E > Recent Status Updates

“The process of civilization becoming less centralized and less authoritarian has created modes of expression in which the burden of assigning meaning and value resides wholly within the colloquy of beholders… So, today, we all acknowledge that, when we argue about art, we are arguing about the use, value, and meaning of objects that have no power, value, or meaning beyond those we attribute to them.”

“The world of art and letters, of graffiti and sexy music, is where we hone these skills, where we acquire the responsiveness, imagination, and flexibility to deal with this world, where we learn to appreciate its anxieties.

“I understood art to be a necessary accoutrement of urban life, a democratic social field of sublimated anxiety, adventure... I assumed that free citizens cultivated their responsiveness to works of art in order to mitigate their narcissism and fuel their imaginative grasp of that which is irrevocably beyond themselves, to transform their anxious discomfort at not knowing into a kind of vertiginous pleasure.”

“There isn’t a story to tell, because a relationship is a story you construct together and take up residence in, a story as sheltering as a house. You invent this story of how your destinies were made to entwine like porch vines… how who you think you are becomes a factor of who you think he is and who he thinks you are, a castle in the clouds made out of the moist air exhaled by dreamers.”

“Is it that the joy that comes from other people always risks sadness, because even when love doesn’t fail, mortality enters in; is it that there is a place where sadness and joy are not distinct, where all emotion lies together, a sort of ocean into which tributary streams of distinct emotions go, a faraway deep inside…”

“We treat desire as a problem to be solved, address what desire is for and focus on that something and how to acquire it rather than on the nature and the sensation of desire, though often it is the distance between us and the object of desire that fills the space in between with the blue of longing.”

“Justice … stood at the gates of Hades deciding who would go in, and to go in was to be chosen for refinement through suffering, adventure, transformation, a punishing route to the reward that is the transformed self … it suggested that justice is a far more complicated and incalculable thing than we often imagine, … [and] the end is farther away than anticipated and far harder to estimate.”

“Certainly for artists of all stripes, the unknown, the idea or the form or the tale that has not yet arrived, is what must be found. It is the job for artists to open doors and invite in prophesies, the unknown, the unfamiliar; it’s where their work comes from, although its arrival signals the beginning of the long disciplined process of making it their own.”

“It’s usually assumed that the male gaze is about power and objectification. It’s actually about anxiety. The male gaze is all about the pull of desire, about how it ‘unmans’ the male viewer. Men have power, but desire has power even over men. And they don’t like it.”
- McKenzie Wark, Art Portfolio: Namio Harukawa

Tune: “Prelude to Water Music”
The bright moon, when will she appear?
Wine cup in hand, I ask the blue sky.
I don’t know inside the gates of heaven
What time of year it would be tonight.
I was just about to ride there on the wind,
But feared the heaven’s crystalline palaces and towers
So high, would be for me too cold.
Instead, I dance and cavort here with my shadow
And know what it is to be among men…

“someone will remember us
i say
even in another time”

]among mortal women, know this
]from every care
]you could release me
]
]dewy riverbanks
]to last all night long
][

“He, she - neither will do for you, Tristessa, the fabulous beast, magnificent, immaculate, composed of light. The unicorn in a glass wood, beside a transforming lake. You produced your own symbolism with the diligence of a computer; “

“Proposition one: time is a man, space is a woman.
Proposition two: time is a killer.
Proposition three: kill time and live forever.”

“Halperin suggests that ‘To practice a stylistics of the self ultimately means to cultivate that part of oneself that leads beyond oneself, that transcends oneself: it is to elaborate the strategic possibilities of what is the most impersonal dimension of personal life — namely, the capacity to ´realize oneself´ by becoming other than what one is.’”

(in reference to Foucault) “we must ‘work at becoming homosexual and not be obstinate in recognizing that we are.’ Homosexuality is desirable because a homosexual way of life allows us to reimagine sociality. The homosexual needs to ‘invent from A to Z a relationship that is formless’ and eventually to arrive at a ‘multiplicity of relations.’”

“They resort to drag, song, mime, dance, etc. … in order to trouble them, to stir up uncertain desire-zones that they always more or less refuse to explore. The question is no longer to know whether one will play feminine against masculine or the reverse, but to make bodies, all bodies, break away from the representations and restraints on the ‘social body.’” (Guattari)

“The queer trend that I am identifying is in many ways an effort to reclaim the past and put it in direct relationship with the present. Autoethnography is not interested in searching for some lost and essential experience, because it understands the relationship that subjects have with their own pasts as complicated yet necessary fictions.”

“No-one can legislate love; it cannot be given orders or cajoled into service. Love belongs to itself, dear to pleading and unmoved by violence. Love is not something you can negotiate... [there are] the ones who think that stray desires can be driven out of the heart like the moneychangers from the temple. Maybe they can, if you patrol your weak points day and night, don’t look, don’t smell, don’t dream.”

“People of color, queers of color, white queers, and other minorities occasionally and understandably long for separatist enclaves outside of the dominant culture. Such enclaves, however, are often politically disadvantageous when one stops to consider the ways in which the social script depends on minority factionalism and isolationism to maintain the status of the dominant order.”

Passing the Unworked Field
Queen Anne’s lace
is hardly
prized but
all the same it isn’t
idle look
how it
stands straight on its
this stems how it
scrubs its white faces
with the
rags of the sun how it
makes all the
loveliness
it can.

“It was said that people mattered, which they did, and we lost their shine.
It was also said that god is light, so that nobody and nothing could see him. But some did. Therefore he is not light.
He resides in night. There’s an affinity between the functions of our brain and those of god. He is memory, and the brain is an agent borrowing that memory, and its functions in total darkness. Like everything divine.”

“In its will to protect the living from the maddening effect of a constant present, nature created memory. An escape. A rest.”

“Standing trees sleep in this forest that created the night when the moon was looking elsewhere.”

Nothing we do is better than the work of handmind. When the mind uses itself without the hands it runs the circle and may go too fast; even speech using the voice may go too fast. The hand that shapes the mind into clay or written word slows thought to the gait of things and lets it be subject to accident and time. Purity is on the edge of evil, they say.

The Butterfly

those things
which you so laughingly call
hands are in fact two
brown butterflies fluttering
across the pleasure
they give
my body

"Riots remind us that the basic unit of politics is not representation, as our bourgeois rulers have insisted, but regicide - as they themselves learned from historical experience! And though riots are far from being the ideal form for effective form for sovereign contestation (and though they tend to announce their doom from the outset), they remain felicitous in the short term on account of their availability."

To the Waters of the Chia-Ling - Yuan Chen
Long ago you were perhaps
a river flowing down a mountain!
Since then you've been flowing,
deepening your bed;
If I could make a river current
understand human feeling,
Then you might know my mind
on coming from so far.

"Poetry is the essence of ideas before they are distilled into thought...
Poetry is the anarchy of the sense making sense."

"If you would be a poet, write living newspapers. Be a reporter from outer space, filing dispatches to some supreme managing editor who believes in full disclosure and has a low tolerance for bullshit."