b.30 years on
"A lot of Algerian pimps passing through the night at Pigalle used all they had for the Algerian revolution. Virtue was to be found there too. I believe it was Hannah Arendt who distinguished between revolutions that aspire to freedom and those that aspire to virtue—and therefore to work. Perhaps we ought to recognize that the end pursued—obscurely—by revolutions or liberations is the discovery or rediscovery of beauty, that is, something that is impalpable and unnamable except by this word. Or rather, no: by beauty we should understand a laughing insolence spurred by past misery, by the systems and men responsible for misery and shame, but a laughing insolence which realizes that, when shame has been left behind, the bursting forth of new life is easy.
"But on this page the question should also, and above all, be the following: is a revolution a revolution if it has not removed from faces and bodies the dead skin that distorted them? I'm not talking about an academic beauty, but rather the impalpable—unnamable—joy of bodies, faces, shouts, words that are no longer dead, I mean a sensual joy so strong that it tends to drive away all eroticism."
—Jean Genet, "Four Hours in Shatila"
Tell me if I'm getting this right
So I’ve been away from the Internet for a few days on a top-secret mission—sorry, can’t divulge much more except that it involved serious disguises—and I came home to learn that, if I understand the media narrative correctly, some guy in southern California made a movie so offensively stupid that it moved people to attack our embassies abroad (it had to happen eventually…), and now they hate us again, despite all our generosity, and our eternal enemies, the extremists, went and took advantage of what was really just a giant misunderstanding (cause really, it was just one dumb guy in southern California, right?) to, get this, kill us. Talk about an overreaction! Here’s hoping calmer heads prevail.
In the meantime, here’s a somewhat subtler analysis. Plus a pretty picture and a Khlebnikov poem and an almost happy story:
Invocation Of Laughter
O, laugh, laughers!
O, laugh out, laughers!
You who laugh with laughs, you who laugh it up laughishly
O, laugh out laugheringly
O, belaughable laughterhood - the laughter of laughering laughers!
O, unlaugh it outlaughingly, belaughering laughists!
Laughily, laughily,
Uplaugh, enlaugh, laughlings, laughlings
Laughlets, laughlets.
O, laugh, laughers!
O, laugh out, laughers!
Priorities
“The demiurge ... has no monopoly of creation, for creation is the privilege of all spirits. Matter has been given infinite fertility, inexhaustible vitality, and, at the same time, a seductive power of temptation which invites us to create as well. In the depth of matter, indistinct smiles are shaped, tensions build up, attempts at form appear. The whole of matter pulsates with infinite possibilities that send dull shivers through it. Waiting for the life-giving breath of the spirit, it is endlessly in motion. It entices us with a thousand sweet, soft, round shapes which it blindly dreams up within itself.… There is no dead matter ... lifelessness is only a disguise behind which hide unknown forms of life. The range of these forms is infinite and their shades and nuances limitless. The Demiurge was in possession of important and interesting creative recipes. Thanks to them, he created a multiplicity of species which renew themselves by their own devices. No one knows whether these recipes will ever be reconstructed. But this is unnecessary, because even if the classical methods of creation should prove inaccessible for evermore, there still remain some illegal methods, an infinity of heretical and criminal methods. ... The Demiurge was in love with consummate, superb, and complicated materials; we shall give priority to trash.’”
—Bruno Schulz, "Treatise on Tailor’s Dummies"
take heart
I’m trying hard not to pay attention to the newscasts, but the vast mushroom cloud of excrement floating above the city of Tampa is sending foul winds clear across the country and I can’t help but catch the scent even here, in the safety of my foxhole. More sandbags—hurry! But it’s got me in a nostalgic mood. I promise not to mention any of the candidates on either side—really, if we ignore them long enough, they might just go away—but I will remark on how remarkable it is that the complete militarization of entire cities has become so thoroughly unremarkable. A number of folks on facebook posted the above photo of Tampa police in party-mode. It would be nice to be surprised at the sight of cops so excessively equipped, and surprised that such strange creatures are patrolling the Constitutionally-protected Free Speech Zones of the USA and not, y’know, Iran or Planet Mogo. My first thought was, Is that Chicago or Charlotte or maybe Anaheim? Because really: this is what we look like now. Sorry, not you and I, not us, but the polity that speaks in our names: America, I believe it’s often called. Our mirrors are dirty: Everyone knows what we look like but us. And isn’t the consistency perhaps a little more honest, better than wearing one costume in Kandahar and another in Tampa? Conor Friedersdorf wrote a good piece for the Atlantic about the media invisibility of such insanely hyperbolic security measures, and about how such measures effectively banish dissent to faraway parking lots where reporters fear to tread. It is safe out there, dissent is, way out in the parking lots and the foxholes where we (sorry: not you and I…) can call upon it should we ever need to remind ourselves of our advantage over the enslaved Chinese and the savage Ecuadoreans and all those other unfree bastards out there. More sandbags, hurry! But I was saying. I’m getting nostalgic because this trend began, to my knowledge, in Los Angeles, way back in the hazy pre-Bush era, in the year 2000, during the Democratic National Convention. Bipartisanship! And by trend I’m not talking about simple massive police violence à la Chicago ’68. I’m talking about massively militarized police violence with all the po-mo trimmings: body-armor SWAT suits, “less-than-lethal” weapons, chain-linked protest zones for all your free-speech needs. I was but a boy reporter in those innocent times and spent that week on the streets, covering the protests for the L.A. Weekly. When it was all over, I filed this report. It all seemed pretty outrageous in those days, surrounding an event thrown to honor Our Democracy with so much repressive firepower, but it’s become the norm at every convention since. At the 2000 DNC, we (this time yes: I do mean you and I) were able to get pretty close. We were penned in, sure, and they beat us and shot at us even in our pen, but they did it within sight of Staples Center, a few meters from the convention itself, and the candidates and the delegates and, should they choose to notice, the national press. Not no more. It was what they call a Teaching Moment. My point, though, is not to complain about all our vanquished freedoms, that old jazz. My point is that people don’t surround themselves with guns, fences, helicopters and the most sophisticated population-control measures that money can buy unless they believe they have reason to be frightened. My point is that the 2000 DNC took place more than a year before the September 11 attacks and that no one then could use al Qaeda as a pretext for such paranoid displays. My point is that it is us that they are scared of, you and I specifically, and we’re not even doing anything! We’re curled up comfy in our foxholes, humming Adele songs whether we want to or not, filling bags with sand. My point is: dumb and vicious as “they” are, they must know something, maybe something that we haven’t quite learned yet. My point is: take heart.