Giorgio Morandi
When a writer gets described as writing the same story again and again, the tone’s usually accusatory, like it’s a bad thing to be noticed doing. But here is this guy, Giorgio Morandi, who painted the same objects arranged in still life again and again. He got really into these objects and seeing what he could do, how he could render what was really there, and what was really there–light–was always changing.
Magic the Gathering: Fear, Crumble, Lifetap
I don’t give a fuck: I like Magic. I haven’t played in at least ten years, but even just off my memories of the game up to, oh, 18, and later in the online versions, I will attest that MtG is the greatest and most intricately strategic and customizable game ever created. Fuck chess and backgammon. Magic is a universe where not only are there so many possible utilities under the array of spells and creatures you can involve in any given match, but also a ridiculous level of inner-tuning, logic, semantic, prediction, counteractivity, and innovation of nuts and bolts. It is the ultimate rendering of a game where to be successful you must decide your approach, construct your apparatus, and operate that apparatus under the manner of luck and the countless structures employed by each opponent. There are so many fucking spells.
Today I’m bored again and found my old archives of cards I have left after I sold most of them off when I quit in high school. I decided to pull 3 cards out at random and write about their utility. It seems to me to have a lot to do with manipulation of other entities, like words and systems of words.
Oh, and also, kiss my ass, Magic rules.
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August 12th, 2010 / 2:11 pm
August 12th, 2010 / 2:11 pm
Sean Lovelace—
How long can you comfortably go without writing (drafting/revising/working your words)? Or: How many days before you feel the tingle/heat/flutter/gnaw/hiss/urge?
On Influence: Anger Lynch Cage Rauschenberg
The first Kenneth Anger film I saw I think was Kustom Kar Kommandos. It was the first piece on a VHS compilation of his movies that my Satanic friend R. had. R. was a cousin of a kid I’d gone to elementary and middle school with, J., who one day I remember showing me a Polaroid of his other cousin having sex with a dog. We were on the smaller bus that went from the elementary school to my house, which was about a mile and a half. J. thought it was funny. I also first saw the word fuck written on that bus I think, though I didn’t say it out loud or know what it meant for another year.
Kustom Kar Kommandos was filmed in 1965 and was supposed to be the first of an eight part film about erotic teenagers and machines. Showing of this first section failed to help Anger get the money he needed to make the rest, so he gave up. Me and R. and another also Satanic kid, L., (I was not Satanic) watched the film that first time in the “play room” of my parents’ house, sitting all of us together on a futon. The play room was my first bedroom in the house but since my parents had built on, it now just kept all the old toys and games and other crap we never really used. By this point the room was basically storage. Today it still has several boxes full of junk I never unboxed after my loft got hit by the first tornado to land on downtown Atlanta, right on me.
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August 9th, 2010 / 2:55 pm
August 9th, 2010 / 2:55 pm
“The camels’ smell was also a bone of contention”
The stupendous fictioneer and performance artist Ben Hersey was just telling me about some forgotten camels. Apparently, back before he was President of the Confederacy, Jefferson Davis was Franklin Pierce’s Secretary of War, and he was convinced by some camel enthusiasts in the U.S. Army—veterans of conflicts with those nasty Native Americans in Florida—that camels would be a badass idea for soldiers in the Southwest. So Davis ordered some dudes off to Tunis to buy some camels. You can read more about the camel episode, but just imagine the spectacle of these pre-Civil War American soldiers bumbling around Northern Africa, haggling with camel dealers. It makes you want a Drunk History episode at least. It makes you wonder what other excellent narratives are floating around out there, recessed from canonical history for being too ridiculous or convoluted to explain. To fit. What are some of your favorite offshoots from history? After Google buys history, will this era be known for its “narrative neutrality?” Do we have nook and cranny concerns? Isn’t it fun on any storytelling level to break “history,” exposing everything as the subjective, harebrained, non-narrative shitstorm that experience really is? How long will it take someone to say “rhizome” if we talk about this? Should we take a shot when someone says it? Are histrionics truer than history? After the camels turned out to be a bust as military equipment, they were sold to zoos, circuses, and private ranchers. Why didn’t they work? Why didn’t camels become part of the military glory we call History?
Aleister Crowley on Writing
“Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.”
“I have never grown out of the infantile belief that the universe was made for me to suck.”
“The ordinary man looking at a mountain is like an illiterate person confronted with a Greek manuscript.”
“To me a book is a message from the gods to mankind; or, if not, should never be published at all. A message from the gods should be delivered at once. It is damnably blasphemous to talk about the autumn season and so on. How dare the author or publisher demand a price for doing his duty, the highest and most honorable to which a man can be called?”
“There are hardly half a dozen writers in England today who have not sold out to the enemy. Even when their good work has been a success, Mammon grips them and whispers: ‘More money for more work.’”
“Falsehood is invariably the child of fear in one form or another.”
“Ordinary morality is only for ordinary people.”
“With the Dagger destroyeth He.”
Grace Jones on Writing
“God I’m scary. I’m scaring myself.”
“Models are there to look like mannequins, not like real people. Art and illusion are supposed to be fantasy.”
“When I started modelling, I’d raise my arms and it was all muscle and all the other models had nothing. Really, everybody thought I was a man. I don’t have to do much to have muscles. It’s just genetic.”
“I also think that men need to be penetrated.”
“Now when I enter a carriage, it almost empties. But there’s always one brave enough to stay.”
“I’VE LOOKED THE DEVIL IN THE FACE, AND GOD, AND SOMEHOW I’VE FOUND A BALANCE. BUT BEING EXTREME IS AT THE SAME TIME A BALANCE – ONE EXTREME BALANCES THE OTHER”
“As a model one is forced to spend a lot of time in front of the mirror and I just started to freak out, like I was going on the other side of the mirror. So I moved every mirror out of my house when I stopped modeling.”
“A legend is someone who has died.”
On Lady Gaga being a copycat: “I really don’t think of her at all. I go about my business.”
“I get bored. I provoke things to happen without even realizing it. I just follow my instincts. I don’t think about it, really.”
“Without daaaancing, it’s a business meeting.”
“Use, don’t abuse.”
On gibberish: “It’s not a made-up language. It relates to everyone… Only the people who are in it.”
“If you take it just for partying, that’s when it goes pear-shaped.”