Asbestos Hall
"…to reinstate Matt Parker to the post of INS Experimental Volunteer. Expelled in the 2003 Purges for the crime of ‘not being dead’, he replied, with impeccable integrity, by contracting cancer. Learning that he wouldn’t be cured, he demanded restitution to his post, then died. The Executive Council has approved this request, cum laude. Every angel is terrifying. Welcome back."
Friday 6/18/2010

ins; mccarthy;

US/UK Sales of The Tibetan Book of the Dead
“There can be no better diagram depicting the populace’s quest for enlightenment”.
(Hollow Earth : Social Trends 1950-2010)
Friday 12/11/2009

(1 note)

US/UK Sales of The Tibetan Book of the Dead

“There can be no better diagram depicting the populace’s quest for enlightenment”.

(Hollow Earth : Social Trends 1950-2010)

Visual interpretation of A Thousands Plateaus
(via centralasian)
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Marc Ngui: Diagrams for Deleuze & Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus

(8 notes)

deleuze; art;

10x10 Knight’s Tour used by Georges Perec to descibe the rooms of a Paris apartment building in Life: A User’s Manual.
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Friday 12/4/2009

(12 notes)

perec; oulipo; literature;

10x10 Knight’s Tour used by Georges Perec to descibe the rooms of a Paris apartment building in Life: A User’s Manual.

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Sophie Calle’s studio (2009)
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What images keep you company in the space where you work?  In my studio there is a stuffed giraffe that I bought when my mother died, to replace her. Her name is Monique too, and she looks at me from on high with sadness and irony, just like my mother did.
I don’t think my mother would have chosen to return as a stuffed giraffe in the studio of her daughter, but she is dead.

Sophie Calle’s studio (2009)

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What images keep you company in the space where you work?
In my studio there is a stuffed giraffe that I bought when my mother died, to replace her. Her name is Monique too, and she looks at me from on high with sadness and irony, just like my mother did.

I don’t think my mother would have chosen to return as a stuffed giraffe in the studio of her daughter, but she is dead.

"Zizek is (in my opinion) the worst kind of thematic critic: he just ‘reads off’ the barest narrative content of films and projects it through the allegorical grill of his Lacanisms. No formalism - not even the barest attention to form, style, expression, tone, mood, nuance - whatsoever. Zizek may be an interesting reference point in some political and philosophical discussions, but his contribution to film studies is, in my view, miniscule."
Wednesday 12/2/2009

cinema; adrian martin; zizek;

"

Frontier of Dawn has been taken in some quarters as a new departure for Garrel, because of its supernatural element. In fact, even this is not quite the case: phantoms, appearing in dream visions … have … haunted Garrel’s previous work. And the crucial film in this regard, the short Rue Fontaine (1984) – an imaginative recreation of the filmmaker’s relationship with Seberg in the ‘70s, at the time of Les Hautes Solitudes (1974) – was explicitly linked by Garrel, in a diary entry written twenty-five years ago, to a literary source of inspiration that is still clearly on his mind today: ‘As in Théophile Gautier’s Spirite, the woman who has suicided appears to the young man in the mirror and calls him to his death’.

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- Where does this story of an apparition come from?
- My friend Frédéric Pardo, the late painter, gave me a novel by Théophile Gautier, Spirite, the story of a woman who appears in a mirror after killing herself and summons a man to the afterlife. In Gautier’s story, she had never met the man. She fantasized about him, entered a convent and committed suicide the day she realized she would never have him. One day, when the man is about to get married, the woman appears to him and tells her story. I thought this tale of an apparition was very beautiful but at the same time, not very cinematographic. Then I started thinking about telling the story of a woman committing suicide, reappearing in a mirror and luring towards death the man she had an unhappy affair with. I am a rationalist but I think the supernatural is a rich vein in cinema, if it is used the way the surrealists used it. The supernatural is useful to make art flourish. If you make a film about tables turning, it works really well. I didn’t want to use digital special effects or synthesis images. I preferred Jean Cocteau-style makeshift effects.

"

Rue Fontaine (Philippe Garrel, 1984)

courtesy of KINOTE

"It is no accident that hidden writings are associated with collective authors as is the case with apocrypha scripta. One of the initial symptoms of inauthenticity that Hidden Writing produces is positive disintegration or, more accurately, collectivization of one author (voice) or an authorial elite, and its transformation to an untraceable shady collective of writers, a crowd. This misauthorial problem is directly connected to the distortion or bastardization of books and their questionable backgrounds. Hence it is a constant nightmare for religious Books and their virginal romanticism. Inauthenticity operates as complicity with anonymous materials."
Reza Negarestani, Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials [Melbourne: re.press, 2008], p. 62.
having kittens in one’s pants