Gene Clark - YouTube

Gene Clark - YouTube

late Derida quote

Returned to Derrida’s last interview, carried out a few weeks before his death, in which he marked his “preoccupation” with the question of “Who is going to inherit, and how? […] When it comes to thought, the question of survival has taken on absolutely unforeseeable forms.” Derrida remained committed to being ‘on the left’ which meant (as he puts it in a letter to Granel in 1971) that the risk of giving an “impression of apoliticism, or rather 'apraxia’”, was tied to the strategic requirement to avoid appearing to take a reactionary position in criticizing current orthodoxies on Marx: “I’ll never fall into anti-communism, so I’m shutting my mouth.”

i.m. James Tate

The Critical Pilgrims

                                             
                                                                                 for Jim Tate

I want the barbarism that is for me a rejuvenation

— Gaugin, in a letter to Strindberg, Feb.5, 1895

My fiancée had long been fascinated with the space left by hanging frames and was in her element sniffing the blanched lines beneath a clock face. It was hard-going getting there

before we could arrive as usual and then only to be sprayed by

a group of flushed guests who looked like they should be

painted wearing official tags made from whale skin.

One upwardly-mobile male with goffered wrists grabbed me by the arm and introduced me to his widowed au pair. She was wearing the kind of window dress one remembers quite well

from Worthing’s red-light district. “We’ve had quite enough of that young man,” she spat, with the nodding smile, responding to my puzzled glance toward the charming Bohemians

creating obscene images from caviar.

Startled by peals of laughter from the living room I turned in time to see Irene pirouette over a root stain where the portrait of a young Bolshevik troubadour used to be, much to the delight of our hosts, the critical pilgrims. And so they had me show the pictures I have had to carry about my person since puberty, with the same nodding smile sparked this one wild time by sucking profoundly on marshmallows dipped in their martinis.

“That was one of my classmates just went in there,” I gasped to the remaining passion plant. I’d kept one eye with her,

out of Irene’s way, all night. Ah, she was beautiful in that prospect, draped seductively over the bowl in a topos birthed by

a preMannerist memento mori. Dropping punches

with unexpected abandon.

If there was still some semblance of a queue for the bathroom I found the circulation of laminated World War I drafts enough to dissuade us from going in. And besides, they tore down this little scene we were painting, having decided it would clash with the lobsters reading their history books on blue tiles.

I think you’ll understand quite well when I tell you I have had

a hard job convincing others I have been the centre of similar parties. Irene has a habit of destroying every image we can purchase that seems close to capturing my feeling for a time

when anything crass would do. When one could finish one’s tequila before our intended came back wearing nothing

but a pilgrim’s chap stick.

'André Gorz & the Philosophical Foundation of the Political' by Dick Howard: superdooper commentary, tipped with quintexistential revolutionary praxis, bapped n' battered firm (no butter) in language yous can truly tuck into.  http://dickhoward.com/…/andre-gorz-the-philosophical-found…/

David Harvey quote

When famines do occur (as, sadly, they too often do), it is invariably due to social and political causes. The last great famine in China, which may have killed some 20 million people at the time of the ‘great leap forward’, occurred precisely because China was then by political choice isolated from the world market. Such an event could not now happen in China. This should be a salutary lesson for all those who place their anti-capitalist faith on the prospects for local food sovereignty, local self-sufficiency and decoupling from the global economy. Freeing ourselves from the chains of an international division of labour organised for the benefit of capital and the imperialist powers is one thing, but decoupling from the world market in the name of anti-globalisation is a potentially suicidal alternative. The central contradiction in capital’s use of the division of labour. Under the rule of capital, agriculture tends to be monocultural, extractive and, of course, perpetually expanding under the pressures of exponential growth. David Harvey, Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism, Verso, 2014, p. 124-5.

Contemporary capitalism entails a certain decomposition of the boundaries between the normal and the abnormal in a population threatened with permanent structural unemployment and thus potentially ‘anti-social’ to an intense degree.  With this in mind, we must study the feelings of disturbed and disordered black youth who are emasculated by police patrols in areas of great poverty if we are to understand why the police might shoot to kill them, but we must also try to understand what system of ideology, repression, and economics police officers are enforcing when they normalize potential criminal behaviour amongst youth in certain neighbourhoods and not others.

In a chapter on the 1979 Iran hostage crisis in her classic study Epic Encounters: Culture, Media, and the U.S. Interests in the Middle East, 1945-2000 Melani McAlister writes:

Terrorism's presence on the world stage enabled a narrative that constructed the United States as an imperiled private sphere and the Islamic Middle East as the preeminent politicized space from which terrorism affected its invasions For more than a decade that narrative had worked to produce a type of American identity, defined by the production of individuals who were 'free of politics.' Within this world of vulnerable families and lovers, terrorism threatened precisely what ha to be threatened in order to establish the disinterested morality of the state's militarized response in the international arena.

Whalen on War

Philip Whalen wrote in 'The War Poem for Diane di Prima,' 3^rd section, called 'The War. The Empire':

When the Goths came into Rome
They feared the Senators were gods
Old men, each resolutely throned at his own house door.
When they finally come to Akron, Des Moines, White Plains,
The nomads will laugh as they dismember us.
Other nations watching will applaud.
They'll be no indifferent eye, nary a disinterested ear.
We'll screech and cry.

I say it with a sad sense of the disparity between us. I am not included within the pale of this glorious anniversary! Your high independence only reveals the immeasurable distance between us. The blessings in which you, this day, rejoice, are not enjoyed in common.-The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity and independence, bequeathed by your fathers, is shared by you, not by me. The sunlight that brought life and healing to you, has brought stripes and death to me. This Fourth July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn. Frederick Douglass: Fourth of July Oration, 1852

Kristeva on Narcissus

“Narcissus is not located in the objectal or sexual dimension. He does not love youths of either sex, he loves neither men nor women. He Loves, he loves Himself–active and passive, subject and object. The object of Narcissus is psychic space; it is representation itself, fantasy. But he does not know it, and he dies. If he knew it he would be an intellectual, a creator of speculative fiction, an artist, writer, psychologist, psychoanalyst.” – Kristeva, Tales of Love (p. 116)

classic Arbeiter-Radfahrer-Band Solidarität poster:

oneohionow.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/budget-summary.pdf

oneohionow.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/budget-summary.pdf

 “We've got to face the fact that some people say you fight fire best with fire, but we say you put fire our best with water. We say you don't fight racism with racism. We're gonna fight racism with solidarity.” – Fred Hampton, Chicago, Valentine's Day, 1969

Last Words from Montmartre

Rocked n' revived by Qiu Miaojin's devastating (literally) Last Words from Montmartre: part lesbian love letter, part fiction, part memoir, part suicide note, part sharp missal from a sweet soul sister sent straight through my heart.... “Loyalty is not a passive, negative guardianship of the gate – loyalty arises from the complete and utter opening and subsequent blazing forth of one's inner life. It is an active, determined desire that demands total self-awareness and deliberate engagement.” (p.20) “Human nature has its fatal weaknesses, but 'love' means embracing the whole of human nature, the bad within the good, the benign within the malicious, the beautiful within within the tragic. 'Love' is the experience of this whole, its unfinished parts, including those of one's own in relation to those of the other.” (p. 141)