The gothic fly belongs to no single era. It hovers above the razor’s edge of aetiological and the eschatological; of death and resurrection; of the something and the nothing. Always already within the orbit of the symbolic, yet never within its snare, the common housefly—like the historiographical catachresis that is ‘the gothic’ itself—sets into motion and makes a mockery of epochal thought and artistic figuration." -- Shayne Legassie

The Logic of Sensi

"Nonsense has ceased to give sense to the surface; it absorbs and engulfs all sense...Artaud says that Being, which is nonsense, has teeth." - Deleuze, LOS

The Noble Lie of the Schizo

Deleuze writes extensively on schizophrenics. His schizophrenic is related to, but different from a clinical schizophrenic. "Schizos", as he calls them, engage in a scrambling of the codes of language, of meaning, of sense. Schizos, best exemplified perhaps by the later writings of Antonin Artaud, cannot be pinned down by any law, by any process of deduction. They are constantly slipping into another dimension by means of evasion, dissimulation, nonsense, violence. Why do they do this? What are they protecting? My best guess is the noble lie. There is a construct that justifies their erratic, harmful, nonsensical behavior to themselves. It is not thought of as a lie, but it is a lie, just as every social law is a social construction born of circumstance then solidified through reification.

One other interesting thing is that social organizations, such as a jail, a school, or a company can demonstrate schizophrenic behavior and hide noble lies just as well as an individual can. Schizo organizations can evade, dissimulate, provoke violence, and produce nonsense explanations.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/us_fantastic_four_no_more#

(best with sound muted)


The Reinvention of Cinematic Time in Abstract Film: Hans Richter’s *Rhythmus 21*
Inga Pollmann, The University of Chicago
UL Library: Room 205
4pm, Tuesday, February 1, 2011

This talk focuses on the role of early abstract film in mediating between cinema, on the one hand, and vitalist concepts of life, on the other, and proposes that Hans Richter’s scroll paintings and abstract films from the 1920s constituted a vitalist “reinvention” of the cinema. Informed by Henri Bergson’s concept of intuition and by vitalist theories of rhythm, Richter’s Rhythmus 21 aimed to engender a “living mechanics” that would merge the temporality of the spectator with the temporality of the medium of film (and in this way challenge Wilhelm Worringer’s earlier distinction between “abstraction” and “empathy”). Linking Rhythmus 21 with vitalist thought expands our understanding of the ways in which early film and early film theory understood the relationship between cinematic indexicality and the “vitality” of moving pictures, and emphasizes the commonalities between Richter’s conceptualization of the cinema and contemporary phenomenological film theory.

I love this sport

I think it's interesting that both Black Swan and Tron (2010) emphasize the quest for technical perfection and how perfection is only achieved by "letting one's self go". This theme comes up in many films, but something struck me about its repetition this holiday movie season. It was counterbalanced for me by True Grit, which has ostensibly nothing to do with perfection, yet the Coens seemed to let themselves go with some uncharacteristic emotion as Jeff Bridges rides a horse with snake-bitten Mattie through the night (e.g. long dissolves, CGI stars, exhausted horse dying, heavy soundtrack).

via paulomarginal

chey: a little part of me dies with every email i end now with an exclamation mark.

yoyo: hahaha! welcome to the working world!

B C

via yayo

Mondrian

http://mxplusbee.blogspot.com/