I Often Dream of Trains

Sitting all alone on my pupils

[breakthruradiotv]

[communicatingvessels]

Some live recordings of new songs.  Check em'.

[demonagerie]

Universitätsbibliothek Kiel. Nürnberger Schembart-Buch, f.247. 17th century

[neatomosquitoshow]

“Labyrinth” by Roberto Bolaño They’re seated. They’re looking at the camera. They are captioned, from left to right: J. Henric, J.-J. Goux, Ph. Sollers, J. Kristeva, M.-Th. Réveillé, P. Guyotat, C. Devade, and M. Devade. There’s no photo credit. They’re sitting around a table. It’s an...

[drewjoma]

Daybreak Express (1953)

[foxesinbreeches]

I would like to be a killer in a white velvet costume, at an operating table or leaning over a child’s pram. At another operating table, stands the handsome, silent vampire. In evening dress, his lips glued to a bared neck like a bird, now he resembles a flautist playing pulses of blood on living instruments. At slightly increasing intervals the drops flow from the instrument to his lips. Each gulp is held for a while in his mouth to let the scent reach his nostrils, to intoxicate his breath. Like a fiery whip across the breast, the drink passes swiftly through the digestive system. Tottering, growing increasingly pale, every more solitary, the handsome vampire swallows another gulp of blood. Dressed in white velvet, I’d like to vivisect a child, from time to time looking up at the vampire by the window, moonlight streaking his face.

Ghérasim Luca, The Passive Vampire (via foxesinbreeches)

[communicatingvessels]

Ghérasim Luca is a great poet among the greatest: he invented a prodigious stammering, his own.

— Gilles Deleuze, Dialogues

The Volcanoes Inside Vegetables

Translated by Julian Semilian 

A canoe made of hair, it seems to me, with soft paddles, gelatinous, like sea animals, beneath which a woman, entirely of crystal, rolls a ball from one lip to the other, is the image-archetype of pollution. During one of my pollutical nights, unhappily so rare, when the poplars lining up before my domicile adopted a compulsively fastidious aspect in their evening frocks, and the violins in my gestures assumed a discreet sound like torture instruments, my imposingly dauntless position regarding erotica seemed to me a disquieting distortion of metallic facial wrinkles on a metal face affixed on a body that accents only its rigid and osseous sections, neglecting the passive-voluptuous subtlety and incertitude of its weft, its lungs, the predilection accorded the scheleton in our current amorous life replacing for me in a demoralizing manner the popular image of death. I don't know to what measure the castration complex can be introduced into an enterprise, be it nostalgic and partial like this one, where the impeachment of a massive activity on the erotic plane is tested. I understand that sado-mosochistic game-playing transforms much of the schematic aspect under which I expound these matters, but what I wish to affirm essentially is that the male and its fabricated rigidity fills the eye that observes it from without with nausea. I am disgusted by the cuddly violence of the male and to this disgust can be granted with more authority than at any other time a certain objectivity because the unpleasant sentiment that I am subjected to finds me inside the phenomenon, myself personally occupying in the realm of the amorous a lightly sadistic position.  

The disdain towards the easy histrionics that accompany practically every time this ilk of active enterprise where sadism is not put into effect to its morbid or extreme degree, but is sustained within its general, theatrical contour, its gesticulations taking on an artificial path, causes me to envy the essentially apparent passivity of the female, because I find it more spontaneous in its reactions, more revealing, more vibrant. I am aware of the risk taken in terms of the consequences in the realm of the analytic which affirmations such as these may provoke and I believe I may lighten up the work-load of the eventual analyst if I were to remind him of the extensive masturbational exercises to which the author of these lines dedicated himself during his adolescence, exercises which still, from time to time, hold him in their allure like the scene of the crime the criminal. I confess though that my analytic file holds little interest for me because my personal position inside of a complex cannot exhaust the conclusions of a general character provoked by the examination of this erotic spectacle where one of the actors is vested in a rigid mantle of bones while the other is a nerve severed with a saw. For in order that the male's bones crack, in order that the marrow within them to spill out like veritable lava, they would need to be endowed with the nebulous and satanic consistency of a Marquis de Sade. It seems to me that it is not necessary to take passivity to its ultimate limit in order for it to become entirely sensitized. I see myself at the roots of a tree taken by surprise by a woman in a red T-shirt glued to her skin, with long black hair strewn in disarray over her shoulders, with eyes like burnt brush. The caresses or the bites of this woman are just as voluptuous to me, the element of surprise containing in its fulgurance a state of panic-arousal, capable of transcending any previous commonplace state. This horrific woman, if she is not sadistic to the extreme, if she is not lost to my sight to awaken the next day in a distant forest next to my cadaver, with her hands stained with blood, is frustrated in her pitch of frequency, in her howl of ash. I place my lips upon the eyes of this incomplete and minor image of passivity, the flowers, with hesitant butterflies swarming around them like vultures. In my bedsheets with drawn curtains, the circles around the eyes that I touch are silent electrical doorbells. The pores are at hand, I am a rubber ball, the hair is far above the head, my eyes tongue the mouth of this unborn woman. A tree on my forehead, transparent and somewhat sparrow, its leaves dropping loose throughout the room, o! what an odd spring. A thick smoke suffuses my arm and thin trails as from a cigarette exude from my fingers with their nails surprisingly stained in a promiscuous yellow. With these stained fingers I leaf through a papyrus, an apricot. Nights fall too quickly in my house for dawn to ever break. The rains within are quick, walls sway, weeds and canoes float upon my lips, perhaps they are my words. My words bite your thighs, it is as though my teeth were written. It is a delirious calligraphy, to be studied today by tomorrow's graphology inside pyramids under an immense block of ice growing in the middle of the desert like a miracle. The mysterious calligraphy of illiterates where images seem closer to the objects which have not been invented yet, the simulated calligraphy of illiterates. I open you up like a horse and look inside for the bridle bit, forgetting you already hold it between your teeth. Night falls again, it is night incessantly. It is the witching hour, permanently bewitching, where the consistency of your being is far more certain than flesh, your bewitching flesh, permanently bewitching. I caress your ectoplasm like I would a shark. I sip you from tall beakers of crystal propped up on living frog leg. I invite you, I shout you, I bestow a name on you, any name. Fog, hair, a mask of quicksilver over your eyes, the vegetables from our virtual gestures, the tiger sleeping on our voice and the salutation we perform reciprocally for one another from the window, lifting from our shoulders with two fingers our craniums like a hat while the trains transporting us in two opposite directions crash into one another like a snowflake.

[communicatingvessels]

The Carnation’s Misfortunes

by   G H É R A S I M   L U C A

Translated by Julian Semilian

The next day the ocean seemed to me even more enrapturing than an operating table. With frowning locks flung over my shoulders, this outmoded mantle from which I never separate, I board this raft without first forgetting to abandon on the shore the two oars, futile to my thirst for carnations, to my hunger to have been tenebrity. Prone on my spine with my stalking dog supine upon my lungs, I stare nostalgically into the sky, enumerating to the thousands the stars, the moon, the wolf’s lair, the vermilion, the Danube, the plague, etc. Over my brow creeps the slashing lip of a saber and two globules of plasma trickle on my cheek recalling the illustrious internal episodes which I am about to intersect like the mysteries of a circus. Monocle fitted to my eyeball, mustache twisting with panache, I stride forth, reckless and viraginous, spellbound and entrancing, slurping with cheeks inflated this magnificent viperous broth which is our internal life. You are a fawn stalked by the swift hunter within me, yes, you! the most enrapturing idol I ever pursued, you who transmutes the macrocosm into the unsurpassed trope of our internal murmur. With temples glued one to the other and both glued to a marble statue, we roam across a palpating byway and our steps disinter cities, rivers, hawks.

I hoist you on my humerus as you would hoist a horseman and with palms lifted above the eyelashes in the mimick of eaves I spy on the sap surging upwards in the distant trees, murder a bird in flight, darken the horizon. Your lashes transmute into a pillow of locks that I plunge my fingers into all the way up to the elbow joints as I might bathe them in a cauldron of plasma and haul out an armorial helmet missing only the skullcap. O! enrapturing idol with the unruffled breath of escargot, with the clamor of bones malefic like a foreshortened fright, I ferry you in my arms like a cauldron for bathing cobras. How tender are the unconcealed symbols and how many tears I would shed over the tiny superstitions misplaced in tiny provincial towns if my eyeball didn’t boast of a retina that could spin an image about nine (or even ninety-nine) revolutions. A limestone retina where they dump empty tuna cans left behind by negligent tourists. Inebriated to vertigo by the spin of this beguiling costume drama, where the entrancing and the odious, tact and impudence, transgression and atonement assemble in your smirk, the retina transmutes into a green mustang with mirroring knees. I myself a mirror, a horseshoe mirror, and your trotting canter appears to be perused across the glowing surface of a mountain lake. Massive rocks engorge us at the precise instant I tether my ascot. O, the tenderness of unconcealed symbols, o! o! O, my idol, o! the unconcealed symbol of this idol, the symbol’s symbol inflaming reality’s realities while the unreal, entrancing as a vampire, beckons me with secret ciphers, from without and within, with a gloved hand or merely with her skeleton.

[communicatingvessels]

[communicatingvessels]

Multiple Sidosis : a film by Sid Laverents

The twisted mind of middle America produces the odd gem.

[communicatingvessels]

'The Passion Considered as an Uphill Bicycle Race'

by Alfred Jarry

Barabbas, slated to race, was scratched.

Pilate, the starter, pulling out his clepsydra or water clock, an operation which wet his hands unless he had merely spit on them — Pilate gave the send-off.

Jesus got away to a good start.

In those days, according to the excellent sports commentator St Mathew, it was customary to flagellate the sprinters at the start the way a coachman whips his horses. The whip both stimulates and gives a hygienic massage. Jesus, then, got off in good form, but he had a flat right away. A bed of thorns punctured the whole circumference of his front tyre.

Today in the shop windows of bicycle dealers you see a reproduction of this veritable crown of thorns as an ad for puncture-proof tyres. But Jesus’s was an ordinary single-tube racing tyre.

The two thieves, obviously in cahoots and therefore ‘thick as thieves’, took the lead.

It is not true that there were any nails. The three objects usually shown in the ads belong to a rapid-change tyre tool called the ‘Jiffy’.

We had better begin by telling about the spills; but before that the machine itself must be described.

The bicycle frame in use today is of relatively recent invention. It appeared around 1890. Previous to that time the body of the machine was constructed of two tubes soldered together at right angles. It was generally called the right-angle or cross bicycle. Jesus, after his puncture, climbed the slope on foot, carrying on his shoulder the bike frame, or, if you will, the cross.

Contemporary engravings reproduce this scene from photographs. But it appears that the sport of cycling, as a result of the well-known accident which put a grievous end to the Passion race and which was brought up to date almost on its anniversary by the similar accident of Count Zborowski on the Turbie slope — the sport of cycling was for a time prohibited by state ordinance. That explains why the illustrated magazines, in reproducing this celebrated scene, show bicycles of a rather imaginary design. They confuse the machine’s cross frame with that other cross, the straight handlebar. They represent Jesus with his hands spread on the handlebars, and it is worth mentioning in this connection that Jesus rode lying flat on his back in order to reduce his air resistance.

Note also that the frame or cross was made of wood, just as wheels are to this day.

A few people have insinuated falsely that Jesus’s machine was a draisienne, an unlikely mount for a hill-climbing contest. According to the old cyclophile hagiographers, St. Briget, St. Gregory of Tours, and St. Irene, the cross was equipped with a device which they name suppendaneum. There is no need to be a great scholar to translate this as ‘pedal’.

Lipsius, Justinian, Bosius, and Erycius Puteanus describe another accessory which one still finds, according to Cornelius Curtius in 1643, on Japanese crosses; a protuberance of leather or wood on the shaft which the rider sits astride — manifestly the seat or saddle.

This general description, furthermore, suits the definition of a bicycle current among the Chinese: “A little mule which is led by the ears and urged along by showering it with kicks.”

We shall abridge the story of the race itself, for it has been narrated in detail by specialized works and illustrated by sculpture and painting visible in monuments built to house such art.

There are fourteen turns in the difficult Golgotha course. Jesus took his first spill at the third turn. His mother, who was in the stands, became alarmed.

His excellent trainer, Simon the Cyrenian, who but for the thorn accident would have been riding out in front to cut the wind, carried the machine.

Jesus, though carrying nothing, perspired heavily. It is not certain whether a female spectator wiped his brown, but we know that Veronica, a girl reporter, got a good shot of him with her Kodak.

The second spill came at the seventh turn on some slippery pavement. Jesus went down for the third time at the eleventh turn, skidding on a rail.

The Israelite deminondaines waved their handkerchiefs at the eighth.

The deplorable accident familiar to us all took place at the twelfth turn. Jesus was in a dead heat at the time with the thieves. We know that he continued the race airborne — but that is another story.

[communicatingvessels]

Standish Lawder's Necrology. Not for the those with short attention spans. The real pay off is in the credits.

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Dali and Disney collaboration Destino.

[fuckmeattree]

[communicatingvessels]

fuckmeattree:

I wrote a mystery novel called The Lost Art of Journalism.

It seems to be out of print.

[communicatingvessels]

THE HUMAN FACE by Antonin Artaud

The human face is an empty power, a field of death. The old revolutionary claim to a form that's never corres- ponded with its body, goes off to be something other than the body. So it's absurd to reproach a painter for academically insisting in his time upon still reproducing the featres of the human face such as they are; for such as they are, they haven't yet found the form they point to and specify to make more than a sketch; but from morning to evening and in the midst of ten thousand dreams they churn as if in the crucible of a never- wearying passional throb. Which means that the human face hasn't yet found the face and that it's up to the painter to give it it. But that means the human face, such as it is, is till in quest of it- self with two eyes a nose a mouth and the two auricular cavities which correspond to the holes of the sockets like the four openings to the sepulchre of approaching death. The human face in effect carries a kind of perpetual death with it from which it’s really up to the painter to save it by giving back his own peculiar features. In effect after countless thousands of years that the human face has spoken and breathed one still has the impression that it hasn’t even begun to say what it is and what it knows, and I don’t know a painter in the history of art, from Holbein to Ingres, who has succeeded in making the face of man speak.  The portraits of Holbein or of Ingres are thick walls revealing nothing of the ancient architecture supporting itself under the arcs of the arches of the eyelids or molding itself in the cylindrical tunnel of the two mural cavities of he ears. Only Van Gogh has extracted from a human head the portrait that is the rocket explosive of the beating of a burst heart. His own. The head of Van Gogh in a soft hat renders null and void all the attempts of abstract painters that could be made, from his time to the end of eternity. Because that avid butcher face, thrown out like a cannonshot on the most extreme surface of the canvas and which all at once finds itself stopped short by a void eye and returned to the inner world, thoroughly drains all of the most specious secrets of the abstract world where the non-figurative painter can delight,- in the portraits I have drawn I have above all avoided forgetting the nose the mouth the eyes the ears or the hair, but I’ve sought to force the face that was talking to me to reveal the secret of an old human story which was taken for dead in the heads of Ingres or Holbein. Occasionally I’ve summoned object trees or animals to come near the human heads because I’m still not sure of the limits by which the body of my human Self may be stopped. Moreover I’ve definitely broken the art style or skill in all the drawings that one will see here.  I mean there’ll be trouble for those who consider them works of art, works of aesthetic simulation of reality. Not one properly speaking is a work All are sketches, I mean soundings or gropes in all the directions of accident, of possibi- lity, of chance or of destiny. I haven’t sought to take great pains with my lines or their effects but rather to inventory the kinds of patent linear truths which are as valid through words, through written phrases, as through the graphism and perspective of lines. It is in this way that several drawings are a mixture of poems and portraits of written interjections and plastic evo- cations of fundamental materials of human beings or animals. And in this way you have to accept these drawings in the barbarism and disorder of their graphic manner ‘which is never preoccupied with art’ but the sincerity and the spontaneity of the stroke.

- translated by Jack Hirschman

(written for a presentation of his Portraits and Drawings at the Galerie Pierre, July 4-20, 1947)

[communicatingvessels]

"Lines of flight or of deterritorialization, becoming-wolf, becoming-inhuman, deterritorialized intensities: that is what multiplicity is. To become wolf or to become hole is to deterritorialize oneself following distinct but entangled lines. A hole is no more negative than a wolf. Castration, lack, substitution: a tale told by an overconscious idiot who has no understanding of multiplicities as formations of the unconscious.

A wolf is a hole, they are both particles of the unconscious, nothing but particles, productions of particles, particulate paths, as elements of molecular multiplicities. It is not even sufficient to say that intense and moving particles pass through holes; a hole is just as much a particle as what passes through it. Physicists say that holes are not the absence of particles but particles traveling faster than the speed of light. Flying anuses, speeding vaginas, there is no castration."

- from Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari essay "1914: One or Several Wolves"

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Halifax's Central Nervous System tearing their souls in two.

[communicatingvessels]