order and a disorder
Diagram for A Thousand Plateaus, Introduction - Paragraph 13, 2010, Marc Ngui
I have all these thoughts that come out when doing mundane things. I think it's Dantec and D&G that provoke these thoughts as catalysts, I think, like latent crazy dreams that happen when there's only intake and no output in thought, reading essays but never writing them, looking at objects but never holding them, and so on.
the other day I was cleaning the fridge, or rather cleaning the dismembered and dislocated innards of the fridge in the bathtub, when it suddenly occurred to me (or rather, it suddenly formulated itself as a thesis) that self-reflexivity as an analytical methodology (ex: medium-specificity within art history) is an a priori method, yes, but more interestingly is perhaps born of an anxiety against groundlessness. that is: it's an approach that is specifically an anxious response to the encroaching territory of non-modernism, and thus an absolutely tacit but also absolutely solid acknowledgement of these happenings. or: a modernist autonomy is born only because (and _not_ in spite of) the proximity of a 'frontier' or a 'rupture', the lack of a tether with which art can be read, knots between 'meaning' and non-arbitrarity becoming untied. in that way, is it too trite to say that post-and-pre are two sides of the same coin, that the necessary conditions of its birth are exactly the same condition which it resists? or maybe the better image is of a fence in a field that ends up generating two spaces, rather than dividing one.
I've been looking for this quote for a while, and finally found it. It's never been typed on the internet before, but it's here now, fresh and new:
- Barthes, "Outcomes of the Text", 1972 (emphasis mine).
pf nw etc
it strikes me
that this this performs as
this mental tic that's inevitable. now, "strikes me" is this way of venturing forth into an explanation without having to put all of my weight behind it; it's possible, it strikes me, this idea slipped by me like haley's comet brushing by the earth (and maybe there's a further metaphorical resonance to be found in the oxygen-tank hoarding that occurred when people thought the tail contained poisonous gas), no responsibility on my part; I've just caught the ball. it struck me.
and performs. oh oh performance. it's beautiful, performs as, effects, appears. does it? it appears to do so. subjective interpretation couched in objective language. quiet interpretation of observed phenomena. your hands held behind your back.
but whatever. we "utilize the means at hand". we real cool. we bricoleurs.
-
1) I just watched pulp fiction for the first time yesterday
2) I just finished norwegian wood for the second time yesterday
It strikes me that violence in Pulp Fiction performs as a stand-in for literary license, or more specifically a license or flexibility that generates a logic of events absolutely one step removed from the usual twists and turns operating within the rules of typical movie plot. By violence I mean specifically acts of violation, events that threaten the usual order of things, the usual geography on which boundaries between specific regions of acceptability lie, etc. So, for example, when Uma Thurman's and John Travolta's characters start doing lines of heroin before their 'date', the space that's opened up through this use of drugs within the movie can be explained within real-world logic as a space that's outside of normal sobriety -- the resulting happenings can be explained literally in terms of this drug use ("they were acting weird because they were high"). It's the acceptance of the shallowest and most initial interpretation of the events going on that breaches your understanding and starts the gradual tear that rends disbelief into halves. My point is that maybe the logic of real-world narrative is dealt with on its own terms and then allowed to be subtracted from the movie because of these factors, maybe leaving something like a logic driven primarily by style and a plot aesthetic of what-the-fuck absurdity. Real-world events dealt on its own terms within logic so that Tarantino plays within the realm of this created illogicality?
I'm also reminded of the similar roles that radiation/genetic engineering and wealthy billionaires play in comic books and superhero stories: freedom, license, creativity spidering out from the notion that these "sufficiently advanced technolog[ies] are indistinguishable from magic" - creativity at the liminal edge of difference and strangeness initially allowed and explained through these technologies at the edge of our understanding, etc.
-
as for 상실의 시대/Norwegian Wood..
I couldn't help but laugh at certain parts and laugh again at my laughter. there were moments when I was certain that it was going to be like coetzee's youth, when watanabe, going on 20, talks about this sense of responsibility, and the older murakami filtering this all through his experience reflects back on this responsibility as something necessarily believed in but inevitably abandoned, and so on. resonating plot points for me, I thought. but no. no, it wasn't. two tiny thoughts:
one. I resent the moments at which murakami (or the narrator) tries to introduce these drastic changes in plot or deaths of a character (such as when kizuki dies, not a spoiler) almost too casually. It's like a steadied and deliberate remark you've practiced and finally introduced by a clearing of the throat and said in a tone too nonchalant to really be deadpan, blasé.
two. the last time I read it some four years ago I remember being struck at the specific point where the narrator turns from stoic description to action, and on reading this again I was somewhat surprised to find that exact turning point again. The phrase "I found myself doing" or "I heard myself say" and the accompanying sense of curious action spurred not by motivation but by something else is appropriate, maybe, for watanabe, words flying forward from somewhere behind distant from the horizon, passing overhead, that sort of feeling.
-
it's funny, lingering traces of travel. 'I am here!' so viscerally ignored when you're there really only sets in when you start to arrive or depart. magnetic fields generated only at the moment when current changes. you flow out, and everything resists and says "stay!" scraps of receipts and regional plastic bags and ticket stubs, in units of economic exchange that fly under the threshold of economic demand that would allow these things to be imported. hey, do you know that the plastic bag you're holding is the rarest, most unimported object possible? the city furthest away from seoul in terms of time, in korea, is somewhere inbetween seoul and busan.
travel; getting lost. to be honest I wanted nothing more than to wander around that evening in japan with a friend and through luck and thanks to couchsurfing that did happen indeed. brief one-off encounter with an awesome girl through koenji and shibuya. late night wanderings alone afterwards. music in my ears and listening to a city napping but certainly still awake. I think in boston these two months that's the thing I'll miss the most; this place grows silent after the T closes; where are the bright lights and the wicks burning around cups of drink inside? where's the room still lit up in some apartment or house somewhere? all of you, all sleeping at the same time. there are no windows high above these streets still lit; no distorted rectangles lit with an incandescent-bulb-yellow. we'll see.
in transit
Moving from place to place sometimes I realize how necessary this all is. Brainwashed to love airports I feel alive running my fingers along the shape of power plugs and the abstract but very concretely abstract shifts in architecture that characterize something more emergent and meta than culture: metaculture, arche-culture, curators of culture and style. 'Culture' and 'style' minus connotations of vertical hierarchy and qualification: 文化, maybe. People flowing. The oft-quoted Benjamin quote from his oft-quoted article channelling Krakauer:
And so sifting my feet through change and movement I realize I like this, I really do. Standing in the subway I realized I couldn't read or listen to music lest I miss out on boredom, on this specific strain of boredom sprouting out from the organization of katakana hiragana kanji on paper.
1) Vertical or horizontal reading? it strikes me that there might be a sort of air resistance coefficient applied to typography, kinda, except instead of air resistance it's the arche-writing presence of black text on a white page, and the gaze of the eye as it starts scanning downwards, or from left to right. I imagine these three-dimensional, voluminous blocks of text approaching as if on conveyer belts, perspective distorting them into trapezoidal shapes, bulbous dorsal serifs appearing out of the white. I vaguely remember a quote by Haruki Murakami, something about the stern of a ship appearing out of a fog. Something like that. Against illegibility which areas resist first, most easily? This sort of air resistance.
2) one other thing that strikes me is the writing-like, script-like splash of patterns on these tokyo streets. zebra crossings intersecting, slightly off of each other. some panels of red marking broad swaths of asphalt. seen from the side, they too seem like they were thrown at high speed, scrawled marks lying against the ground not too repetitive and regular to seem overly logical but with uncertainly determined angles arbitrary-seeming enough that I start to try to read for an intelligence behind all of this. who wrote this? what is this city saying?
more on this later. (having said 'more on this later' I probably will not come back to this having generated some sense of finitude. I've already burst this balloon growing in my mouth.)
stuffcalendar: tokyo, june 10
MAP:
http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?ie=UTF&msa=0&msid=
100143715566812488965.00046be8b99caa451cb4c
exhibitions
*emergencies! 011
SATO Tetsuji + SAKAMOTO Yoichi "blank"
&
Open Space Now! 2009
@ NTT Intercommunication Center
*The Kaleidoscopic Eye: the Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary Collection
@ Mori Art Museum (1000yen)
Beauty & Light Exhibition photographs by Pascal d'Aboyer & Morgan Fisher
Opening night -- performance by Morgan Fisher, 8:30pm
@ SuperDeluxe (free)
*Winter Garden: The Exploration of the Micropop Imagination in Contemporary Japanese Art
@ Hara Museum of Contemporary Art (700 yen)
Neoteny Japan -Takahashi Collection
@ Ueno Royal Museum
**+/− [the infinite between 0 and 1]
Ryoji Ikeda
@ Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo (MOT)
400yen
*NISHI Tatzu - What if someone finds out?!
@ Arataniurano
http://www.arataniurano.com/
events:
FOX LOCO PHANTOM, ZOOBOMBS, Machida Naotaka & PK BATTLES
6:30 doors, 7pm start. Y2500.
@ Shelter, Shimokitazawa
http://www.tokyogigguide.com/categories/details/1080-fox-loco-phantom-zo...
also:
random info that's easier to access when on a public site w/o login
Baggage claim: 1st floor (arrivals): GPA or JAL ABC, Inc. probably around 500yen per day.
http://www.narita-airport.jp/en/guide/service/list/svc_06.html
suica & nex package - at terminal 2 travel center
http://www.jreast.co.jp/e/suica-nex/
keisei skyliner. remember to reserve express for the way back. or take limited express?
http://www.keisei.co.jp/keisei/tetudou/metropass/index.html (+ metropass)
500 yen (baggage) + (2480 + 1000) (there and back + metropass) + 3000 (capsule hotel? maybe less for 24-hour internet cafe) = around 7000. that leaves me 3000 for food and museums. perfectly doable. NTT & MOT maybe? Hmm. plushy internet cafes is around 1500 yen, I hear; lacks the fun of a capsule hotel but certainly cheaper.
I think the best idea would be to go to Koenji and wander around to shinjuku; wake up really early and go to NTT, the mot museum, maybe stop by akihabara before I take the keisei skyliner/limited express back, leaving by 3:30 or 4 at the latest.
seoul sunshine
is this for me? this is for me? for this is me? for this is me. this is for me.
이것도 한 때.
title is whatever today's date is, your time zone.
I've been: It occurs:
I've been: walking in Seoul, creating mental maps, organizing spaces. This is probably the first time that I'm appropriating the city as a conscious choice of location, rather than as a default, flitting from subway stop to stop, grounding geographical location on a one-dimentional colored subway line.
3 areas I've been mostly in, in no particular order:
- 삼성Samsung/강남Kangnam/압구정Apgujung (they're all the same, places to eat/drink/watch movies.)
- 인사동Insadong (sometimes-forced Korean-quaint-old-natural, relieved mostly by the fact that it's a space for the appreciation of A Korean Identity, counter to the more prevalent undercurrents of Korean inferiority complexes)
- Gosh that sounded so elitist/judgemental.
- it's just a part of identifying/feeling capable-authorized of such judgement.
- 종로3가Jongro3ga/을지로3가Uljiro3ga/청계천Chonggye-chun. (Those areas, full of liveliness and in my opinion the more fleshy beating heart of Seoul. Cameras, motors, zippers, lace, semiconductors, pvc, watches, lights, bathroom sinks, art supplies, film, fabric, wood, glass, posters, paint, rubber mats, what not. Raw business in its operation, supplies and dealers, advocates of the corporeal, the unprocessed, the smelly busy active and pure core of things. Boxes lashed onto motorcycles twisting between cars losing themselves in a two-stroke haze cloud sliding down side alleys. Someone sits outside smoking, three hours before dusk. I take out five cameras onto a table into a pair of knowledgeable hands and the atmosphere changes, shifts imperceptibly into mutual appreciation, inspection, lexicon flowing under the table : seal, filter, fungus, pc, synchronization.
---
It occurs to me that Virginia Woolf and Henri Cartier-Bresson feel old to me, old, less engaging, more, er, boring. I feel as if I've betrayed part of myself that would try to see if the intensity of my pen-underlines (representing the intensity of my delight and excitement) would sublime through the page and leave rip-marks so soaked with dark that they would slowly chromatograph outwards and outwards. Just just, representational, visual, mimetic, 's no longer cutting it. I get angrier at photography, the action of capturing -- irrationally and without reason, worried that a photo was taken because uh that looked nice and I wanted to capture that nice-looking uh that.
I realize that I read Lolita all wrong all wrong, all trustingly and pre-post-modernly, as a straight love story, a real one, with truth and beauty and sincerity and all that. I read Pale Fire recently, and I realize that Nabokov is all about the process of writing, the role of the narrator in disguising, re-inventing and masking, and the role of the reader (in his novels) to penetrate the narrator's mask and arrive at some apparent 'inner reality' that may or may not exist. In short, the reader's action is in parallel with the narrator, appropriating a viewpoint to create another one, and also, the writer and reader is on opposite sides, with each side wanting to interpret and create and justify...
--
These ideas, and the effort necessary to realize them. more, more. get on it, taeyoung, self-motivate.
- segmentation of spaces with aural fingerprinting
- portable boundaries
- l+c
de-sacr-ation
korea korea korea.
seoul seoul seoul.
I'm back and two weeks overdue of some sort of reflection. I'm back and I'm sleepy and I feel like settling into a rhythm, an aesthetics of a lack thereof, ugly apartment buildings and garish red sidewalks, et cetera, this city breathing hey hey jumble jumble JUMBLE and a haphazard lack of attention to overall visual appeal. Instead of focusing on everything fitting together there's a micro focus on individual design, tree than the forest, and the resulting hodge-podge of neon signs jutting: horizontal flat, vertical flat, jutting out neon wires moving up, around, a hearted up and inside out and the longer distance between transfers on the subway and the more time spent standing thinking wondering, the yearly revisits and self-evaluation, all of this.
This city. I find myself criticizing things when I come back, aiming my eye with the proud-chested self-professed position of someone on the cultural fence, neither inside nor outside, identifying with or against. QUESTIONS: Korean identity: blood vs. nationality? Cultural pride: artificial self-propagandizing vs. exoticism/idealization of the foreign? I voice these thoughts in conversation with others but at the same time I know that these opinions have more to do with me versus Korea, a personal agenda rather, Hey I came back let's fight jackets on and everything I missed you and you rubbed off on me and I've got to fight you now because of this sense of identification that I have with you. This sense of agenda and opposition to be thought against, fought against, argued against is somehow my way of nestling back into this rhythm; before I realized it on one Saturday night I was attempting to mark an identification with this country/culture/rhythm/color, lifting my right leg, standing still, making it mine.