Prologue
Lemmie tell you a story about how people transgress, write, and remix life out of life.

I'm all ears.

On Fridays

• Friday, March 19, 2010
• H was 99 and grey. She was naturally grey and did not dye her hair. She lived in an old refurbished brown-stone building. Thin inner walls. She smoked. Casually dressed, she would spend her afternoons strolling in near-by parks. H wasn’t very tall. It caused her difficulty finding tights, socks, and other outfit. So, she preferred to make her own clothes. Being good at needlework, she both fashioned her own looks and adjusted it to the width of the wallet of a white collar worker in a chocolate factory that she herself was.

Friends found her a nice person to hang out with—someone good to have around…Her communicational skills, inherited through the Etruscan - Huguenot lineage, meant talks were always interesting with her, and her love for music meant long nights full of dance to diverse rhythms and melody swerves. Truth be told, there was something about her that friends secretly disapproved of very discretely frowning an eyebrow— a benign comment about her strange ways in the company of gentlemen (A friend:”Õ”/Another friend:” Õ”).

H’s room was neat and tastefully furnished (occasional piles of hand-made clothing items might have happened here and there). It smelled of dry rose petals. Fruit she held in a basket on a window sill. In two corners, diagonally facing each other, were plants of reasonable size. The room was so much more than just that. Full it was of sounds, coming from an antique turntable. Sometimes there was silence.

I used to visit her on Friday evenings. We would spend a lot of time digging H’s impressive collection of records. She would guide me through a riff here and a double big bass / drum kick there, explaining influences and a diachronical dialogue hidden from the ear of an average listener. Once we would exhaust our hunger for notes, we’d sag into huge, soft cushions, talking tirelessly about politics, with a late night phone-in radio program in the background.

I always sipped my favorite cuppa, while H indulged in the potent smell and taste of the well known caffeinated liquid. She would frequently ask me questions, demanding maximum engagement of my mental capacities. So, I’d feed her with answers, providing enough material for meditation that’d last long enough to bridge week-long gaps between our Friday meetings.

I would sometimes bring light, herb-flavored crackers to munch on. H always had an arsenal of cookies: thin, crispy ones, melting between the tongue and the palate the moment a drop of saliva gently lathered them (not to mention the delicate specificities of the same process when a spoonful wave of tea leaked into the oral cavity; she would confess a similar experience with a different kind of drink at play, but I wouldn’t dare speak on her behalf). When we did not analyze her vintage record collection or discuss politics, we were silent. Such were our Fridays.¹

On Rape
Just as life treats them, so do broken beat bards and bardesses treat literature: they violate it, rape it, dissect it, shock it, and share it. But sometimes they also go easy on it, nourishing it like a vulnerable, fragile child. In Rape New York (2009) Jana Leo reveals a personal tragedy of a foreigner-cum-international-student-non-resident-alien, moving into an apartment in Harlem, soon after which to be raped there. She dares to expose what is in the vocabulary of distorted, patriarchal ethics considered dirty laundry in order to criticize contemporary culture, mercilessly depriving an individual of that what otherwise makes him or her alive.

Choosing the apartment is economically conditioned. Hence, potential locations, offering affordable apartments are Greenpoint and Harlem. The former they disqualify for its deadbeat ghetto feel of nostalgia for the Europe that is no more. On the other hand, Harlem’s spirit of the ghetto is different. They see in Harlem the spirit of renewal. Only it comes with a price: in soulless, profit-making games rulers, managers, and other profiteers cut deals, typically, sacrificing destinies of the marginalized, discriminated, oppressed, stigmatized, dispossessed, ostracized — the muted. Quite often “the muted” translates into, but is not limited to, “women” and / or “people of color.”

However, in Leo’s novel poverty is presented as the category cutting across these cultural divides. Underscoring the unscrupulousness of the real estate industry, she criticizes the way corporate culture violates personal lives. Specifically, via public spaces – buildings - it colonizes the private sphere – apartments/homes and the physical bodies. Traditionally attached to domestic space, women tend to be typical victims of such aggression. The narrator, ventriloquizing Leo’s experience, testifies:”My assault occurred on the threshold between public and intimate space” (49). She shatters the myth about rape, problematizing it as follows:

As I looked at the statistics, it became clear how the myths associated with rape and the home were intertwined. The idea that rape happens at night, in dark alleys, in alien locations is false. It is a myth that nourishes the image of the house as a safe place, offering comfort and suppressing the threat of rape from the mind. This mythology serves a masculine interest, with its lust for the free availability of women within the sanctuary of their home. (48)

Indeed, women are typically raped in their houses, which further complicates the notion of home. Property, the standard by which human existence is measured in the materialist culture, affects societal institutions, the family including:

The family has been replaced by a couple; leisure and relaxation instead of work and family activity, are the focus. Like hotel rooms, the ‘condo’ remains anodyne, a neutral exchangeable unit. These new, non-family homeowners are not rooted in a place. Operating in a globalised, transitory world, in which the life/work balance is no longer secured by memory, community or stability, but by financial investment, condo-dwellers investing, buying and selling and leaving without a trace, as if they were never there. (78)

The family has been replaced by a couple; leisure and relaxation instead of work and family activity, are the focus. Like hotel rooms, the ‘condo’ remains anodyne, a neutral exchangeable unit. These new, non-family homeowners are not rooted in a place. Operating in a globalised, transitory world, in which the life/work balance is no longer secured by memory, community or stability, but by financial investment, condo-dwellers investing, buying and selling and leaving without a trace, as if they were never there. (78)

“For the new kind, it is the home itself which produces the homelessness.”²

Leo accentuates the complicity of architects in transformations of both the society and individual lives under the dominance of materiality and power addicts’ egomaniacal craving in dark zones of grey economy:”Rather than having a strong commitment to changing housing conditions, architects colluded with the exploitation of developers, neglecting basic human needs” (46).

“So it is with so called ‘urban planning,’ which one could be forgiven for imagining as a profession which plans the city on behalf of people, but which is more a matter of planning people on behalf of the city. Urban planning can be understood only as a staging of participation in something in which it is impossible to participate.”³

Underpinning this argument is the claim that urban planning reflects the rest of the culture in which commodity is prioritized over human life. That is precisely the reason why crime happens in Jana Leo’s Rape New York. Particularly, certain buildings are intentionally criminalized through landlords’ refusing to ensure safety of the tenants (41). Human life and death are treated as causalities in the process of commodification of everyday. Along with individual lives, subcultures are sacrificed.

Harlem jazz heyday is long over. Partly forgotten. The remaining flavor struggles puzzled by new aesthetic. Often with a smile. Many venues got turned into tourist attractions. Some persist, juggling between the preserving the heritage and conforming to the consumerist demand (for example, Sylvia’s, the Queen of Soulfood, Restaurant and Lenox Lounge). Gospel can be heard within the eroding walls of local churches (St. Martin’s Church, St. Moriah Baptist Church, somewhat less alarming is St. John’s Pentecostal Church, while Abyssinian Baptist Church and its touristy reputation keeps the walls in place, which cannot be sad for the buildings in its closest proximity).

Cultural capital is the bait for hip, well - off buyers in search for a fix for lack.

“These are the people with millions to spare but an unacknowledged anxiety that they must be hip, stylish…smart, cool. They want confirmation that they have that intangible it-ness that money can’t buy. They want to be unique, and if they can’t be unique they want at least to have something unique. Architecture can help here. Unlike almost anything else you can buy, a building has to be somewhere particular. It has an address. The cool building, on the cool street, in the cool neighborhood, in the cool city.”⁴

Commodification of rare groove is what turns neighborhoods into an economic asset. Thus, artistic, bohemian, jazzy, funky communities get invaded by developers to attract potential buyers of “somewhere particular.” In the era of postcapitalist globalized economy, when the whole world is a construction site, America is truly global: “The American dream has sacrificed equality and fraternity on the altar of liberty and profit.”⁵

Ye Stare's Puzzle Who am I? Such a question hardly makes any sense in postgradnarrative times. But if you try and respond to the catatonic stare’s puzzle, you may find yourself enriched for a couple of worthy cognitive hasanas. I am I am I am. As for me, I find little-to-no-amusement in tiring my brain with unnecessary stretching. However, I do rejoice tremendously in giving my ol’ cortex some good bouncing. For the latter reason, I reciprocate, staring back at the bottomless void.

Once upon a time in the postfuture the streets were named after the names of bands: “magazine boulevard/ bee gees avenue…oasis lane…the fall parkaway…stone roses junction…inspiral carpets warehouses.”⁶ Today it’s different. An American Prayer: Amerikkka, Amuirkey, “America takes drugs in psychic defense” ⁷…”America, Death”⁸… “America is the Utopia of modernity.”⁹ Ameri can sacrificed on the altar of profit…”I’m a product of America.”¹⁰

If we all live in an American suburb due to the global politics of “providing the wider world with the gift of democracy,”¹¹ we are all Americans “or at least a product of the Black Atlantic.”¹²

If “death is the loss of love,”¹³ we are also all dead American(s), dead Indian Celts – ”masses of exiles”¹⁴…Or ”Exile whose other name is Delayed Death”¹⁵…Or Undead… Consequently, instead of the gift from God--fucking with love¹⁶--we have “Robot fucking. Mechanical fucking. Robot love. Mechanical love. Money cause. Money cause. Mechanical causes. Possessiveness habits jealousy lack of privacy wanting wanting wanting.”¹⁷

The world is a prison because “the woman who lives her life according to nonmaterialistic ideals is the wild antisocial monster.”¹⁸ No wonder one is perplexed, confused, paralyzed:”If I knew how this society got so fucked up, maybe we’d have a way of destroying hell.”¹⁹ Maybe. But, perhaps it’s not about knowing how our lives got screwed up. Perhaps it’s not at all about knowing, but rather about believing in the “possibility inherent in impossibility.”²⁰ The dilemma of an individual as an empty signifier, living a rhetoricized life: “the wire of fire unstrung, unsung and believable (livable).”²¹ Just as Home’s London from Memphis Underground is an unreal city, a ghost town, so do New York and U.S. seem to have lost belief in rebirth from the jazz era, the boldness of the obscure countercultural charm of the Beats, fervency of the civil rights movement, the 1960s hopeful appeal, revolutionary NYC ²² downtown noise of the 1970s… 1980s…the magic of rock’n roll.²³ In other words, the vitality coming from the genuine investment in freedom have gotten dissolved. To regain it, it is necessary to realign the Constitution with the constitution of silence.²⁴ Consequently, it will reawaken the trust that “Even in the face of something like gravity, one can jump at least three or four feet in the air and even though gravity will drag us back to the earth again, it is in the moment we are three or four feet in the air that we experience true freedom.”²⁵

A redescription of freedom and liberties is only possible under the proviso that Amerikkka resumes its adolescent faith, instead of getting ossified in a merciless global exchange, strangely bringing uniformity, but not unity. In the vocabulary of street names, it translates into “Ye Gang Of Four Postfuturists Boulevard.”

: WE, the “fanatics of aesthetics and meaning, of culture, of flavor and seduction, and we who see only what is profoundly moral as beautiful and for whom only the heroic distinction between nature and culture is exciting, we who are unfailingly attached to the wonders of critical sense and transcendence”²⁶ are intrigued by the dialectic of simultaneously countering and blending with the supposed “hyperreality of everything here.”²⁷ For us, who draw inspiration from the anti-European spirit as much as we are in love with refiguring heritage and who fell in love with the anti-American dream because it is faithful to the original spirit that conceived America, the transatlantic disenchantment has been a powerful aphrodisiac, waking an unstoppable impulse for copulating with the abject lover.

What is new in America is the clash of the first level (primitive and wild) and the ‘third kind’ (the absolute simulacrum). There is no second level. This is a situation we find hard to grasp, since this is the one we have always privileged: the self-reflexive, self-mirroring level, the level of unhappy consciousness. But no vision of America makes sense without this reversal of our values; it is Disneyland that is authentic here! The cinema and TV are America’s reality! The freeways, the Safeways, the skylines, speed, and deserts – these are America, not the galleries, churches, and culture…Let us grant this country the admiration it deserves and open our eyes to the absurdity of some of our own customs. This is one of the advantages, one of the pleasures of travel. To see and feel America, you have to have had for at least one moment in some downtown jungle, in Painted Desert, or on some bend in a freeway, the feeling that Europe had disappeared. You have to have wondered, at least for a brief moment, ‘How can anyone be European?’²⁸

: How, indeed, when this is England! Here and now.

Ye Catatonic Stare: Never ever since a power greater than me good self placed me in this long chronotope have I been confronted with a reply more stupefying than this one.

0: Just because the way I was raised prevents me from depriving you of an answer, I will now engage in an endeavor seemingly beyond one’s verbal and mental capacity. Having said that, allow me to give you a hint, deciphering my bewildering thought: if the postfuture exists, it has to be now; if now exists, it has to be here; if here exists, it has to be everywhere; if omni exists, it has to be on me; if me exists, it’s gotta be wee.

Ye Catatonic Stare: This does not seem to add the odd clue to what I was expecting to be revealed.

0: Good inquirer, I have no other means to help you with that.

Ye Catatonic Stare: But…

0: Only…perhaps to insist on the remaining elements of the syntagma. Lemmie take one at a time: “gang,” for instance, is irresistibly remindful of “bang,” ain’t it?

Ye Catatonic Stare: As a matter of fact, it est.

0: Jolly good. Now, follow that string of association and you’ll very soon find yourself in a nearby sewage—at luckiest.

Ye Catatonic Stare: Is that right?

0: As this hand, eyeless moron. Listen here and think “gang” as a “mob”—capishi?

Ye Catatonic Stare: C!

0: Orajt! Let’s move on, slow-brained, mentally…whatever…

Ye Catatonic Stare: Impaired.

0: Hey, thanks for that! Now, the “gang/mob” notion is unmistakenly relatable to the concept of the band, ain’t it? The band is quite close to the word ‘group’. Now groups can be of different kinds and this is how we get to the point where it as well features certain kinship with the notion of the tribe.

Ye Catatonic Stare: I hear you…

0: Keep that in mind and follow me to the next step of this desacrilege. “Postfuture” I already explained elsewhere²⁹.Shall not go back to it even if the price was leaving you in the darkness and on your own. Now the “boulevard”. It brings a sense of urbanity to the image of savagery, wilderness, and uncivilized conduct—nature unrestrained by…well…”culture”— for the lack of a better world.

Ye Catatonic Stare: WOW! Now, why “four”?

0: Figure it out. And have a nice day!

A Nice Day in the Land of EngineZ and ErZ

…As the current is carring the boat, pictures from the distant past cover the sky. This silky screen displays the succession of space in time. However, one should not be misled to perceive such a portrayal as merely nostalgic. It is a voyage through the minds of displaced nonindividuals – uniformed, yet devoid of union. This entails ambivalent feelings, shifting from attraction to resistance with regard to the past, which makes nostalgia impossible. For example, nostalgia for a non-existent place, as Svetlana Boym in The Future of Nostalgia explains a departure of the term from its original geographical reference onto time, is impossible because we don’t find any epoch humane enough to be reclaimed.

So, are we then sick of it? Of what? “Homesick and sick of home,” as Svetlana Boym suggests in “Nostalgic Technology: Notes for an Off-Modern Manifesto.” Sick of homesickness, rather. We do not believe in being sick of home, bearing in mind the notion of home presented through the works of Wark, Leo, and Home. Sick of all sorts of projections, displacement, deferral, and mediation – the world which remembers what should be forgotten and forgets essentials for living something that could with no reservations be called life.

Forecasting through the years past, one finds oneself digging the time ahead. Played in reverse, it is a process of fludiariation or resingularized fellow-creatures in enduring patience and persistence in redescribing everything as the sine qua non of freedom. Such excavations are a call for putting an end to the escalation of the waning of affect³⁰ in the sea of fragmented, affectless, defaced entities and for the union of refaced human beings, radiating life reemerged from the death of narcistic, greedy, power-hungry consumers, ignorant of the vital ingredient for constructive human relationships--mercy, charity, grace or, simply…whatevadafuck.

"whole regions become devoted to nothing but the display, amusement and servicing of the spectacle’s governing agents. New York, Los Angeles, Paris, London have no function but as repositories for the spectacle of the wealth and the wealth of the spectacle.”³¹

0: Wass is zis, engineerZ?

E: You are here to listen to the questions--not to ask. Especially not to be the first to ask!

0: I am here to be doing wadevadafuck I want to fucking do!!

E: You may try, but what kind of effect that will have on your system is not within your power to know.

0: First, “system” has been out of my vocabulary for quite a while. Second, it (whadevadafuck it is) has never been within my power to start with. ‘Why,’ you may ask yourself in a moment of an unexpected outburst of sobriety, serenity, and sincereness. The answer you shan’t have because your assumption about power is fucking wrong.

E: If my assumption about power is wrong, you not only have no assumption, but…

0: Worse still…

E: Precisely in accord with my presumption that if the initial velocity of the body-about-to-start-moving is 0, than the expected acceleration it can develop within the space of 7 seconds can be no more than 2.89 gigamiles per nanosecond. Once the body achieves this, the energy produced from the point A to the point B cannot exceed 11J. Optimum is to be sought within the range of this limit.

0: I have no point of departure. Neither do I have the initial state of absolute passivity necessary for the acceleration you are blah-blahing about. I have none of the sine qua nons for your formulae to turn true. I have no speed, no body, no velocity, no energy, no seconds, no fucking points, no limits, no nothing whatsoever!!!

E: Alternatively you are in a state of constantly projecting your energetic potential onto either a mother, a father, a partner, or a screen.

0: Wrong! I don’t like to watch!

E: Most probably, then, that is how it used to be, if you claim that now it is no longer the case. If so, the space you will need to regain the initial state of zeroness, necessary for the optimal acceleration of 2.89 gigamiles per nanosecond shall be twice the length of the period normally assumed for such a process.

0: Not once have I stressed the specificity of non eXistanCe of the word ‘normal’ in my vocabulary. Neither do I have a slightest intention to redefine it, nor can I be less bothered to try to explain how it immobilizes your sentence’s attempt to reach my ears.

E: I am a scientist, not a linguist.

0: That fact does not change the character of your sentence. Worse, it does to your ‘normal assumptions’ no more than punctuation to my speech.

E: Your speech stretches beyond the scope of what I assume.

0: Now you are again close to restate the premise about how much longer it will all take because of the lacking passivity…here I’m running out of terminology…

E: Because certain words are missing from your dictionary in order to describe the world in the way corresponding to the one the world is.

0: You have too many words. Worse still, many of them are wrong.

E: My calculations might not be expressed in the way on a par with verbal virtuosos, but they can certainly : A) provide a sane person a sustainable guide for coping with the physical reality he lives in; B) provide a platform for predicting the future and prepare a person to act accordingly.

0: A) The fact that you use synonyms makes you neither more eloquent nor your statements more in tune with the black holes in my discursive universe; B) The illusion you have about platforms is a failure of a different order that I elaborated on elsewhere.

E: You can’t equate my verbal shortcomings with theoretical weaknesses.

0: Although seemingly a bright remark, I shall not delude myself into an idea that it can have serious consequences beyond the syntactical boundaries.

E: This is arrogant.

0: Just as I imagined—your short-span flashes of cerebral maneuvering are just that. Not only are you A) desensitized to discursive pluralism; B) incapable of avoiding ad hominem argumentation; C) misogynist, but you are --above all--hopelessly imprisoned in a belief that you have vision.

E: I claim nothing either above or underneath what I say.

0: Which is…?

E: I might be losing temper here…

0: Please, do NOT!

E: Does this mean I can resume my argument and you accept conventional terminology?

0: By no means.

• I could spend my whole life smelling the paths the feathery touch of your fingertips drew over my forehead, brows, cheekbones, chin. I could spend my whole life listening to the halo of my iris, imbued by your whisper, penetrating all the way down to the faraway corners of what-ever-it-ESSEness.

My England from Tokyo

Having happily abandoned the province of the aggressively neat-thinking gentleman, 0 was enjoying each step, accompanying the rhythm of deep breaths, stealing oxygen through the gentle rain caressing the exposed skin. Soon 0 felt tiny drops sneaking under the protecting clothing and it felt like a dreamy invasion of the friendliest foe. It felt like having an intruder in one’s once safely guarded world. But now, amidst this breezy mix of sensations, 0 was wondering what all that safety was for. Silly. Now it’s not. We inhabit a comforting world where there is “a real scarcity of alterity,”³² To 0 the world looked from that perspective had no prospects for hoping to step outside of imprisonment in one’s own skin. “Sad,” 0 thought. Then, sensing the micro-menagerie, crawling steadily over one’s once hidden parts of the body, hardly landing, more floating along the surface, 0 knew that to think of such an impossibility meant being temporarily deluded into accepting a futile vocabulary. Outside it was possible to reach. The gentleman one just was lucky enough to get rid of was rather solid proof of it. “Where did he live if not outside of himself?” 0 thought. But all did not quite fit. If his was an example of refuting the claim of the scarcity of alterity, than the world was still a desperately homogenous place, where outside it was possible to find unlikely consolation in what Baudrillard claims to be the essence of living in New York:

“Why do people live in New York? There is no relationship between them. Except for an inner electricity which results from the simple fact of their being crowded together. A magical sensation of contiguity and attraction for an artificial centrality. This is what makes it a self-attracting universe, which there is no reason to leave. There is no human reason to be here, except for the sheer ecstasy of being crowded together.”³³

Theirs is a universe like that in Edvard Munch’s art: there human destinies are like distant planets whose orbits never coincide. If they do, they clash. Indeed, 0 was witnessing such a clash of one’s own orbit coinciding with the other’s – slowly progressing from the surface to the layers under one’s skin. Why didn’t the engineer’Z living outside of his own psyche feel like a pleasurably controversial clash 0 was immersing oneself in? Perhaps because something was missing from that pattern of ‘reaching out’.

Indeed, this could as well be the reason for the ‘wrongness’ of certain ‘reachings out’. To step out properly more is necessary:“…those qualities of humanity, of hospitality, of kindly humour which belonged to an older day.”³⁴ And / or, to be “An infant outside of reason, speaking reasonably about the unreasonable.”³⁵

What if all this hospitable, humane, humorous infant-speaking-reasonable-about-the unreasonable, leads to the allegedly desirable clash of orbits? What if such a clash, along with bringing distant planets together, also triggers destruction of a kind? Something gets destroyed in such an encounter? So what! Screw it. Something else emerges.

Indeed. That is why one lives in New York, where all is not about satisfying the tribal drive and free publicity proving one’s existence, where existence has nothing to do with proving in the first place:

The importance of New York is beyond academia, architecture, business, art or any other field. It is the unexpected reactions from strangers and the occasional encounters that create close relationships that make the city significant...These people, in this New York, create a system of chance in which one finds what one needs when looking for something else. ³⁶

Or, “Either you had no purpose/Or the purpose is beyond the end you figured/And is altered in fulfillment.”³⁷ Whad-ever-de-fuck it ESSE.



Very FI

Walking further along the road, the turquoise mixture continued to fuel 0‘s non-system, guiding one towards the spot of the journey of whose existence one was completely unaware. Yellow breaths were redeeming--restoring one’s dismayed consciousness, disarrayed by the queer dialogue with the clean-brained gentleman. Easy steps. Long distances. Road shrinking under the soles. Purple sunset gradually being taken over by the indigo king. Some pattern above! And the pulse of the spheres, stretching beyond the visible in sync with whatever-here-and-there.

• On a night like this I see the pair of eyes you left for me. Thank you.

The dawn found 0 standing on the shore, spilling an eye over the effervescent, fleecy lace along the line of contact. Gentle waves, stroking the sand. And Singer’s son, rising shyly but surely from behind the fading darkness.

• Who am I? Such a question makes no sense on a morning like this. If the urge to, nevertheless, hear the question persists, I sometimes slyly answer it. At times I expel myself from the debate, while, in fact, I feel at home when I choose the remaining of the three options.

And the dusk like this was certainly the right place to exercise the potency of that device. The scarlet canvas poured a gleam of vacuous treasure over whatever – could - welcome - its-gift. Yet 0 felt a discordant presence, creeping behind one’s back.

• There are too many relative clauses in your sentence.
• Sometimes I think that the panic about an increase of the planet’s population is just an expression of the fear of the escalation of loneliness.
• “Beginning in the seventeenth century we tried to substitute a love of truth for a love of God, treating the world described by science as a quasi divinity. Beginning at the end of the eighteenth century we tried to substitute a love of ourselves for a love of a scientific truth, a worship of our own deep spiritual or poetic nature, treated as one more quasi divinity.”³⁸
• The colors turquoise and yellow are all I have as a response, if need be.
• “I take Derrida’s importance to lie in his having had the courage to unite the private and the public, to stop trying to bring together a quest for private autonomy and an attempt at public resonance and utility. He privatizes the sublime, having learned from the fate of his predecessors that the public can never be more than beautiful.”³⁹
• The only heritage I have is this pair of wild eyes that the man who died left for a cold season of the heart.
• “The referent is lifted, but the reference remains”?⁴⁰
• Never had darkness found permanent residency in the character of the man who died and whose legacy I live now.
• “the tendency…to hide from the light it can cast on itself.”⁴¹
• Temporary blindness…or temporary insanity…call it what you will…
• ”Unmediated expression is a philosophical impossibility.”⁴²
• That indeed is one of the greatest philosophical truths.
• “And that the fascination exerted by the ‘is’, or the ‘what is’ in the question ‘what is literature’ is worth what the hymen is worth–that is, not exactly nothing–when for example it causes one to die laughing.”⁴³

0: Are you a monk or something…? I mean, I can see you live here on this beach like a fucking recluse, hidden from the rest of the world…How-da-fuck-do you explain your existence?

• “…a repudiation of the very idea of anything – mind or matter, self or world – having an intrinsic nature to be expressed or represented.”⁴⁴

0: Why-da-fuck are you then wasting your time babbling about the things you don’t believe in?

• That’s a good question, but still makes me suspect that what you believe in is what was imposed on you to believe.

0: Interesting and potentially brainy observation, yet insufficiently flexible to explain how come I got ‘fooled’ to believe these and not some other beliefs.

• How do you explain it?

0: I do not. As Baudrillard understands it in Radical Alterity: “A snob does not claim any universality and has no principal interiority. For a snob, there is no psychological interiorization of values, signs, or forms; there is only affectation” (67). In Guillaume’s vernacular, it translates into:”…underidentification, a retreat of the subject into codes like the forms of politeness”(58). Although Baudrillard disapproves of Guillame’s emphasis on the snob’s absence of subjectivity, the moment of convergence between them regarding the world of a snob/dandy is:"…a world where the rule is preferred to reality”(59)⁴⁵ In the jargon of Guy Debord, it is “…a world where there is no room for verification.”⁴⁶

• Perhaps...

0: Perhaps the world in which no verification is necessary, but also the world in which passionate, in-depth intellectual, emotional, and spiritual engagement has been demonized. In When Surface Was Depth (2002) Michael Bracewell criticizes the 1980s and 1990s infantilized consumerist culture and the heresy of digging under the surface:”…the nurturing of our inner child⁴⁷ by any means possible has achieved a new fashionableness – at the expense, perhaps, of our inner adult” (124). It is the world which cannot differentiate between game and play ⁴⁸ - rule and reality. Or so it seems. Without a possibility to verify it. Or freed from the necessity to verify it.

• “Without the gamble on welcome, no door can be opened when freedom knocks.”⁴⁹

0: Yeah! And Rox!

On Rocks

0: On the futility and wrongness of presumptions I elaborated elsewhere, but it does not preclude my continuing the exposé about the world we just started the conversation about. Having said that, lemmie add that it is also the world in which rock’n’roll ceases to be an opportunity for obtaining “a bare minimum of existential Territories.”⁵⁰ Instead, mortgage turns rock’n’roll into jailhouse rock “This estate is an experiment, an invisible open prison that the inmates mistakenly perceived as their home.”⁵¹

Got it! Such home is the housing project in Lynne Tillman’s No Lease On Life (1998). Elizabeth, the antiheroine of the novel, is overwhelmingly disturbed by the noisy, filthy, desensitized, dispassionate, inconsiderate neighbors, junkies who use the halls as shooting galleries, drunk, nocturnal passers by, whose vomit is the trace of their existence. It is the Lower East Side that smells the same as the one in Kathy Acker’s Blood and Guts in High School. It is the same viral blood dripping from the needles and scars. The same garbage. The same dirt:

Tyron would clean the halls and stairs. But since he hadn’t been properly hired – the Big G didn’t know or wouldn’t approve, Hector should be doing it, it was his job – Tyron didn’t have access to sink and clean water. He’d mop the six floors with the same bucket of dirty water. The dirt was pushed around, spread from corner to corner. Elizabeth always thanked him, because the floors looked a little better, the dirt was diluted, thinned into dark streaks. (101)

0: Precisely. That is the diluted world of the underprivileged for whom the slogan ‘it’s a small world’ makes little-to-no sense because they have to clean it (79). The world of the ‘losers’ ruled by peculiar, merciless paradoxes, with no room for compassion:”There’s no sympathy for failure and no sympathy for failed suicides who end up crippled. Failure doesn’t negate failure” (75).

I hear you. Bastards! Dissolved communication is suggested through Tillman’s use of jokes. They cut the narrative and make prominent the watered down wit infused in the life of the neighborhood. Jokes here illustrate the numbness about which Baudrillad writes:

Laughter on American television has taken the place of the chorus in Greek tragedy…In other countries, the business of laughing is left to the viewers. Here, their laughter is put on the screen, integrated into the show. It is the screen that is laughing and having a good time. You are simply left alone with your consternation. ⁵²

Likewise, the jokes do not affect the characters because the “tenants pretended to be deaf and blind to each other.”⁵³

0: Fucking right on! Did I just tell you about the blessing of temporary blindness!

Wasn’t I the one who talked about temporary blindness?

0: That should be a wake up call for someone (Õ)!

I was just gonna tell you about brief moments of revelation.

0: I'm all ears.

They compulsively spend their lives in the halls, on the pavements, or looking on the street through windows. This is how the underprivileged participate in the culture of waning affect⁵⁴. Yet, even in such a state of displacement from oneself, there are brief moments of introspective revelation:

A friend of Roy’s told him a story. The friend was a reformed or recovering addict. One night when he was still getting high, he was waiting on line in a drug store, a hole in the wall farther east. A woman behind him said, Isn’t it funny? The more I do, the more Iwant. Roy’s friend repeated the story to Roy. His friend said, She didn’t know she was a junkie.⁵⁵

Sure it arouses no excitement in the interlocutor:”Roy wasn’t surprised by that. He thought people were stupid.”⁵⁶

0: Like fuck! The anesthetized tissue of this community, we are led to imagine, could not get resensitized by merely improving the economic aspect of their lives – the postfuture is the postufuture, no matter what we think about it. Elizabeth seems to be aware of that:

People who could afford to buy everything were miserable about something. There’s always something missing. Things were missing in Elizabeth’s life. They weren’t misplaced. In any time or under any regime, it would be the same. Elizabeth couldn’t replace what was lost, and what wasn’t lost may never have existed to begin with. Everyone was dissatisfied, even if they didn’t have much to complain about. Once deprived, always deprived. (23)

This limboid NA / AA determinism is an inverted portrait of the radically exoticized other. Unlike Japan, persisting allegedly due to its inherent versatility and absolute hospitality, these aloof neighbors are not very good hosts. The inner Japan is a product of the domasticated and transferred outside. In contrast, the East Village alienation makes the outside input stay on the surface because it cannot be digested. If swallowed, it is vomited. The face of the other in the world of the diluted spirit looks like the face of the street--incommensurably distant, hostile, threatening, uninspiring, and ugly. Did anybody mention genuine intimacy?

No. Because, as Lynne Tillman writes in her short story “Living With Contradictions” (2002), it is “something people used to talk about before commercials. Now there’s nothing to say” (82). But there is a lot to watch. And feel, too. Just because commodification of everything has extinguished one’s ability to vocalize intimacy by no means implies that the need for love and affection is gone. Or love and affection themselves for that matter. Rather, they are muted, which only testifies about severe violation of one’s right to be alive. It should be admitted, however, that contemporary culture has put some effort in redeeming our crippled souls:”People are intimate with their analysts” (82). But that comes with a price. Couch sessions are not for the dispossessed – they look for redemption on the street. Those who can afford talking cure gain pleasure from a temporary relief and epiphanies through which they successfully (miraculously at that) reach the hidden, secret inner unknown. Then they transform it into something which, after the analyst acknowledges and approves of, obtains the status of the legitimately rationalized, verbalized unconscious.

People use that knowledge to overcome hardships in their lives. Successfully they abandon unsuccessful relationships and free themselves from the oh-so-obsolete commitment. They, for some reason, also continue living a life deprived of itself. Perhaps because, as Tillman reflects, one’s still “An infant outside of reason, speaking reasonably about the unreasonable” (84). Or perhaps we gave things the wrong names:” Calling love desire doesn’t change the need” (84). As the title of the story suggests, there is something paradoxical about the relationship between the way we feel / think and the way we speak about it. One wonders whether it is because “language follows change and there [isn’t] any language to use” (81). But that’s oh-so-antiquated “mirror” thinking. One feels obliged to speak in the spirit of the “post-lamp” age and discoursize the need. But for some reason it does not work. Concurrently, it troubles us. But it’s a “pleasurable contradiction and it [is] against all reason” (84).

Or perhaps neither against nor for, but off-reason. So we can respond to our thirsty souls and to the spirit of the culture in which we live. Only in slang, so to say. This parallels Svetlana Boym’s theorizing from “Nostalgic Technology: Notes for an Off-Modern Manifesto,” telling about the analogy between the erroneousness of the presumably perfect technology and the fallible human nature. The fact that computers freeze, printers break, scanners won’t produce an image, in a way proves that errare humanum est. This indirectly informs our capacities to reanimate the muted. That opens an off-modern avenue to be walked, neither quixotically fighting the technological Goliath, nor sheepishly following the commandments. Instead, an off-modern, untrodden path, should allow us to “sinfully” speak of love after it couldn’t disappear, having successfully been verbalized on the couch.

It comforts us because our fallen nature feels no longer as a weakness. It brings detectable fulfillment. But, for some reason, the muted cry persists. The subtonic groove whispers that it’s not all what human nature is about. There’s more to it. Only if we proceed laterally, through the “exploration of the side alleys,”[29] shall we find that “it’s only human to err” should not be confusedly equated with “to be human is to err.” Because esse too humanum est.

You're my guy! Õ!



Tuesday, May 4th, 2010 Don’t need you to be the balm wrapping my body with the warmth of the summer night air by the ancient flow. Don’t need you to be the snow mummifying me. Don’t need you to be the sand mudding our entangled legs. Don’t need you to be my underwater boogieman. Don’t need you to dig me from my grave at the foot of the mountain. Don’t need you to be the voice purpling my skin through the orangy sunrise. Don’t need you to be the end of my fragmentation. Don’t need you to be my breezy companion on the rafting down the diamond stream. Don’t need you to be my skillfully hidden fear. Don’t need you to assure me that I have forearms. Don’t need you to show me how sharp a penknife can be. Don’t want you to be my favorite herbal tea. Don’t want you to be an agonizing ghost longing to become human. Don’t need your eyelids to close my mouth when I fall asleep. Don’t need your shins to oil my railings. Don’t need to hear your whisper yelling a storm into my backbone. Don’t want to eat the amber dripping from your earlobes. Don’t want to stuff myself with your case full of chocolate. Don’t want you not to exist so I can find you. Don’t want you to bitterly loath my not needing you. Don’t want to have you help me realize my pur pose. Don’t want to run for four. Don’t want to be a runaway so you can chase me. Don’t want you to tell me how to become happy even if I don’t have you. Don’t want to hear your false accusations. Don’t want to be any of the fake ideas you have about yourself. Don’t need to see what it means to be silent while encircled with triangular raging noise. Don’t need no body to show me that there is something in there worth seeking. Don’t need no body to reelly be my repressed refiguring. Don’t need you in any sense knowable to the human mind. Nor do I need my own beak to be your cloud’s eye. But you are allowed to rape me.

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¹ Nedeljkov, Me Up.
² Ken Wark, “Architecture.” Totality.tv. n.d. n.pag. Web. 8 May 2010.
³ Wark, “City.”Totality.tv. n. pag.
⁴ Wark, “Architecture.” Totality.tv. n. pag.
⁵ Leo (Rape 92).
⁶ Noon (Needle in the Groove 213-216).
⁷ Iggy Pop, “Neon Forest.” Brick by Brick. Virgin, 1990.
⁸ Acker (Empire 163).
⁹ Home (Memphis Underground 31).
¹⁰ Iggy Pop, “Cold Metal.” Instinct. A&M Records, 1988.
¹¹ Home (Memphis Underground 258).
¹² Ibid., 31.
¹³ Acker (Pussy King 159).
¹⁴ Acker (Empire 163).
¹⁵ Acker (Pussy King 29). Emphasis original.
¹⁶ Acker (Blood and Guts 69).
¹⁷ Ibid. 98.
¹⁸ Ibid. 66.
¹⁹ Ibid. 66.
²⁰ Scholder (The Diaries of David Wojnarowicz 129).
²¹ Ibid. Also, see Knezevic, “Words’n Birds and Breathaches.” n. pag.
²² Nedeljkov, This Is Radio NYC.
²³ See Guattari’s where he presents an idea about the significance of rock’n roll for obtaining “a bare minimum of existential territories” (Three Ecologies 33).
²⁴ Eliot (“Little Gidding” 190).
²⁵ Wojnarowicz (Close to the Knives 41).
²⁶ Baudrillard (America 122).
²⁷ Ibid.
²⁸ Ibid., 104-5.
²⁹ Nedeljkov, “Creation, Resistance, Refacement: Remixing the Transatlantic Culture Flows at the Turn of the Millennium” (work-in-progress) and “Radical and Other Faces of the City in the Age of Global Defacement” (work-in-progress).
³⁰ See Fredric Jameson Postmodernism, or, the Logic of Late Capitalism (1991).
³¹ Wark, “City.” Totality.tv. n. pag.
³² Baudrillard and Guillaume (Radical Alterity 48).
³³ Baudrillard (America 15).
³⁴ Joyce (Dubliners 194).
³⁵ Tillman (This Is Not It 84).
³⁶ Leo (Rape 123).
³⁷ Eliot (“Little Gidding” 33-35).
³⁸ Rorty (C. I. S. 22).
³⁹ Ibid., 155.
⁴⁰ Derrida (Dissemination 211).
⁴¹ De Man (Blindness and Insight 15).
⁴² Ibid., 9.
⁴³ Derrida (Dissemination 223).
⁴⁴ Rorty, (C.I.S. 4).
⁴⁵ Emphasis original. A reference to Kojève’s, Barthes’s and others’fascination by this phenomenon.
⁴⁶ Debord (Comments 48).
⁴⁷ Presumably Bracewell , assuming the childlike/childish distinction, is referring to the latter.
⁴⁸ Drawing on the legacy of the Situationist International and the idea of experimental behavior as a form of a permanent play. Wark ( 50 Years of Recuperation 44) .
⁴⁹ Steiner (Real Presences 156).
⁵⁰ Through ‘existential Territories’ Guattari is addressing the singular, idiosyncratic, sensible, andfinite. (Three Ecologies 75).
⁵¹ Home (M.U. 110).
⁵² Baudrillard (America 49).
⁵³ Tillman (No Lease On Life 154).
⁵⁴ Jameson (Postmodernism).
⁵⁵ Tillman (No Lease On Life 32).
⁵⁶ Ibid., 32.

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Works Cited

Acker, Kathy. Blood and Guts in High School. Groove Atlantic. 1978. Print.
---. Great Expectations. New York: Grove Press, 1982. Print.
---. Empire of the Senseless. New York: Grove Press, 1988. Print.
---. Pussy King of the Pirates. New York: Grove Press, 1996. Print.

Baudrillard, Jean. America. Trans. Chris Turner. London: Verso, 1988. Print.

Baudrillard, Jean and Guillaume, Marc. Radical Alterity. Trans. Ames Hodges. New York: Semiotext(e), 2008. Print.

Eliot, Thomas Stearns. “Little Gidding.” 1942. Four Quartets. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovic, 1971. Print.

Debord, Guy. Comments on the Society of the Spectacle. London: Verso, 1998. Print.

De Man, Paul. Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism. Wlad Godzich and Jochen Schulte-Sasse, eds. Theory and History of Literature. Vol. 7. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983. Print.

Derrida, Jacques. Dissemination. Trans. Barbara Johnson. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981. Print.

Guattari, Felix. The Three Ecologies. London and New York: The Athlone Press, 2000. Print.

Home, Stewart. Memphis Underground. London: Snowbooks. 2007. Print.

Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke University Press, 1991. Print.

Joyce, James. Dubliners. 1915. Andrew Goodwyn, ed. Cambridge: CUP, 1995. Print.

Knezevic, Nikolina. “Words’n Birds and Breathaches.” LIES/ISLE. Issue 1. N.d. N. pag. Web. 8 May, 2010. http://liesisle.com/issue01/wordsnbirds.html

Leo, Jana. Rape New York. London: Book Works, 2009. Print.

Nedeljkov, Nikolina. Me Up. Web. 9 May, 2010.

Nedeljkov, Nikolina. This Is Radio NYC. Web. 9 May 2010.

Nedeljkov, Nikolina. “Creation, Resistance, Refacement: Remixing the Transatlantic Culture Flows at the Turn of the Millennium.” Work-in-progress.

Pop, Iggy. “Neon Forest.” Brick by Brick. Virgin, 1990. CD.

Pop, Iggy. “Cold Metal.” Instinct. A&M Records, 1988. CD.

Rorty, Richard. Contingency, Irony and Solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Print.

Scholder, Amy, ed. In the Shadow of the American Dream: The Diaries of David Wojnarowicz. New York: Groove Atlantic, 1999. Print.

Steiner, George. Real Presences. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989. Print.

Tillman, Lynne. This Is Not It. New York: Distributed Art Publishers, 2002. Print.

Tillman, Lynne. No Lease On Life. San Diego, New York, London: A Harvest Book Harcourt Brace & Company, 1998. Print.

Wojnarowicz, David. Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration. New York: Vintage Books, 1991. Print.

Wark, McKenzie. 50 Years of Recuperation of The Situationist International. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2008. Print.

Wark, McKenzie. Totality.tv. n.d. Web. 8 May 2010.

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