I_BECAME_JUST_I_BECAME_UNREASONED_ I_BECAME_EXTRAVAGANT

   I found the bee as it fumbled about the ground
   Its leg mangled, its wing torn, its sting
       gone
   I picked it up, marvelled at its insistence
       to continue on, despite the dumb brute
       thing that had occurred
   I considered, remembered the fatal struggle
       the agony on the face of wounded friends
       and the same dumb drive to continue
   I became angry at the unfair conflict suffered
       by will and organism
   I became just, I became unreasoned, I became
       extravagant
   I observed the bee, there, lying in my palm
   I looked and I commanded in a harsh and angry shout –
       STOP THAT!
   Then it ceased to struggle, and somehow suddenly
       became marvellously whole, and it arose
       and it flew away
   I stared, I was appalled, I was overwhelmed
       with responsibility, and I knew not where to begin.

TIME AND THE CITY

SOME SEVENTEEN SYLLABLE COMMENTS

1

On the freeway

I follow redglow taillights

to my city of glass

2

I was not here yesterday

also

I will not be here tomorrow

3

Will you please explain this

I hate you

I fear you

I return always

4

The pain of your people

tears my flesh

Still…

There is the hour before dawn

5

I will not be here yesterday

also

I was not here tomorrow

'Letter from Kickapoo (pop. 250)'

   I'm
   hiding out
   from the heat here

   this time
   they want me
   for Living without Believing
   for Working without Slavery
   Playing without Patterns
   and Loving without Misery

   please don't give me away?

  

INITIATION

What we doing, being

   cool?

That argument Kitten, on

   the freeway

I couldn’t keep up our

   habits and

We cruised along sick,

   seeking magic

And you said – Hit some

   chump over his head

But I didn’t dig that so

   you offered

To find some good tricks

I got hot, indignant like

   a square with tears

And you felt pity, saying

 - Don’t cry Daddy, it’s just

another way to burn a sucker

'Things Exactly as They Are'

   Things exactly as they are
   Are Paradise
   But it's always so quiet
   When the crickets die

PUSAN LIBERTY

 the 6 x 6 bounces me down thewashboard roads, I see the sun-eaten walls of Korea, mygirl-wife & child in mud & straw hut back in Taegu & hereI am meeting the SEAL as he sits on his roller-skate cartminus arms & legs but beneath his ass a million $’s worthof heroin – I make my buy walk through the 10,000 cam-era market-place, jeeps for sale, people for sale, I’meven for sale as I find the porch of Cutie’s suckahatchihouse and fix, sitting in the sun on the adobe veranda, thetwo Chinese agents come around to make their buy, 2 youngboys, they’re hooked bad & I charge them too much – we sitthere and fix, I fix again, the so-called Enemy & I, but just3 angry boys lost in the immense absurdity of War and state suddenfriends who have decided that our hatred of Government exceedsour furthest imaginable limits of human calculation  

American poet William Wantling (1933-74) led a life of extremes. Much of his poetry reflects this. Born in Peoria, Illinois (a town which would come to represent the kind of conformism that Wantling detested), he was a soldier in the Korean War, became a heroin addict on his return to civilian life, and spent almost six years in San Quentin prison for forgery and possession of narcotics. It was in prison that Wantling began to write. His early poetry already reflected a need to transcend immediate circumstances as well as to confront them. 

'The Awakening', dated December 1962, was first published in a limited edition of 200 by Turret Books in 1967, and as the opening piece for In the Enemy Camp: Selected Poems 1964-74, 108pp, Tangerine Press.

The four-line poem, 'Things Exactly as They Are,' takes its title from Wallace Stevens' long poem 'The Man with the Blue Guitar' (which itself was inspired by a Picasso painting).

ADVICE_FOR_HOT_YOUNG_MEAT_

SIMON EVANS NOT NOT KNOCKING ON HEAVEN’S DOOR @ PALAIS DE TOKYO 

PRINTEMPS_PARIS_JAZ_JELLA

PEOPLE OF INTENSITY PEOPLE OF POWER / LES READYMADES APPARTIENNENT À TOUT LE MONDE©

It was in the early 1970s that – for the first time ever, to my knowledge – executives (in the advertising industry, of course) hired artists for the specific task of interfering with business as usual. In the 1970s, Henning Brandis, a young man with a background in the Fluxus network, was hired at the advertising firm GGK Düsseldorf, where his job was to think up little assaults on the safety and continuity of everyday company operations. One morning, for instance, three creative directors found their desks nailed, legs up, to the ceiling. Everything that had been on the desks had been glued to them and covered, Daniel Spoerri–style, with a layer of white paint. Or there would be surprising noises, abused furniture, adolescent pranks, pointless assignments, and other critiques of conformist work, ranging in intellectual quality from class clown to Joseph Beuys. Around the same time, the owner of März publishers, Jörg Schröder, had founded the advertising agency Bismarc Media, whose employees were told to produce nothing, and, when they couldn’t bear producing nothing, observe each other laboring under the pointless compulsion to be productive. A general manager was appointed whose task was to undermine any possible output.

•

•

[T]he phenomenon we are interested in here is this: a society in which intention and focus are on top and intensity and wastefulness are at the bottom – also existing, perhaps, on the romantic margins of leisure, of bohemianism and puberty – is being reshuffled into a society where all these relations are reversed. And if we accept that this is a social fact, we can describe this development in terms of a larger diagnosis of the transition from Fordism to post-Fordism, from a society of discipline to one of control, as the victory of artistic critique as described by Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello, or in terms of the much-touted ideas of the artist as entrepreneur and of the creative cities in which the creative class allegedly leads a life that is as creatively intense as it is economically productive and successful.

•

•

If we hold on to this distribution of pairs of opposites, however, something else emerges: on the one side, we find the description of work, at least in the conventional sense; on the other, that of leisure. Intensity and wastefulness, at least at first glance, obey extra-economic, if not counter-economic, principles. Someone who is wasteful neither saves nor invests; he or she does not speculate, does not even submit to the ritual calculation of the potlatch and its indirect benefits. Wastefulness is the opposite of husbandry. Intensity enjoys potential and irresponsibility: whatever happens, we do not put it in the biographical piggybank of subjectivity, heaping up experiences; nor does it even need to happen at all – it may well remain a dream. 

•

•

Within this model, the subjectivation of the self seizes, time and again, precisely on those vestiges of the structure that shaped them as objective social relations just before they were fed into the illusion of omnipotence harbored by the outsourced subject of the post-Fordist economy. But this model also reveals a subject within the subject, a highly self-possessed and possessing subject that can triumph in the victories of the person who has to survive all of this in addition to his or her defeats. This subject is strong, harboring no illusions, and is a master that constantly dissociates from its own loserish qualities, either kicking them when they’re down or flirting with them, tender and bored. The sentences that start with “I’m the kind of person who…” allow for both.

Diedrich Diederichsen / http://www.e-flux.com/journal/people-of-intensity-people-of-power-the-nietzsche-economy/ 

Images : Hobby Pop Museum 

• • •

•

  Au MAMCO de Genève est installé (et parfois montré) ce qui se caractérise comme un stockage : celui de l’agence Les readymades appartiennent à tout le monde©, ouverte à New York en 1987 et fermée en 1993 . « Je suis parti d’une fiction pour produire quelque chose qui s’inscrit véritablement dans la réalité », dit l’agence. Créée par Philippe Thomas, elle propose à des « personnages », terme volontairement ambigu, d’entrer dans l’histoire de l’art, via sa bibliothèque — ses catalogues, ses listes, ses registres. Bref, de proposer l’archivage de l’œuvre avant son existence, comme le réel enjeu de la transaction. Les « clients » de l’agence, alors, payent leur signature et avec elle, leur droit d’entrée, dans un petit théâtre où figurent collectionneurs, commissaires, critiques, historiens d’art ou journalistes. Ce petit théâtre n’apparaît pas comme tel, mais à l’image bureaucratique de l’entreprise gestionnaire et de ses images dont Philippe Thomas a imaginé toutes les retombées fictionnelles. 

        Cette entreprise ne s’est pas cependant limitée à produire des œuvres dont la particularité tient au fait que leur première cession s’accompagne de l’attribution de leur signature à l’acquéreur — une procédure s’inspirant de celle, très usitée dans la fiction littéraire et qui consiste, pour le romancier, à prêter des propos, des pensées ou même des œuvres entières à ses personnages. Inéluctable développement de la logique interne du travail de l’agence, elle passe, en 1991, de l’attribution d’une œuvre singulière à celle de toute une exposition. Citant un titre de Nabokov, Feux pâles au CAPC de Bordeaux, permet de ré-envisager l’intégralité de l’histoire du musée occidental, allant jusqu’à lui associer diverses œuvres d’artistes inconnus – clients de l’agence – accrochées, avec la bénédiction de l’institution signataire. Comme le signale Patricia Falguières, il s’agit non d’un retrait physique mais d’un véritable ré-investissement de l’exposition. Une exposition où ne s’opposerait plus le verbal et le visuel, le livre et le lieu. C’est ainsi, finalement, que le stock, le stockage, l’archivage, les « planning boards » les cartes postales deviennent le Cabinet d’Amateur de l’esthétique de la production. 

Elisabeth Lebovici + Caroline Bourgeois / L'argent au plateau / http://www.artsetsocietes.org/f/f-lebovicibourgeois.html

Images: Philippe Thomas, Les ready-made appartiennent à tout le monde® ; Autoportrait de Groupe / copyright succession Philippe Thomas / MAMCO Genève.

I_SAY_WE_OUGHT_TO_GO_BACK_TO_TV_SETS_CUT_FROM_STONE

CYNTHIA_ITS_ME_IN_THE_BATHROOM_ ALWAYS_LOOKING_FOR_MAGIC

Shana Moulton, Every Angle is an Angel 

@ Palais de Tokyo until 11.09.2016

"My entire practise is a form of consumption. I hit my stride as soon as I realized that shopping, home decorating, and all of the television and video games I'd consumed as a child could be a source of inspiration rather than something to disown."

"always looking out for magic, it's a way to escape from banality."

"Cynthia, it's me in the bathroom; it's me worried about ageing; it's me looking at a beauty magazine. Getting into this character is just getting into me."

late to get the rot out / I don't get the rot out... SALT.8

Inside cover with works by Samara Scott, Alix Marie, Hannah Regel, Jessica Ramm.

excerpt from my poem on paranoia

Lyle St

Lyle St

SALT.8 is out, featuring a poem I wrote while researching structures of paranoia and conspiracy theory. it's partly based on a dream about an AWOL soldier and crochet and it's called : 

PARANOIA . IS . NOT . JUST . AN . 

INTERPRETIVE . STANCE . BUT . A 

. DISCOURSE . ABOUT . AGENCY .

+ essays by Thea Smith, Rózsa Farkas, Hannah Regel, Madeline Stack, Jala Wahid. + i totally love Lyle St's ballsy excellent poems. Hazzah. 

"In other words, trace is the absence of presence, and my tablet-palimpsests are a map of my extra-linguistic wanderings: the dumb questions I ask google and the caress with which I swipe through the fleeting moments of Instagram images."

"I don't know how it is for other people.

The (...) is the ultimate silence, unbearable."

"In Naples in 1972, female cashiers instituted a smile strike. Their affective labour-value, created by the service class, was withheld when the women refused to smile at customers."

http://saltmagazine.tumblr.com/

DO_EASY

The Discipline of D.E. (Do Easy)

William Burroughs / Gus van Sant

URBAN_LEGEND

it

is

first

a tower

of columns

stone iron steel

life-sized windows

people to wash them

washer men and women

and their oversized children

their city is home to chameleons

their city is both asylum and asylum

the city is always a zoo and a theme park

the city imagines nature as a sister virtuality

the city administers its treatment indiscriminately 

the city is both therapy and pathology for the lonely

the city cries itself to sleep with other people’s tear ducts

by checking and releasing flow, the city pumps its own heart

a city is always a whole whole, even as it expands and contracts

the whole city is like an orange, with rind and segment, ring and suburb

a city collapses like a burned-out star in cases of bad or useless circulation

a city never returns to the state of a village, but may die ignobly in a village-like way

a city is a supermarket unpacking out of similar boxes no choice between the same thing

-EAVENANDHELLTHEDOORSOFPERCEPTIONANDHEAVENANDHELLTHEDOORSOFPERCEPTIONANDH-

a city is the ugly veil of second nature, which her inhabitants want to raise and lower forever

difference makes no real difference to the city, but she will lean back and watch the show

a city needs at least four large structures, and one of those is the city art museum

a city directs culture by applying pressure here and allowing parasites there

this is not the wish of those who control the city and the city knows it

the city suckles its addicts with carbon monoxide and benzene

the city swaps sublimity at dawn for self-loathing at dusk

the city vaunts itself as the true nation of the nation

a city’s madness weaves itself on park benches

the city is the unchanging pace of fast food

the city’s coffers are the glory of its few

the city gives scrounging its dignity

the city makes darkness visible

the city is its own full moon

the city only masturbates

the city is a bad child

the city is disdainful

the city eats itself

the city cackles

the city vomits

the city faints

the city lives

the city has

unusually

diverse

deaths

souls

hats

etc.

but

no

v.

r.

ALCHIMIE_DISCURSIVE_OU_NÉCRO_ÉTHIQUE<>? _THÉORIE_DU_DRONE

« On peut y voir l’aboutissement d’un désir ancien, qui anime toute l’histoire des armes balistiques : accroître son allonge de sorte de pouvoir atteindre l’ennemi à distance, avant que celui-ci ne soit en mesure de le faire. Mais la spécificité du drone tient à ce qu’il joue sur un autre segment de distance. Entre la gâchette, sur laquelle on a le doigt, et le canon, d’où la balle va sortir, s’intercalent désormais des milliers de kilomètres. A la distance de la portée – distance de l’arme à sa cible – s’ajoute celle de la télécommande – distance de l’opérateur à son arme ». (p. 23)

« Cette tentative d’éradication de toute réciprocité dans l’exposition à la violence dans l’hostilité reconfigure non seulement la conduite matérielle de la violence armée, techniquement, tactiquement, psychiquement, mais aussi les principes traditionnels d’un ethos militaire officiellement fondé sur la bravoure et l’esprit de sacrifice. À l’aune des catégories classiques, le drone apparaît comme l’arme du lâche ». (p. 30)

« Cela n’empêche pas ses partisans de la proclamer être l’arme la plus éthique que l’humanité ait jamais connue. Opérer cette conversion morale, cette transmutation des valeurs est la tâche à laquelle s’attellent aujourd’hui des philosophes qui oeuvrent dans le petit champ de l’éthique militaire. Le drone, disent-ils, est l’arme humanitaire par excellence. Leur travail discursif est essentiel pour assurer l’acceptabilité sociale et politique de cette arme. Dans ces discours de légitimation, les « éléments de langage » de marchands d’armes et de porte-parole des forces armées se trouvent recyclés, par de grossiers processus d’alchimie discursive, en principes directeurs d’une philosophie éthique de nouveau genre – une « nécro-éthique », dont il est urgent de faire la critique ». (pp. 30-31)

IMAGES : 

« The Magician », Martin Sharp Tarot (1967)

« The Queen of Swords », Hexen 2.0 Tarot de Suzanne Treister (2009-2011)

« The flow of energy through a system acts to organise that system », Whole Earth Catalog, Stewart Brand et al., citation de Norbert Wiener (1968)

« Untitled (p. 180) », Brion Gysin,  William S. Burroughs, (circa 1965)

TEXT :

Grégoire Chamayou, Théorie du drone, Paris : La Fabrique (2013)

ECUSSONS :

Les écussons de l'USAF Pararescue et de l'USAF MQ-9 Reaper drone (la faucheuse)

EVERY_MONAD_CONTAINS_ALL_THE_OTHERS

_THE_IDEA_IS_A_MONAD_THE_BEING_THAT_ENTERS_INTO_IT_WITH_ITS_PAST_AND_SUBSEQUENT_HISTROY_BRINGS—CONCEALED_IN_ITS_OWN_FORM—AN_INDISTINCT_ABBREVIATION_ON_THE_REST_OF_THE_WORLD_OF_IDEAS_JUST_AS_ACCORDING_TO_LIEBNIZ'S_DISCOURSE_ON_METAPHYSICS_(1686)_EVERY_SINGLE_MONAD_CONTAINS—IN_AN_INDISTINCT_WAY—ALL_THE_OTHERS_

Walter Benjamin, from the « Epistemo-Critical Prologue » of Origin of German Tragic Drama, Verso (1998)

GIF BY MARIA ZAHLE @ AKERMAN DALY @ http://akermandaly.com/