark tan, his dark tan, his dark tan tan, tan tan. “The elusive Tim,” I’ve a shooting box in Scotland. Some found, others recorded with no particular song, or even kind of song in mind. Kathryn, on the phone in the living room, “I raise my hand when I want the bus to stop.” Now we are back here. Resorting to concrete imagery; the drums and the saxophone are recorded on magnetic tape. You tell me I am practicing terror? Kathryn, on the phone in the living room, “I raise my hand when I want the bus to stop,” Kathryn on the phone in the living room. The sun’s trumpet, the spiral honey, our ears asking fr bigger acoustical sensations—zooming closer through cranking your rushing waves. All your rushing waves.

The ritual of disconsolate remembering,

“I was on my way to the chapel one day,” she says, “I was on my way to chaple one day,” she says, “For teenagers only, falling behind in a capacity to disturb. Tell me how you know, tell me how you know, tell me how you know me.”

4.4.09 SNL/NBC/Lisztomania

Thomas Mars’ right hand outstretched and holding a microphone he slightly pushes forward. His left arm is cocked, elbow out, hand on hip. He switches his hand on the microphone and pushes his right arm out, swaying, allowing it to return. He holds the mic with his left hand, the mic stand with his right hand, just above the knob to raise/lower it. His feet push him back and forth and he rocks his hips and bounces like the people in the 80s movie his fans used in his bootleg video.

When Thomas Mars starts singing he sings to you with a slight shake of his head: “So sentimental.” His left hand comes of the microphone and then comes back. He says “no” and stretches out his left hand and shakes it, flopping, to emphasize his point. He switches his hand placement on the microphone/mic stand, the right is now holding the mic, the left the mic stand. He leans a bit down and to the left and cocks his head up to the mic.

Both hands resting on top of the microphone. Both hands resting on top of the microphone. Both hands resting on top of the microphone. Both hands resting on top of the microphone. Both hands resting on top of the microphone. Both hands resting on top of the microphone.

He drops his left hand and brings it back up to the microphone just as the band drops out for the chorus. He looks up like a young boy waiting for the Eucharist.

Thomas Mars looks to his left. Thomas Mars drops his left hand to his side and quickly brings it back up to the middle of the mic stand, which he shakes as the rest of the band comes in behind him for the chorus. Thomas Mars switches his hand placement and sways back and forth and bounces on his toes.

Thomas Mars slowly pushes his right hand out from the microphone while grasping the microphone with his left hand. He looks like he is snapping the fingers of his right hand, but he is really just swaying his hand around, shaking it one, two, three times until the note he sings turns into an “oh” and he points with his hand and his hand raises slightly.

Thomas Mars right arm sways back and forth off beat in front of his body and out to his side. His hand points at his side, like a cowboy’s gun, and he lifts it up, puts it on the microphone, drops his left hand to his side, brings his left hand back to the microphone stand, pulls the microphone off the stand with his right hand, picks up the microphone stand with his left hand and places it quickly back and to his left so he can walk in front of the microphone stand while holding the microphone, with its red cord, in his right hand.

He walks towards stage left extending his open left hand while tipping the microphone at an angle to his mouth. His left hand opens up and moves towards his face and Thomas Mars puts his left hand on the top of his head and ruffles his hair. His left hand drops to his side and then picks up the microphone cord, the red microphone cord, as he leans back to his right, into the microphone. He looks out into the crowd and moves back stage right. He looks towards stage right.

Thomas Mars leans back and rights himself towards the center of the audience still holding the microphone in his right hand and the red microphone cord in his left hand. He leans to his left and comes back up in a circle–his left hand gestures outward moving with his body–until he comes up with his eyes closed and his left hand, still holding the red microphone cord, gestures as if to say, “who knew? I did.”

The left hand comes up to the microphone and Thomas Mars is now holding the microphone with both hands while he leans into the microphone and sings. He drops his left hand to his side and moves it behind his back. He moves backwards and his left hand re-appears from behind his back and grabs the top of the discarded microphone stand.

Thomas Mars walks forward with the microphone stand as if his hand was around a friend’s shoulder and Thomas Mars was telling this friend how to break up with his lover, who Thomas Mars is now sleeping with.

Thomas Mars is wincing. Thomas Mars brings the microphone stand into his shoulder and points upwards with his left index finger.

Thomas Mars leans the microphone stand backwards a bit and cross leans to his left while doing so, eventually ending up behind the microphone stand. Thomas Mars puts the microphone back on its stand and sings with his right hand on top of the microphone and his left hand right below the microphone. The stand is leaned back just a bit. He looks like he is taking the Eucharist.

Thomas Mars sways his head a little bit back and forth. He looks up and to the right. He puts both hands on top of the microphone and sways back and forth. His right hand drops away and sways outwards and to the side of his body.

Thomas Mars’ right hand sways in front of his body, grabs the red microphone cord, and then sways back out to the right of his body, upwards towards his head into a point, a point, and then his palm stretches outwards, towards the audience. The red microphone cord rests in the fleshy part of his hand that connects his thumb to index finger. HIs right hand comes back down and grabs the microphone stand and Thomas Mars takes a step backwards and then one forwards and to the side, as if practicing a jazz square without knowing how to do one. He bounces up and down. His left hand is on top of the microphone stand. His fingers raise up and he turns to the left, drops the microphone stand down towards the back of the stage and bends over with his back to the crowd.

Thomas Mars takes the microphone off the stand, holds it with his left hand to his face, holds the red cord up with his right hand, looks directly into the microphone and points upwards with his right index finger. All the fingers on his right hand extend and Thomas Mars rotates his body to the right, his face following his outstretched hand.

Thomas Mars drops his right hand.

Thomas Mars switches the microphone to his right hand and lightly fingers the red microphone cord with his left hand.

Thomas Mars curls up the red microphone cord in his left hand and brings them–his hand and the cord–up to his chest, possibly to his heart. He steps forwards and extends his hand outwards.

He sings deeply into the microphone and leans backwards while stretching his left hand, still holding the microphone cord, outwards to the audience. He stays leaning for a few seconds, bopping up and down, until he casually uprights himself into a half twist that takes him backwards towards the microphone stand which he grabs with his left hand.

Thomas Mars lets the microphone go and it rocks back and forth next to him. He looks upwards, over the crowd to his left and extends his left hand, carrying the red microphone cord, outwards pointing his index and middle finger. His left hand drops palm out onto the top of the microphone stand. His body twists to his left and leans the stand away from the audience. Thomas Mars looks away from the audience, crosses his left foot back over and turns back around while putting the microphone back on its stand.

Thomas Mars sucks his lips and bobs his head; he holds the microphone with his right hand and the middle of the microphone stand, red cord bundled up with it, with his left. He bounces up and down and brings his left hand back away from the microphone stand, drops the red cord and puts both hands on top of the microphone. He twists his body to the right and leans the microphone stand back and to the left. He swings it slowly back in front of his body and leans back with it. To be clear, he takes two steps backwards with it and then comes back forwards to sing with both of his hands resting on top of the microphone. His right hand drops to his side, raises it upwards and out in a warm gesture while his head tilts back and to the left. His left hand is not resting on the microphone and longer.

Thomas Mars places his left hand on top of the microphone and his right hand on the middle of the microphone stand, gripping the red microphone cord with it. He leans the stand backwards, tilting his body with it, though he leans his mouth in closer to the microphone proper. The song ends and he violently pushes the microphone stand back and to the left of his body while he turns away from the audience and walks towards the drummer. He uprights the microphone stand with his right hand, turns back around into a full bow, all the while holding onto the microphone stand. He stands up, lets go of the stand, walks to his right while waving, bows again, turns to his left, and walks back to center stage.

We know that the terms ‘chance’ and ‘aleatory’ both refer back to related etymologies: ‘to fall’, and ‘falling’ in the case of the former; ‘dice’, ‘dice-throw’, or ‘game of dice’ in the case of the latter. Thus these terms bring together notions that, far from being opposed to one another, are actually inseparable–the notions of play and of calculation, and of the calculation of chance which is inherent in every game of dice. Every thinking in which the identification of being with chance is dominant foregrounds the theme of the dice-totality (which is to say, of the unalterable enclosure of the number of the possible), of the apparent gratuity of the game (the play of life and of a world whose superior artificiality is acknowledged), but also that of the cool calculation of frequencies (the world of life insurance and evaluable risks). The ontology of the enclosure of possibilities inevitably situates us within a world whose aversion to gravity is but the obverse of the fact that it only takes counting techniques seriously.

By way of contrast, the term ‘contingency’ referes back to the Latin contingere, meaning ‘to touchg, to befall’, which is to say, that which happens, but which happens enough to us. The contingent, in a word, is something that finally happens-something other, something which, in its irreducibility to all pre-registered possibilities, puts an end to the vanity of a game wherein everything, even the imporbably, is predictable. When something happens to us, when novelty grabs us by the throat, then no more calculation and no more play-it is time to be seious. But what is most fundamental in all this-and this was already one of the guiding intuitions of Being and Event-is the idea that the most powerful conception of the incalculable and unpredictable event is provided by a thinking that continues to be mathematical-rather than one which is artistic, poetic, or religious. It is by way of mathematics that we will finally succeed in thinking that which, through its power and beauty, vanquishes quantities and sounds the end of play.

pg. 108, After Finitude

New Review Up!

K-punk has a good post up at the moment detailing his thoughts on a European Business Ethics Conference at which he spoke. As I’ve been working on some poems about eco-movement/responsibility/youth-culture, I perked up at this quote:

But the subject supposed to recycle, Campell argued, presupposed the structure not supposed to recycle: in making recycling the responsibility of ‘everyone’, structure contracts out its responsibility to consumers, by itself receding into invisibility. The discussion after Campbell’s paper turned on the question of agency – since “corporations are made up of individuals” doesn’t this mean that there is always hope for change? But it seems to me that “individual” is best defined as one incapable of acting. I would suggest that, at this time when the appeal to individual ethical responsibility has never been more clamorous – in her new book, Judith Butler Frames Of War uses the term “responsibilization” to refer to this phenomenon – it is necessary to wager instead on structure at its most totalizing. Instead of saying that everyone – i.e. every one – is responsible for climate change, we all have to do our bit, it would be better to say that no-one is, and that’s the very problem. The cause of eco-catastrophe is an impersonal structure which, even though it is capable of producing all manner of effects, is precisely not a subject capable of exercising responsibility.

(And, of course, MGMT, is playing on shuffle while I read this–which, btw, I heard in Reckless the other day and watched at least three conversations happen between clerks who were “surprised” by the record as they had written it off on the basis of the first single. I had been sitting there for about one side of the record, selling some cds, and have to say, was surprised in the same way).

Last night, showing Amira some poems, I had an odd moment of trying to describe to her both the form and the content of a poem: she’d read it quickly and was interested in just trying to get me to talk about them. I had absolutely nothing to say, though it was based around a 3 syllable/line count I’ve been working with and was a part of this series on hipster/youth culture I’ve been working on. Where was she losing the thread?

spoke of Diana’s hill-
billy re-
invention,
her overalls,
her corn pipe,
liquor, her
cobs for com-
post, her sor-
cerized corn
she no long-
er eats

New feature on Patter is Movement up at The Phoenix.

New review up at the Phoenix of the new Honest Jons/EMI Hayes Archive compilation.

Spent Thursday evening at Art Chicago and besides seeing:
1. A red ghost with a penis (my companions and I–”can a ghost get hard?”–did not get close enough to see if the answer was in the title, humorously–also, was triple dared to go ask the gallery owner, politely declined amidst uproar about refusal to follow up after being triple dared)
2. Unfortunate jello wrestling
3. Oakland sweat-stained undershirt flag (“It’s stopped smelling,” the gallery owner said, “It has blood and vomit on it”)
4. Really nice text pieces printed on silver gelatin–unfortunate text though, something about middle age crisis?
5. And this really awesome folk art gallery from New Orleans that was beautifully out of place with Louisiana and Texas themed license plates.

But! was amazingly moved by David X. Levine’s colored pencil drawings. Apparently, homeboy is synesthetic of, I would assume, the sound to color variety. I’ve been looking around online for a picture of the drawing that drew me in–patterned, sharp red diamonds on a black background with a newsprint picture of a young James Brown in the corner, but I’ll stick with this Brian Wilson ode, that’s similar:

It’s maybe a little too eye-winking–reminiscent of a junior high boy’s notebook–but these pieces point to Levine’s more abstract spaces:

From what the gallery owner told me, Levine draws on the wall while listening to music, allowing his synesthesia to control the patterning. The thumb tack holes are visible, and he seems to listen to songs over and over, as certain shapes and patterns repeat themselves (unless, if you’ll allow an Adorno-ian raise of the eyebrow–all pop music is the SAME). It’s lighthearted and, except when he’s quoting song lyrics or performers–pretty self contained.

It was interesting, then, seeing this stuff and having such a response to it, and then being nonplussed by other exhibits involving music:
1. The aforementioned Oakland gallery had some punk t-shirts and zines
2. Touch painting get noise music
3. An Australian dude put some potatoes on some keyboards

Punk nihilism doesn’t resonate as strongly when it places itself within institutional contexts. A pile of t-shirts with the word fuck on them are trying to be sold next to silkscreens of Chinese girls in red dresses. By reaching towards a pre-punk version of pop music and focusing, through his measured colors and patterns, our eyes on this older music’s order and form, Levine suggests a place for the Wilson and Brown’s teenage exhibition within an art/craft just as much as an art/attitude context. The closest Levine comes to distortion (that I saw) was the Kinks which, as you can see, is, well, just look:

This isn’t to say that the punk spirit shouldn’t be attempted within the gallery-my buddy Stephen Lapthisophon connects to it in his work pretty consistently:

Just that, to converse with punk only on the level of reaction or witty emptiness creates a darker version of the art fair’s superficiality–the original point losing power outside of the basement.