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unexpected encounters #14: alt.modern
The angel — three years we waited for him, attention riveted, closely scanning the pines the shore the stars. One with the blade of the plough or the ship’s keel we were searching to find once more the first seed so that the age-old drama could begin again. We returned to our homes broken, limbs…
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unexpected encounters #13: sun throat cut
The body will continue to demonstrate mortality as the fate of all humans. It is for this reason that any reference to human animality gravely affects those who dream of its antithesis. They take offence not only at any mention of animality in life, but in science, literature, and the arts as well, as this…
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unexpected encounters #12: road trip journal
The truth is that in this house with its four walls of glass I feel … always on alert. I am always restless. Even in the evening. I feel like a sentinel on guard day and night. I can rarely stretch out and relax … Edith Farnsworth, quoted on panel at Farnsworth House [Sally] Hemings’…
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unexpected encounters #11: in the zone
War is beautiful because it inaugurates the dreamed-of metallization of the human body … War is beautiful because it combines gunfire, barrages, cease-fires, scents, and the fragrance of putrefaction into a symphony. War is beautiful because it creates new architectures, like those of armored tanks, geometric squadrons of aircraft, spirals of smoke from burning villages.…
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unexpected encounters #10: the arrival of modernity
The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins, signalized the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production. Karl Marx, Capital,…
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unexpected encounters #8: phantasmagorias
The world dominated by its phantasmagorias—this, to make use of Baudelaire’s term, is “modernity.” Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project He who has once begun to open the fan of memory never comes to the end of its segments. No image satisfies him, for he has seen that it can be unfolded, and only in its folds…
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unexpected encounters #7: aesthetics
Beauty will be convulsive, or it will not be. André Breton, Nadja Greece’s government has said the country is “turning a page” after Eurozone member states reached an agreement on the final elements of a plan to make its massive debt pile more manageable. The government spokesman, Dimitris Tzanakopoulos, hailed “a historic decision” that meant “the Greek people…
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unexpected encounters #6: exit
The error of the Surrealist militants was to imagine the surreal to be something universal, that is, a matter of psychology, whereas it turns out to be what is most local, ethnic, class-bound, dated … Believing that the images they sought came from the unconscious, whose contents they assumed as loyal Freudians to be timeless…
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unexpected encounters #5: tags
Writing is the destruction of every voice, of every point of origin. Writing is that neutral, composite, oblique space where our subject slips away, the negative where all identity is lost, starting with the very identity of the body writing. Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author” Likely the tagging went like this. (1)…
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