It Is Said That Above Oblivion’s Tide There Is A Pier*

Fig. 1. James Ensor - Masks Confronting Death, 1888


'This is the valley of ashes - a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens: where ashes take the form of houses and chimneys and rising smoke, and finally, with a transcendent effort, of men who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air.'

F. Scott Fitzgerald (from The Great Gatsby)

* Above Oblivion's Tide there is a Pier by Emily Dickinson

Your Ears Will Orgasm #45: Luciano Berio - Ekphrasis (MixPod Player)

Please Be A Witness To Love As A Thing Of Wonder*

Fig. 1. Quadricycle for two, 1886

Valentine's Day May Mean More To Retailers Than Lovers

Some holidays know who they are. Thanksgiving is about giving thanks; Independence Day celebrates freedom. But other holidays contradict themselves, and none more than Valentine's Day, which has about as much to do with love as the Easter Bunny has with resurrection.

For one thing, it's named after a martyr, which isn't a very promising start for a holiday meant to celebrate passion, not punishment.

In olden days, a typical observance involved bachelors pulling maiden's names out of an urn like a raffle. Nowadays, Valentine's Day is a favorite of 8-year-olds who come home from school with more candy than on any day other than Halloween, though this, too, seems a little odd for a holiday that shimmies into view in a pink feather boa and high heels.

Children alone can't account for the fact that a billion cards are sent every year - second only to Christmas - and 85 percent of them by women. For this, we can thank Esther Howland, a 1847 Mount Holyoke grad whose father owned a stationery store and who came up with the idea of mass-producing Valentines. The mother of the Valentine never married, but she did get very rich.

I'm suspicious of any holiday in which the greeting card business and the diamond cartel conspire. Greeting cards have their place - congratulations on the new baby, joy and peace in 2009 - but surely love should sing harmonies only you can hear, not the tinny pipe organ of the Hallmark serenade.

As for the diamonds, I like them as much as the next girl, but especially in this economy it would be nice for love to be associated with something warm and soft and accessible, not cold, hard and exorbitant.

My main frustration is that Valentine's Day only pretends to celebrate what we like about love while more often undermining it. Love is hope and madness and generosity; it asks for nothing in return. Valentine's Day easily evokes dread and duty and devotion put through a metal detector.

A million Web sites instruct men on what to give, lest they send the wrong signal or are reduced to relying on drugstore chocolates. Restaurants cue the violins and raise their prices. You can find matching Snoopy Valentine towels on eBay, not to mention naked Cupid refrigerator magnets.

There's nothing wrong with reveling in romance, and honoring friendship, and pausing in the bleak midwinter to tickle the people we love, but it's also a good sign of the state of your relationships if the day just saunters by and winks and you feel no need to pay much attention.

Love should fizz without champagne, should grow even in hard soil. The minute its expression feels like a duty, it has lost its bearings. "Love sought is good," Shakespeare observed, "but given unsought is better."

Nancy Gibbs (Time/PBS)

* 'I have always felt that there is a triangular quality to every love affair. There are two lovers and a third element - the idea of being in love itself. I wonder if it is possible to fall in love without this third presence, an imaginary witness to love as a thing of wonder, cast in the glow of our deepest stories about ourselves,' (Siri Hustvedt)

Addendum: Smoke Me Down To The Butt, Baby

My Bloody Valentine - Cigarette In Your Bed (click image to watch clip on YouTube)

There Is A Dark That Only Inner Light Can Illuminate

Fig. 1. Max Burchartz - Lotte's Eye, c. 1928

'The real meaning of enlightenment is to gaze with undimmed eyes on all darkness.'

Nikos Kazantzakis

Your Ears Will Orgasm #44: A Better Version Of Me (MixPod Player)

1. T-Bird & The Breaks - Take Time
2. Fiona Apple - A Better Version Of Me
3. Nina Simone - Feeling Good
4. Ian Dury & The Blockheads - Reasons To Be Cheerful
5. The Young Punx - The Clapping Song
6. Goldfrapp - Happiness

Question: Is Your Art Theory Half Full Or Half Empty?

Fig. 1. Cildo Meireles - Insertions into Ideological Circuits: Coca-Cola Project, 1970


'Expression, like construction, signifies both an action and its result. ... If the two meanings are separated, the object is viewed in isolation from the operation which produced it, and therefore apart from vision, since the act proceeded from an individual live creature. Theories that seize on "expression" as if it denoted simply the object, always insist to the utmost that the object of art is purely representative of other objects already in existence. They ignore the contribution which makes the object something new.'

John Dewey

Hi - My Name Is Lucio And I Am A Manic-Depressive

Fig. 1. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde - Grand Opera House, San Francisco, 1901

Is Mood A Language?

Sadness is the fundamental mood of depression, and even if manic euphoria alternates with it in the bipolar forms of that ailment, sorrow is the major outward sign that gives away the desperate person. Sadness leads us into the enigmatic realm of affects - anguish, fear, or joy. Irreducible to its verbal or semiological expressions, sadness (like all affect) is the psychic representation of energy displacements caused by external traumas. The exact status of such psychic representations of energy displacements remains, in the present state of psychoanalytic and semiological theories, very vague. No conceptual framework in the relevant sciences (particularly linguistics) has proven adequate to account for this apparently very rudimentary representation, presign and prelanguage. The "sadness" mood triggered by a stimulation, tension, or energy conflict within a psychosomatic organism is not a specific answer to a release mechanism (I am not sad as a response to a sign or for X and only to X). Mood is a generalised "transference" (E. Jacobson) that stamps the entire behaviour and all the sign systems (from motor functions to speech production and idealisation) without either identifying with them or disorganising them. We are justified in believing that an anarchic energy signal is involved, a phylogenetic inheritance, which, within the psychic space of the human being, is immediately assumed by verbal representation and consciousness. Nevertheless, such an "assumption" is not related to what occurs when the energies that Freud calls "bonded" lend themselves to verbalisation, association, and judgement. Let us say that representations germane to affects, notably sadness, are fluctuating energy cathexes: insufficiently stabilised to coalesce as verbal or other signs, acted upon by primary processes of displacement and condensation, dependent just the same on the agency of the ego, they record through its intermediary the threats, orders, and injunctions of the superego. Thus moods are inscriptions, energy disruptions, and not simply raw energies. They lead us toward a modality of significance that, on the threshold of bioenergetic stability, insures the preconditions for (or manifests the disintegration of) the imaginary and the symbolic. On the frontier between animality and symbol formation, moods - and particularly sadness - are the ultimate reactions to our traumas, they are our basic homeostatic recourses. For if it is true that those who are slaves to their moods, being drowned in their sorrows, reveal a number of psychic or cognitive frailties, it is equally true that a diversification of moods, variety in sadness, refinement in sorrow or mourning are the imprint of a humankind that is surely not triumphant but subtle, ready to fight, and creative . . .

Literary creation is that adventure of the body and signs that bears witness to the affect - to sadness as an imprint of separation and beginning of the symbol's sway; to joy as imprint of the triumph that settles me in the universe of artifice and symbol, which I try to harmonise in the best possible way with my experience of reality. But that testimony is produced by literary creation in a material that is totally different from what constitutes mood. It transposes affect into rhythms, signs, forms. The "semiotic" and the "symbolic" become the communicable imprints of an affective reality, perceptible to the reader (I like this book because it conveys sadness, anguish, or joy) and yet dominated, set aside, vanquished.

Julia Kristeva

Addendum #1:

Fig. 2. The Secret Life of the Manic Depressive (still), 2006 - Stephen Fry (click image to start watching this documentary on YouTube)

Addendum #2: And Now For Something Completely Foreseeable

The Life of Brian, 1979 - d. Brian Jones (click image to watch clip on YouTube)

Ladies And Gents - Allow Me To Style Your Cramps

Fig. 1. The late Lux Interior (Erick Purkhiser) of The Cramps


Mouth

The mouth is the beginning or, if one prefers, the prow of animals; in the most characteristic cases, it is the most living part, in other words, the most terrifying for neighbouring animals. But man does not have a simple architecture like beasts, and it is not even possible to say where he begins. He possibly starts at the top of the skull, but the top of the skull is an insignificant part, incapable of catching one's attention; it is the eyes or forehead that play the meaningful role of an animal's jaws.

Among civilised men, the mouth has even lost the relatively prominent character that it still has among primitive men. However, the violent meaning of the mouth is conserved in a latent state; it suddenly regains the upper hand with a literally cannibalistic expression such as mouth of fire [bouche à feu], applied to the cannons men use to kill each other. And on important occasions human life is still bestially concentrated in the mouth: rage makes men grind their teeth, while terror and atrocious suffering turn the mouth into the organ of rending screams. On this subject it is easy to observe that the overwhelmed individual throws back his head while frenetically stretching his neck in such a way that the mouth becomes, as much as possible, an extension of the spinal column, in other words, in the position it normally occupies in the constitution of animals. As if explosive impulses were to spurt directly out of the body through the mouth, in the form of screams. This fact highlights both the importance of the mouth in animal physiology or even psychology, and the general importance of the superior or anterior extremity of the body, the orifice of profound physical impulses; one sees at the same time that a man can liberate these impulses in at least two different ways, in the brain or in the mouth, but that as soon as these impulses become violent, he is obliged to resort to the bestial way of liberating them. When the narrow constipation of a strictly human attitude, the material look of the face with a closed mouth, as beautiful as a safe.

Georges Bataille

Your Ears Will Orgasm #43: The Cramps - Tribute Mix (MixPod Player)

1. All Women Are Bad
2. Sunglasses After Dark
3. Lonesome Town
4. Goo Goo Muck
5. Aloha From Hell
6. Surfin' Bird
7. Miniskirt Blues
8. I Was A Teenage Werewolf
9. Bikini Girls With Machine Guns
10. Two-Headed Sex Change
11. Mystery Plane
12. Human Fly
13. Don't Eat Stuff Off The Sidewalk
14. The Way I Walk
15. New Kind Of Kick
16. I Can't Hardly Stand It
17. Garbageman
18. What's Inside A Girl?
19. Return Of The Living Dead
20. Daisies Up Your Butterfly
21. She Said
22. Zombie Dance
23. Saddle Up A Buzz Buzz
24. Drug Train

Obituary: The Last Of Blossom, Dearies (Telegraph, UK)

Fig. 2. Blossom Dearie (1926-2009) - The Adorable Blossom Dearie

Stairways To Heaven Are Always One Person Wide

Fig. 1. Jan Matejko - The Astronomer Copernicus, 1872


'We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.'

Oscar Wilde