Short haired girls rock

Someone needed to say it.

Oh and on that note how good is »this·guy«?

Beirut Journal

http://beirutjournal.blogspot.com

I haven't

It's been 9 days and counting so far. Let's see how long I last. 9 days since that and that. I need to give up the latter. The former can happen whenever the planets align and all that malarkey.

I think I'm on to a good thing this time. True lucidity is just around the corner. I wake up and feel it slithering out of my fingers in the mornings now.

Website as GRAPH!

Check your website out as a graph.



(This is muttering-madman.blogspot.com) ;)

As an aside, I've been arguing with the powers that be about a website developed by our company fairly recently. They put everything behind https with a completely newbie-ish JavaScript redirect from the http:// landing page. Obviously this is completely brain dead. The scary thing? The person responsible for designing this solution is a senior systems analyst...

Anyway, I generated a graph of this. Hillarious I'm sure you'd agree.



(URL hidden to protect the guilty) :|

Certain "Something For Kate" lyrics

have been getting to me lately. Almost every song I listen to has some gem in it. Great writing in my opinion.

"i want days and weeks to burst out of you"

Say Something

"in a city that rumbles like an impatient child
he hears everything"

Feeding The Birds And Hoping For Something In Return

"and your eyes become corridors
where i wander with a candle
calling out to you"

You Only Hide

"I was hanging upside down from the overpass
Waiting to discover something about the world
I couldn't get with the program and I couldn't listen to them
It was like trying to think in reverse
And I don't want to slide into apathy"

Monsters

"You're not the first to think that everything has been thought before
I spoke to an echo and he said
'I’m not satisfied, I want something more'"

Three Dimensions

"you hold me in mid air and you keep me a measure from impact
you stop and ask me if the ringing in your ears might be the sound of thought
you're like a long slow accident, time stood still while motion emptied you out
and we watched you like a slide show 1,2,3,4 and there you go"

Stunt Show

i picture myself like a column of smoke
and when questioned i see myself riding around forever on a manmade horse and you
and you

you'll be
moving randomly

Manmade Horse

These are songs from "Echolalia". Inspirational. Look at their website.

False memories and dreams

Kinda interesting article about false memories and imagination.

This probably helps explain why I sometimes have false memories about situations and events I've dreamt. Most bizarre. I guess I just have very vivid dreams (or something).

"What we learn could be useful for people who make decisions outside [the lab] based on the memory of others"

This made me start thinking about why we can even trust someone else's memory of anything. I'm sure this is going to sound silly when I re-read it in a week or so, but this seems especially pertinent in light of the subjectivity of experience as well.

Inclusivity and the Biennale of Sydney 2006?

Grasping the Thistle by Lisa Kelly. Brilliant read imho.

My favourite bit was:

Though back at question time at the close of the June symposium session my prickly question was duly responded to, even if the answers could have been more likened to variously sidestepping¹⁷, trampling¹⁸ and patronising¹⁹ the thistle rather than grasping it. And I was left none the wiser as to the significance of Sydney to the Biennale of Sydney, other than as a host city with a series of well appointed venues for culture sourced from ‘elsewhere’.

¹⁷ Museum of Contemporary Art senior curator Rachel Kent insisted that she was unable to comment, not having worked on ‘Zones of Contact’, but suggested attending meetings, lunches and talks.
¹⁸ Casula Powerhouse Arts Centre artistic director Nick Tsoutas asserted that the Biennale of Sydney was not a platform of inclusivity, was not responsible for representing Sydney artists, was a nationally organised international event that could be staged in any interchangeable city and has nothing to do with Sydney or its arts community. Probably all in one sentence. No one disagreed with him.
¹⁹ Australian Centre for Photography director Alasdair Foster suggested that the artworks themselves in ‘Zones of Contact’ functioned as a ‘conversation’. And that whilst local artists might not get to meet visiting artists, they got to meet the works.

From what I saw and experienced I'd go so far to say that BOS 2006 was the complement of the set of all Sydney art that could and should have been "included" where the universal set is the union of the set of all foreign art included in BOS 2006 and the set of all Sydney art that could and should have been "included". Well almost, and isn't that just as bad!

Bawdy but brilliant

Some Henry Miller excerpts from "Black Spring"

'Anyway, after she had worked herself up to a state of collapse, when the neighbors couldn't stand it any longer and there were knocks on the door, then her aged mother would come crawling out of the bedroom and with tears in her eyes would beg me to go in there and quiet her a bit. "Oh, leave her be," I'd say, "she'll get over it." Whereupon, ceasing her sobs for a moment the wife would spring out of bed, wild, blind with rage, her hair all down and tangled up, her eyes swollen and bleary, and still hiccoughing and sobbing she would commence to pound me with her fists, to lambast me until I became hysterical with laughter. And when she saw me rocking to and fro like a crazy man, when her arms were tired and her fists sore, she would yell like a drunken whore—"Fiend! Demon!"—and then slink off like a weary dog. Afterwards, when I had quieted her down a bit, when I realized that she really needed a kind word or two, I would tumble her on to the bed again and throw a good fuck into her. Blast me if she wasn't the finest piece of tail imaginable after those scenes of grief and anguish! I never heard a woman moan and gibber like she could. "Do anything to me!" she used to say. "Do what you want!" I could stand her on her head and blow into it, I could back-scuttle her, I could drag her past the parson's house, as they say, any goddamn thing at all--she was simply delirious with joy. Uterine hysteria, that's what it was! And I hope God take me, as the good master used to say, if I am lying in a single word I say.
(God, mentioned above, being defined by St. Augustine, as follows: "An infinite sphere, the center of which is everywhere, the circumference nowhere.")'

'No more peeping through keyholes! No more masturbating in the dark! No more public confessions! Unscrew the doors from their jambs! I want a world where the vagina is represented by a crude, honest slit, a world that has feeling for bone and contour, for raw, primary colors, a world that has fear and respect for its animal origins. I'm sick of looking at cunts all tickled up, disguised, deformed, idealized. Cunts with nerve ends exposed. I don't want to watch young virgins masturbating in the privacy of their boudoirs or biting their nails or tearing their hair or lying on a bed full of bread crumbs for a whole chapter. I want Madagascan funeral poles, with animal upon animal and at the top Adam and Eve, and Eve with a crude, honest slit between the legs. I want hermaphrodites who are real hermaphrodites, and not make-believes walking around with an atrophied penis or a dried-up cunt. I want a classic purity, where dung is dung and angels are angels. The Bible a la King James, for example. Not the Bible of Wycliffe, not the Vulgate, not the Greek, not the Hebrew, but the glorious, death-dealing Bible that was created when the English language was in flower, when a vocabulary of twenty thousand words sufficed to build a monument for all time. A Bible written in Svenska or Tegalic, a Bible for the Hottentots or the Chinese, a Bible that has to meander through the trickling sands of French is no Bible—it is a counterfeit and a fraud. The King James Version was created by a race of bone-crushers. It revives the primitive mysteries, revives rape, incest, revives epilepsy, sadism, megalomania, revives demons, angels, dragons, leviathans, revives magic, exorcism, contagion, incantation, revives fratricide, regicide, patricide, suicide, revives hypnotism, anarchism, somnambulism, revives the song, the dance, the act, revives the mantic, the chthonian, the arcane, the mysterious, revives the power, the evil, and the glory that is God. All brought into the open on a colossal scale, and so salted and spiced that it will last until the next Ice Age.

A classic purity, then—and to hell with the Post Office authorities! For what is it enables the classics to live at all, if indeed they be living on and not dying as we all about us are dying? What preserves them against the ravages of time if it be not the salt that is in them? When I read Petronius or Apuleius or Rabelais, how close they seem! That salty tang! The odor of the menagerie! The smell of horse piss and lion's dung, of tiger's breath and elephant's hide. Obscenity, lust, cruelty, boredom, wit. Real eunuchs. Real hermaphrodites. Real pricks. Real cunts. Real banquets! Trimalchio tickles his own throat, pukes up his own guts, wallows in his own swill. In the amphitheater, where a big, sleepy pervert of a Caesar lolls dejectedly, the lions and the jackals, the hyenas, the tigers, the spotted leopards are crunching real human bones—whilst the coming men, the martyrs and imbeciles, are walking up the golden stairs shouting Hallelujah!'

So it's poisoned file sharing eh?

The response:

hmmm... we dont' know. we grabbed the miller off of file sharing. don't know where it came from, etc. we haven't altered the file in any way. such are the hazards of file sharing, no?
yrs,
kenneth
ubuweb

No one thought UbuWeb would hbave altered the file in any way - but Miller has still been censored!

Questions of censorship

I noticed something very strange in a recording I downloaded from UbuWeb the other day. A friend of mine recommended I give a Henry Miller reading of an excerpt from "Black Spring" a listen so I promptly downloaded and listened to it; several times. As soon as I could I went out and bought a copy of the book. It's total madness and genius and quite possibly a perfect rendering of beauty and "esctasy" in the manner Miller intended. I haven't finished it yet, but it's an amazing work of art. Check it out.

Anyway, to get to the point. There is a discrepancy between the book and the recording on UbuWeb. I noticed something missing from the recording because the line in the book which happens to be missing from the recording is a total bombshell and beautifully poised for maximum impact :) So I posted some feedback on their feedback web form:-

*Quick note about possible censorship?*

Hi guys,

I've been reading Henry Miller's "Black Spring" lately. Your link to Miller reading an excerpt from it inspired me to get my hands on the book and read it for myself. One thing has come to my attention during my reading of it though. There is a discrepancy between the recording you have hosted on your site and the book.

The book (ISBN 0-8021-3182-4) has (bottom of p24-25):-

"Something better than a Christ, something bigger than a heart, something beyond God Almighty I think of--MYSELF. I am a man. That seems to me sufficient.

I am a man of God and a man of the Devil. To each his due. Nothing eternal, nothing absolute. Before me always the image of the body, our triune god of penis and testicles. On the right, God the Father, on the left and hanging a little lower, God the Son; and between and above them the Holy Ghost. I can never forget that this holy trinity is man-made, that it will undergo infinite changes--"

But your recording cuts out "the Devil. To each his due." and also leaves out "Before me always the image of the body, our triune god of penis and testicles."

It's obvious in the first instance that the recording has been doctored. The second sentence is neatly censored in its entirety.

Are you aware of this? I'm intrigued and somewhat dissapointed as it's one of the more powerful images/lines in the beginning of the book. Who would deliberately censor such things?

I look forward to your reply and thank you in advance for your investigation,

P.S. ubuweb.com is an amazing resource. Thank you so much for making all of this freely available.

I'll keep at them on this point. I guess I just don't have better things to do. I should probably find something. Still - quite shocking don't you think?

For those of you that care (and there might be one) - I'll keep you posted :D

Art on cardboard

This is a very groovy thread with some very groovy images done on cardboard!?!

cardboard is for boxes

My favourite would have to be the little dude standing next to the street sign with a broken umbrella.

(wack)

Scene: man wearing "street gear", "graffing" a wall and generally being "hip hop".

"Man, I don't believe in cliches you know. They're wack."

Favourite quote from "Mistery Of Hip Hop" on the ABC last night. Oh the irony!

Thomas Herpich

Thomas Herpich rox0rs to the max "GET OUT OF HERE!" hardness of CORE!

Apropos of Readymades

"Apropos of Readymades" by Marcel Duchamp, from Marcel Duchamp on UbuWeb Sound

In 1913 I had the happy idea to fasten a bicycle wheel to a kitchen stool and watch it turn.

A few months later I bought a cheap reproduction of a winter evening landscape, which I called "Pharmacy" after adding two small dots, one red and one yellow, in the horizon.

In New York in 1915 I bought at a hardware store a snow shovel on which I wrote "In advance of the broken arm."

It was around that time that the word "Readymade" came to my mind to designate this form of manifestation.

A point that I want very much to establish is that the choice of these "Readymades" was never dictated by aesthetic delectation.

The choice was based on a reaction of visual indifference with at the same time a total absence of good or bad taste ... in fact a complete anaesthesia.

One important characteristic was the short sentence which I occasionally inscribed on the "Readymade."

That sentence instead of describing the object like a title was meant to carry the mind of the spectator towards other regions more verbal.

Sometimes I would add a graphic detail of presentation which, in order to satisfy my craving for alliterations, would be called "Readymade aided."

At another time, wanting to expose the basic antinomy between art and "Readymades," I imagined a "Reciprocal Readymade": use a Rembrandt as an ironing board!

I realized very soon the danger of repeating indiscriminately this form of expression and decided to limit the production of "Readymades" to a small number yearly. I was aware at that time, that for the spectator even more for the artist, art is a habit forming drug and I wanted to protect my "Readymades" against such a contamination.

Another aspect of the "Readymade" is its lack of uniqueness... the replica of the "Readymade" delivering the same message, in fact nearly every one of the "Readymades" existing today is not an original in the conventional sense.

A final remark to this egomaniac's discourse:

Since the tubes of paint used by an artist are manufactured and readymade products we must conclude that all the paintings in the world are "Readymades aided" and also works of assemblage.


Marcel Duchamp, 1961

See an artists paint box strewn with violent reds and dashes of yellow ochre. Add sullied rags wrung through hands and dropped frequently at the foot of an easel. They're blackened and soiled with heavy blotches of colour. Add an assortment of tools and spatulas. Pick this box up and shake it thoroughly and imagine the contents being mixed up and smacked around inside. Now open it and blow the result up to room size. Think of a house looking exactly like this, a replica of an oversized artists paint box. This large paint box is illuminated with a warm yellow light. Music is blaring out every orifice of this place. Bottles of paint are lined up on the window sill in the kitchen like miniature watercolours. The room before it is littered with so many individual newspaper sheets. Someone has taken enormous care to separate each one from it's sheaf and then thrown them spontaneously around the entire house. Empty glasses stained with bourbon and coke seem to lounge in a drunken stupor between pillows on the floor. The entire house-in-a-box is a trail of mess from one room to the other.

Two women sit directly outside of this. The oversized one's face is darkened with black hair. Her eyes don't make a statement because they hide in shadow. The other woman is dainty by comparison. She has the stature, remarkably, of a mouse. Her nose moves in a dainty wiggle as she nibbles at her companion's conversation, tasting each piece and lavishing audible satisfactions.

“Oh, comeon, I know he likes you”, she murmurs quietly. Her body language is shy and wary of the larger woman. She leans away from her larger companion. She seems wary of being crushed.

“Yeah, he's weird. I love him and I know he loves me too”, whines the other one.

I think about cutting to a suburban soap-opera scene. “He's weird”. Ok. Let's go with that.

But the large one stops talking and contents herself with moping under her mop of dirty black hair. I notice that her hands are too large. They are mans hands. I want to throw a soiled nappy in her face. Her little partner sits and silently placates her. Her little body moves imperceptably, but it's there. A certain cooing rhythm. A slightly seductive wobble. That's when I notice it; they are mistress and slave. I look at the black haired woman and imagine dark gritty black pubes to match. Suddenly she is sitting upright on her stool, her faced screwed up with enormous exertion. Her significant arse starts to envelope the seat with a hot swollen greed. I stare slack-jawed in wonder. The seat buckles violently and flings the smaller woman in the air. Her hands have clamped around one of the legs and she dangles off it staring, transfixed at the looming event horizon, the point where time is slowing and at which the seat is disappearing. I'm dimly aware of shouting something though I'm not sure it's intelligble. No-one is listening. The little woman's tail wraps around the window sill and rattles the old glass pane. The pane beats back and cruelly slaps the large womans sagging breasts. I beat my hands on my thighs and scratch wailing lines into the duco of a passing car. The dark haired woman is groaning and her eyes have started to grin blood. Her lips shake and shower saliva over the entire verandah. I'm kicking the fence down in front of me while the little woman is disappearing, but she is gone and the only remnant is a slick wet mess of hair. The large woman heaves a massive sigh and winks at me. I grin back at her and continue on my way.

Great black rolls of shadow roared in our ears and raced over viridian hills. The earth folded in magnificent creases to meet the land below, and you moved your fingers nimbly and quickly through your hair. Your nervous staccato movements spilled more black like an ink spill but the earth ignored you; you with your sweet sorghum tangled hair and your thin wet dress clinging to your hips. You squatted and I ground my teeth at the black grave. Why Didn't You Cry? Instead you conducted the skies and moved earth with your pink little fingers. No one was out there but us. Just the two of us and mist and rain and racing shadows following your direction. They would bend back their ears and bare their teeth in a stretch to race across vast lengths of paddock and sweep through fences and smash into bales of hay. The sky was cold and miserable. The air was blue around us. I wanted to hold your hips in my hands and feel their gentle warmth. You flittered smiles at me, and blinked your long lashes. I shrank back from you and trembled.

Murakami can write

"The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle" is incredible. What an author. If only I could read Japanese.