Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: anarchism, anti-police brutality rally, ☭☭☭, columbia, every heart is a revolutionary cell, hakim bey, insurrection, new school, nyu, occupy everything, peter lambourne wilson, pigs, police brutality, take back the night
Off the sidewalks, into the future! Swoooosh I guess we’re rupturing the spacetimecontinuum vortex now? As per usual an anti-police brutality rally was met with, surprise, more “police brutality”. Even with this it’s worth thinking about what “police brutality” looks like – or doesn’t look like at a majority white, privileged space like the New School. NYPD has a community affairs unit, who knew? It’s starting to feel like an insurrectionary circuit is being traced from union square via new school to washington square park and back. How do we abolish exchange? Perhaps our vegan potlucks in the park should become mutualist potlatches. Maybe we should start eating the pigs? Rev Billy showed up to preach but I guess we weren’t all buying what he was selling. Has even anti-commercialism been commodified? And how does his hair defy gravity so bouffantly? I want to know.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: ☭☭☭, dissemination, every heart is a revolutionary cell, global southeast, GRANAD(A), insurrection, third world decadence movement
La Décadence n’a rien à faire avec Amour. La Décadence est un excellent marteau que nous employons pour détruire l’Empire.
[Decadence is not Love. Decadence is a hammer we use to crush Empire.]
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America is a series of several displeasures, beamed into our bedrooms in little increments of ketchup packets and adolescent angst. America is the kindly uncle that might violate you with his left hand even as he hands you tamarind sweets from his right. We’re feeling really unclean America, and we’d quite like a shower please, but your oceans are salty and even your rainwater runs cold. Never forget that we love you, America, even when we suspect you have mortgaged our dreams of personhood away.
We are brown and glossy and we think we have rather nice legs but our chappals are getting scuffy and that’s not going to land us an I-banking job, is it? Perhaps we should do good and queue up for the NGO-industrial complex to help you help us help them. Soon our governments will build another shopping mall, and we’ll program ourselves new dreams of getting off your global welfare state. Your cities are expensive, though and we cant afford your economic noblesse oblige anymore. We’e running out of band-aids already, yet we’re bleeding all over our new shoes. These heels are high! Slow down a bit there, we can’t quite keep up with your shadow. Yet with our orgiastic consumption and your immaculate white goods, we think we could be friends, what do you say?
Decadence is not Love. Decadence is a hammer we use to crush Empire
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: anarchism, anthropology, aum, ☭☭☭, bataille, becoming, blanchot, canetti, deleuze, dissemination, eisenstein, every heart is a revolutionary cell, extincts, extitutions, fascism, frekorps, guattari, hinduism, in the beginning, insurrection, larkin, nietzsche, superman, theweleit, universe, violence, what is to be (un)done
In the beginning was the language, and the language was gravity. Before the beginning was infinite violence. When violence met language, there was conflict; at once collision and collusion. Conflict became a reproductive space of exchange, and atomisation became the original sin. We learnt what evil was, and it was the One.
Gravity meanwhile was inscribed into (celestial) bodies, becoming the first legal contract between them. So it is that particles collide to produce fragmented planets and people, in an exchange of violent energy. Humans similarly collide to exchange pleasantries, and sometimes bodily fluids. On the level of language, morphemes collide to exchange ejaculations of speed and to reproduce meaning. In the eighteenth century, these forms might have been approached through money, character and root.
Yet this beginning is simply the beginning of the rational, instinctual Man-form, and its subsequent trajectory through time and space. Following Nietzsche, the universe itself is a monster of energy without beginning, without end, not expanding but constantly transforming, in an infinite play of forces, and waves of forces which work like concepts to create embodied affects. Violence is this monstrous energy.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: aesthetics, anarchism, art, ☭☭☭, beautiful losers, buenaventura durruti, every heart is a revolutionary cell, just seeds, meredith stern, olympics, pete yahnke, sds, swoon
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THINGS THAT WILL HAPPEN ON 08/08/08
- The Olympics start. I think the Olympic Ring Bike is kind of amazing. Usually I associate the Olympics with Bombay, mad humidity and my grandmother’s house with rattan paneling on the walls. Don’t know that I’ll see any of this episode though. - This film premieres in NYC. It describes itself as being “rooted in the DIY subcultures of skateboarding, hiphop, punk and graffiti” and celebrates “the spirit behind today’s most influential cultural movement“. I’d daresay reality TV trumps these today, but either way, - I will be on a transatlantic flight to a wedding in Surrey, then Dubai and maybe South India for a few weeks. - After having presumably bombed the Arabic oral which is in 9 hours (but unwritten) and the final exam the next day. Oh dear? |
THE ARTWORK FOR THE FILM GOT ME THINKING ABOUT REVOLUTIONARY AESTHETICS, THOUGH
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: ☭☭☭, childhood, dash snow, die fetten jahre sind vorbei, endings, every heart is a revolutionary cell, poloroids
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Sometimes when I think of poloroids I think of dash snow and the amazing photo below by Dave Schubert. But sometimes poloroids can also be lovely. Or the shots from the very first Antifrat gig that fell on something hot and are warped, transience like that particular guitar! +bass! +drums! + girlpower! incarnation of the band. And later on, ditto with the Sparkplugs, albeit on a different stage. I think the first time I ever came into contact with poloroids actually was when I was far littler than now, at the Wafi centre’s annual it’s-Christmastime-you-should-be-buying-more extravaganza, replete with air-imported pine tree and fake snow. Of the smilingly sit/struggle with all the dignity of a very small person on Santa’s lap for posterity kind, even though you’re really far too large (in your head) to be doing so.
Soon, though polaroids may go the way of polar bears, Santa’s reindeers and all things once-wintry once global warming’s karmic punchline kicks in. This is saddening.
Filed under: film, politic + insurrection: other | Tags: art, ☭☭☭, die fetten jahre sind vorbei, every heart is a revolutionary cell, louis vuitton, pigs, sds, student activism, tattoos, the edukators, the fat years are over, wim deloye
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Since writing about The Edukators a while back, I’ve come back to it a fair number of times. Not to give away any of the plot (see it, it’s brilliant), but the end sentiment shuffles somewhat over to “some people never change” as quoted on the note at the end. A literalised writing on the wall if you will, with the person in question being a german ex-SDSer – turned corporate millionaire- ostensibly still with the radicredientials of his student days.
But just how sustainable is student activism anymore? Since then, at least from what I can gather in the US, the nature of the university system itself seems to have changed. In ‘68,
you could graduate $2000 or $3000 in debt and go on to be a committed activist for the rest of your life; many of the 68 vets have done just this. Today you’re going to be graduating from the same schools with something like $100k in debt. and activism is almost something you have to give up as you hit your senior year, if this makes sense. Similarly, whereas most stuff went down at big elite institutions like Columbia or UC – Berkley, today it’s happening at state, community and even high school campuses, which is especially incredible. What then will the future look like – are many of SDS, for example, destined to become the same kind of benevolent i-bankers, corrupting the system from within (if at all)?
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I don’t know when said fat years will be over. But in the year of the pig, corporate branding reaches new levels, with pigs getting Louis Vuitton tattoes. There’s an interview over at if it’s hip it’s here with Belgian artist Wim Deloye, a vegetarian who tattoos live pigs (albeit sedated) for art’s sake. To quote from the interview:
Wim: I started tattooing pig hides, which I’d get from the slaughterhouses, in 1994. It was only in 1997 that I started to work on live sedated pigs. I tattoo pigs because they grow fast and they are so much better to tattoo than fish. I tattoo them when they are young and I like the way the artwork stretches and distorts over time. Essentially, we invest in small tattoos and we harvest large paintings.
I don’t know how I feel about the cruelty aspect of this, but some of the stretched pigskins look too much like human skin for comfort. There’s some more examples at the same site.
Filed under: diy, film, rags | Tags: die fetten jahre sind vorbei, diy, every heart is a revolutionary cell, film, sds, the edukators, the fat years are over
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aka The Edukators, a film I’ve been itching to see after coming across a quote “every heart is a revolutionary cell. Cue a painted hoodie (how did I never realise I had gold paint before?)/ drawing (to be redone).
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