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In the past I could start writing without knowing what I was going to say But now… “I haven’t got anything to say” has become a reason to never begin I’ve stopped taking that leap of faith The leap into the darkness of the thought yet unthought, the words yet unwritten–that pre-birth moment–oh how I miss–sinking–getting to know a day by discovering it later–in language–some honey on my lips–I loved the way writing made everything I lived that much sweeter

loneberry

threelisabeth-deactivated201803

REORIENT ALL YOUR FAILURES. DROPPED THREE MUGS ON THE FLOOR TODAY? DISASTER CHIC. WORE THE SAME STAINED SHIRT FOUR DAYS IN A ROW? GARBAGE CHIC. DIDN’T BRUSH YOUR HAIR? TAKING “ARTFULLY DISHEVELED” TO PREVIOUSLY UNREALIZED LEVELS OF GLORY. DIDN’T BRUSH OR WASH YOUR HAIR, FOR THE PAST, LIKE, WEEK? YOU ARE A BEAUTIFUL MAGICAL PRINCESS OF THE FOREST, EMERGING BLINKING INTO A STRANGE URBAN LAND. FUCKED UP PAINTING YOUR NAILS? ABSTRACT AND INSOUCIANT. WHO CARES, LIFE’S WEIRD, YOU ARE A BEAUTIFUL AND STRANGE CREATURE, W H A T E V E R

aloofshahbanou

do you ever think about the things you’ve left behind with people who are no longer a part of your life? I ruminate on this every so often — I think about all the things I’ve loaned out or given to men and how those objects still linger in their most intimate spaces. people who I haven’t seen or spoken to in years still have pieces of me in their desk drawers, on their bookshelves, maybe even now in storage. or maybe they threw me away, maybe they put me in the garbage and the local waste management company picked me up and took me to their facilities so they could incinerate me. good. I’m a better version of me now, I didn’t really like me back then. 18-year-old me was desperate. 20-year-old me was desperate. 22-year-old me? desperate. I don’t know where we learn this, I don’t know where we learn to accept this masochism. masochism only gets me so far, masochism leaves me hollow, masochism is fucking demanding. there comes a time when all you really want is love and truth and you’ll search for love and truth in other people, you’ll play games and wreak an unspeakable violence upon yourself and you’ll say “all of this pain is a great burden,” and you’ll say “all of this pain teaches me a lot about myself,” and you’ll say “all of this pain feels so familiar,” and you’ll say “this pain is old and grueling,” and you’ll say “this pain isn’t love.” we are fed lies about this “love,” this “love” is illusory. when you embrace this “love,” you have lost. this “love” is packaged and marketed to us by a society that doesn’t want to grapple with eroticisms — a society that handed you a gun which you readily accepted, trigger happy, unaware that your livelihood is in its crosshairs. so maybe that waste management company annihilated me, maybe I’m in the middle of a desert right now, maybe I’ve been crushed into a trash cube, maybe I’ve been mashed into the earth. but the loss of those objects, the disintegration of that particular version of myself, holds so much power, so much possibility. the death of that version of me allows for new paths to different ways of knowing and being and loving. a better version of me rises like a wild phoenix from the ashes of despair. a better version of me fights and lives and wins.

royalpunani

rabbitsnwolves-blog

Well, he was sorta asking for it, dressing in such flammable clothing.

tanknaka

if he didnt want to get set on fire, he should have stayed indoors

ziddity

He must have been drinking alcohol. That stuff is flammable. Of course it was going to happen when booze was involved.

the-immortal-god-emperor-deacti

I bet he acted like he wanted to be set on fire. I mean can you blame someone for doing it if he was acting like that? Boys will be boys…

gwschoolhiatus-deactivated20161

How do we know it was even fire?

You have a great need for other people to like and admire you. You have a tendency to be critical of yourself. You have a great deal of unused capacity which you have not turned to your advantage. While you have some personality weaknesses, you are generally able to compensate for them. Your sexual adjustment has presented problems for you. Disciplined and self-controlled outside, you tend to be worrisome and insecure inside. At times you have serious doubts as to whether you have made the right decision or done the right thing. You prefer a certain amount of change and variety and become dissatisfied when hemmed in by restrictions and limitations. You pride yourself as an independent thinker and do not accept others' statements without satisfactory proof. You have found it unwise to be too frank in revealing yourself to others. At times you are extroverted, affable, sociable, while at other times you are introverted, wary, reserved. Some of your aspirations tend to be pretty unrealistic. Security is one of your major goals in life.

In 1948, psychologist Bertram R. Forer gave a personality test to his students. He told his students they were each receiving a unique personality analysis that was based on the test's results and to rate their analysis on a scale of 0 (very poor) to 5 (excellent) on how well it applied to themselves. In reality, each received the same analysis. On average, the rating was 4.26.

what does the cyborg wear?

Some aspects of feminist thought, which criticize fashion on the basis of its 'misrepresentation' of women, and advocate a return to the 'natural' body, and 'natural' beauty have also had to be abandoned.

kim sawchuk [pdf]

Davis identifies six anti fashion movements:

- utilitarian outrage

- health and fitness naturalism

- feminist protest

- conservative skepticism

- minority group disidentification

- counterculture insult

http://www.scribd.com/doc/21346236/What-is-the-Contemporary-by-Agamben

Work clothes

My boss asked why I don’t support designers like Acne and Céline because as an artist, I should. I felt too ashamed to mention the price in response. She buys $130 bottles of wine when we go out together. I make overtures towards paying only because I know she will insist.

My best work friend does not dress well, but she is funny and intelligent and sweet. I am her boss, so sometimes I worry that this is why she is friendly. It occurs to me to tell her that everyone at our job would take her more seriously if she wore the fashion uniform rather than the slightly frumpy brightly colored vintage house dresses she wears daily, and I feel awful because I like her funny dresses. Instead we drink beers and talk about how much we hate our other co-workers.

I wear the same black jeans, black knock-off proenza bag, same leather jacket every day. I switch out my black t-shirts and black shoes. My boss wears similar, except her bags are Chanel and Alexander Wang, her heels are higher, and her coat is blue with a black fur collar. Her boss, a man, wears those red soled shoes that someone once told me signify “rich & slutty,” and I thought his shoes just happened to have red soles until he said that they were actually Loubitons.

I’m still acutely aware of all the shit. I am the only brown person in my office (though I attempt to hire only girls whose names do not sound European). My co-workers think it’s funny that I tell them not to take any shit from men. Months later, one said that she listened, and thanked me for it. I become a holder of secrets: I got raped, my boyfriend is living off me, I don’t actually believe in the brand, my shrink said ____. My pockets bulge.

These days I am more interested in ted talks than lib com, even though I swear they have the caveat for me “of course insurrection would be better.”

2012

Dear Chris Kraus,

It seems foul, to first off be writing again without a response to my previous letter, and two, to be writing your name in the header when you cannot but understand this as a letter to you. After this paragraph I will dispose of the formality of writing to you and instead write at you, to turn my brain inside out for you.

Last year's letter was a plea for help.

(1)

Surrounded by talk of self-negation* yet firmly situated in an understanding of the female condition as fundamental lack (do not misconstrue this point to indicate a distrust in materialism—histories are all that created this body) (and of course I say that to indicate a certain rigor, to defend myself from an assumed dependence on poetic language),** we attempted to motion towards a dialectical resolution of these two threads.

* People want to be someones. But the really exciting challenge is to become no one. And where will you find no ones? In nowhere. Where things are exploding. (Bernadette Corporation)

** “Oppression creates a psychology in the oppressed. Marxism, though adroit at analyzing the economic and political situation of such persons, has often neglected, perhaps out of nervous dismay, to notice how thoroughly the oppressed are corrupted by their situation, how deeply they envy and admire their masters, how utterly they are polluted by their ideas and values, how even their attitude toward themselves is dictated by those who own them. [... Genet's] plays are studies in what one might call the colonial or feminine mentality of interiorized oppression which must conquer itself before it can be free.” (K. Millett, Sexual Politics)

(2)

The limits of materialism and feminism have made themselves utterly clear to us. We cannot but be disappointed. Of course, this was hardly a surprise to anyone but us. I thought we were doing something different than just merely relying on what CK calls "programmatic critiques and their implicit, misleading 'solutions.'"

Drawn like moths to the flame, the self-glorification of dogma—it's so easy to love yourself when you are doing feminism "right," using politics to prop up this shitty body, stupid brain.

We thought we could somehow turn the manifestos and critiques and so on into more than just unformed anger, more than a stance of aggression, more than a hatred that structured everything we saw. But it could never be more than a vantage point. M. Sandonsky’s invocation of paranoia was perfect. The tools we have at our disposal are effectively nothing. Rather, it is merely ‘I SEE IT’ ‘IT IS HAPPENING’ ‘HERE IT IS’.

Because we justify(ied) ourselves by the possibility of of this becoming general, however many times we tried to rationalize that we were trying to lead like Jesus, not a politician.

But still I fear becoming Judith Clark, claiming bullshit like: “I was beginning to say these politics are crazy. I’ve experienced so much loss, and created so much loss, for the sake of an illusion.”

(3)

Another choice: "being attracted to men who treat you badly." But this is silly: I am not attracted to women who treat me badly in the same way, because the men have the option to make me important again by fucking me. Or even not fucking me, but doling out those small words of encouragement.

(4)

(To return to a moment to the second person: I fear that the laziness with which I propped myself up on dogma and a man was ever too apparent to you. That these two crutches disgusted you.)

(5)

Fuck, the only solution is the hardest: the destruction of the ego before all else. How else could we have thought we could do negation? Of course we must destroy ourselves! What Acker said: silence, running away, psychosis, drugs, detachment. Sontag said Weil claimed: "the only thing more hateful than a 'we' is an 'I.'" And here I am, psychosomatic memories of leaning on a political milieu and a theoretician male, still writing the word "I" over and over again.

The extinction of desire requires the extinction of ego, no? I only get that with heavy drugs, and afterwards I don’t feel like I can sink my feet into it again.

(6)

If the woman does not exist, can we choose to refuse to exist in the signifying economy? Is there a difference between what is sacrificed by society and what we destroy in ourselves?

Rape is not a violation of individual so much as a negation of individuality, making a person only representative of a class/caste. Maybe that’s the whatever-singularity, except for the predicate part: no attributes, only a representation. There is no real to fucking under patriarchy, only symbols and signifiers.

The artist Liu Bolin paints his body in front of racks of magazines, disguising his human form like a chameleon who disappears in front of a leaf. One photograph of his performance art at first glance merely depicts a newstand. On further inspection, his body is painted with headlines and logos so he is naught but the work. But if he were a woman, what would the assumed feminine/feminist reading of the works be? I suspect the dullest possible: subsumption of the female body to the media ideal of a certain nothingness or vapidness. Yet I can’t help but envy his ability to be read as anti-state, anti-government, and—above all—important.

(7)

I've been drawn, lately, to exploring traditional femininity as a method of self-destruction. Eileen Myles: "I am desperately running towards what anyone in their right mind would be running away from. Which is femaleness, which is failure." The simplicity of Lacan's formulation of woman often allows me to forget the black hole we are meant to function as, that is, "a kind of 'black hole' around which the subject's desire is structured" (Zizek, Meta 94).

Coming back to men who treat you badly: the man I live with’s type is a dyke—I say dyke with all the stereotypical superficialities of chubbiness, bad skin, and ugly clothes. The male-submissiveness (not feminism, the two can easily be confused) of this is what allows us to be together. Yet somehow it also motivates my choice of expensive lingerie and stockings, painting my nails and high heels. I am attempting, I think, to demand that he respond such that I can structure myself around his desire.

(I'm not sure how personal to get here: earnest honesty insofar as absolute indiscretion can and could destroy the ego. Jan Adler, destroying these fragile objects in front of the gallery viewers. Yoko Ono, prone beside a pair of scissors, waiting to be stripped naked by her audience. I think of Sontag again: "people are videotaping their own bedroom feats, tapping their own telephones.")

Sometimes when we are fucking I am overcome with a certain asexual desperation for his body. In Slaven Tolj and Marijia Grazio’s Food for Survival, half-nude, they “apply an unidentified powder to their bodies from a can labeled Überlebensnahrung (food for survival), which had been sent by western allies as aid to war-torn Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina; they proceeded to lick each other, as if to feed themselves.” I am captivated by this description of a performance I never saw, if only for how perfectly it captures the completely unsensual but compulsive ways we touch. I need the power I get from him by his considering me fuckable.

Is this really power though? Dee Graham proposes that women have developed a Stolkholm Syndrome-esque relationship to men and thus work please them so as to remain safe. Feminitity, she proposes, is actually a survival strategy. I think of Lana del Rey or Christina Aguilera, the beautiful pop stars who seem to throw themselves at the feet of men with varying degrees of awareness. They are pathetic too, just like me. (But I’m just trying to become tender, the way Jenny Holzer said I should, for me. Cf., I guess, to how the PPK doesn’t allow sex or marriage, because “love affairs are bad for the war.”)

(8)

It perhaps suffices to say that I am desperate for a relation of entrustment, a role model. Because the contradictions that structure my life and I have become overbearing to a point of banality, and I am paralyzed with boredom—a boredom that makes me stupid. A boredom that even finds dull the nihilism that I have become so accustomed to, and I find myself toying with God and foreign forms of power.

One feminist would declare such a dress to be demeaning to women. Another would argue that the woman who wears it takes charge of her sexuality and dares anyone to judge her based on her wardrobe decisions.

Givhan: Hedi Slimane’s Assault on Luxury and Beauty at Saint Laurent - The Cut

Well, a lot of people can fake cheerful. But how does such a benign-seeming person come up with such malign tales? Gilligan thought for a moment, then quoted Flaubert. “I’m not going to get this exactly right, but it’s something like, ‘You should be neat and orderly in your life so you can be violent and original in your work,’ and there’s something to that,” he said. “It’s fun to explore that darkness and that criminal behavior on the page, but I’m too timid to do it in real life.”

The Dark Art of ‘Breaking Bad’ - NYTimes.com

The limitation of Hegel’s notion of sexuality is clearly discernible in his theory of marriage (from his Philosophy of Right), which nonetheless deserves a close reading: beneath the surface of the standard bourgeois notion of marriage lurk many unsettling implications. 1While a subject enters marriage voluntarily, surrendering his/her autonomy by immersing him/herself into its immediate/substantial unity of family that functions with regard to its outside as one person, the function of family is the exact opposite of such a substantial unity: to educate those born in it to abandon (their parental) family and pursue their path alone. The first lesson of marriage is that that the ultimate goal of every substantial ethical unity is to dissolve itself by way of giving rise to individuals who will assert their full autonomy against the substantial unity that gave birth to them.

Actuality |

Adulthood circles her like two vultures in the desert sky, eyeing the innocence that is already waning. They will pull the rest piece by piece from her abundant exposed flesh pouring out from under a t-shirt that both says dope and is indeed dope. Somewhere a girl with a dream and a cardigan is hung upside down from a tree. This is the west.

No Country For Old Miley: Cormac McCarthy Describes the Video for “We Can’t Stop” | The Hairpin

piercepenniless

Marx contra Dawkins

"Man is the world of man – state, society. This state and this society produce religion, which is an inverted consciousness of the world, because they are an inverted world. (…) Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. (…) The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. (…) Criticism has plucked the imaginary flowers on the chain not in order that man shall continue to bear that chain without fantasy or consolation, but so that he shall throw off the chain and pluck the living flower.”

(Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, 1843) That would be Karl Marx, being smarter about religion than Richard Dawkins will ever be, 170 years ago. The same text include the line about religion as ‘the opium of the masses’, which is probably the most wildly misused line from Marx. Opium was a medicine and comfort while also being a potent drug – when the phrase is used to mean “LOL religious people are so dumb it’s like they’re on smack LOL I am the great rationalist”, it misses precisely Marx’s recognition of the *social function* of religion, as well as its contradictory content, as both protest against suffering and a consolation that often enables its perpetuation. On that consolatory function, this: I was raised Catholic. When my grandfather was in the weeks where he was dying, I found myself in Soho Square – for non-Londoners, the heart of London’s historical gay district – reading in the sun. To the east of the square is a Catholic church, one of first built after Catholics were allowed to build churches in England again. I received a phonecall telling me to come to the hospital this evening, because the time was coming near. I found myself walking into the church and sitting down on one of the back pews. I genuflected, because muscle memory is hard to overcome, even when you haven’t been in a church for many years. I didn’t pray. But I thought about the instinctive Catholicism, deep-rooted, of my grandfather’s generation. I thought of his early jobs, of which he was so proud, hauling flour on the docks at the age of 14 (“earning a man’s wage so young.”) I thought of his war service and its horrors. I thought of his hands, back and knees giving out because he had worked all the flex out of them. I thought of his particular stubbornness. I thought of him lying in a bed a few miles away on a drip, all the weight gone out of him. I thought of him ill-treated by the state, unwilling to provide in his last years a small measure of justice for what he had done for decades. The impossible inequality of that never-agreed contract. I thought we do struggle with the powers of this world, princes and potentates – Ephesians – and I thought about redemption. What would redeem the endless work, the stress, the privation and the loss of over eighty years. How to give thanks, also, that to be born in a tenement in Bermondsey was not always to die there. How to finally understand the attraction of the promise of redemption and the horizon of a new world, in which the manifest injustices – the things left unfinished – shall have passed away. I don’t believe the New Jerusalem is waiting for us. And I could see, walking out of that church, how such a promise might be an inducement to inaction. But I also thought how all the old stories and psalms had a better way of naming and giving shape to the – very normal – suffering of a boy losing his grandfather, the sense of a pain shared and repeated many thousands of times over the generations, and a sharpening rage for the quotidian misery that made up so much of his daily work. I don’t think this is an easy fable. In some way it restates the obvious, about pain and knowledge and reflection. Heart of a heartless world indeed.

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