The Picturesque

There are paintings that depict Horses and Carriages (by Monet or Pissaro, say) but few or no paintings of cars.  The distinctive idea of romance in the contemporary is missing.  Why is that?  Why is the car not picturesque?  Romantic?   Here what I mean by “romantic” has to do with the sense of the adventure of the individual imagination as it were. Something (increasingly) seems to prevent this from happening, as we move through the Century, for adventure and technology seem increasingly incompatible – exclusive.   A gross anonymity replaces, or seems to replace, the individual (the lyric imagination) in its hope for crystalisation in such terms: for identity to be resolved into the dimensions of an artefact.  From World War I on, it is possible to find illustrations of cars or aeroplanes or trains that are clearly important as objects to the persons depicting them but they lack in individual presence, there is a kind of corresponding ‘loss of soul’ in the successively new makes of car that have come out over the decades.  For example, while there is a definite iconography in the made-for-poster war images of spitfires, in stylishly simple white wall tyres of holiday Deusenbergs, they decline quickly into the real world more or less romance-less photographs of the present day: that is to say into clear cut adverts with all the attendent loss of texture and manners that this implies.  This is a postmodern condition: how all the icons representing our modern lives (cars; ipods; computers and so on) stand beyond artistic representation.  In romance terms in effect these all but existing as an invisibility.  The ipod silhoutte figure that one sees in adverts is the closest thing that technology can get to romance, but on the other hand that is just an advert and points not to the individual but to the mass culture of fashion’s endless bottle of ginger pop.

Baritone to Falsetto

Imagine formats for CDs or mp3s that are ‘interactive’.   An environmental music.  Up to a point it is a technology already available; allowing the listener’s mood partly to create the music (even if this isn’t strictly possible).  But suppose electronically adjustable parameters: ranges, scales.   For the sake of simplicity say a prima donna mode.  This can be adjusted like the bass or treble.  Switching it up increases the range.  Baritone to falsetto. Falsetto to spinto soprano. Knobs to be twiddled, buttons to be pushed.

It is usable retrospectively.  Common CDs – to a degree – imagine this, become plastic in terms of their mood, their tonal range, and even instrumentation.   I decide to listen to a Bach harpsicord piece as a piano work instead.  Somewhat like mashups or viral movies, versions of these versions are passed around as further ‘finished objects’.  Listened to without alteration.  But then too, these too are modified and explored finally – endlessly.  So that when a result many times removed is compared to the sound from which it originated no comparison is possible.  The indulgence and histrionics are gone, leaving in their stead a minimalism and newness.

This too could stand as a metaphor for how I work.

discombobulated floom as parataxis: Persiflage++++++++++++ to Hyperflottel

Persiflax to hyperflie!

 

discombobulated calcimyalinack!

 

Racism is not a state of mind.   Not in its origins.

 

It would be better to describe it as a spontaneous expression of identity.  Identity which finds its device in difference as an emotion – in a sense of things not identified with emotionally but rationally: difference finds the emotional spring.

 

Who from the history of Presidents represents your ideal?

 

What would you do about Afghanistan?  Iraq?  Iran?

 

Isn’t it premature to judge a person who hasn’t even begun?

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

Since, he’s found God.  Advertising.  Irrelevance.  Art.    

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My floom is as great as yours

An Infinity of Imaginary Sand

What’s real consists in the instrumentation that’s designed to measure real.  The attitude indicator or the vertical velocity dial or the radar.  Like the eye seeing the instrument sees even in the midst of cloud.  But if what it sees is an infinity of imaginary sand?  But what matter if there is still an identifiable horizon?

The Parody of Reversal

This is an age that doesn’t need a double since any individual is already two people by a simple act of inadvertence.  The peppery surface of an electronic screen.  Its sim doesn’t have to be real, it has only to be a world.  Obviously, we are talking about a cultural creation – reality.  Like the concept ‘normal’ reality’s concept doesn’t have a designated truly actual place … only an ‘approximation’.  A place that divides in two.  The more interesting simulations of ‘what is the original object’ – ? are those that somehow occupy a space of their own: don’t look real.  Just as a sand castle doesn’t resemble anything much but vague sand, with the interesting textures, as with rain’s patina, acheived within that … the thing itself standing as the sim’s inverse, or as turned inside out sim-wise like sand seen underneath (in reverse shadow) or as with the underneath top of a wave say or the lining of a coat which parodies the coat’s outside …  turning the lining into its mirror so there is another actual coat inside out: so what difference is there between the lining and the coat’s ‘real skin’ if that surface itself is the lining – in fact just like the icing that covers the cake with a pure and snow white white, eaten first?  Because once the food is eaten it becomes the skin.  The icing of that becomes the icing of me.  The movement of ice in all the jostling forms, the gut, the blood, the blook, all the animals of the slow organs in slow thought, squamous, a-squawk, the blue feathers of the starling, that are a-flutter inside me …