Yearly Archives: 2006

(on finishing proust)

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“Disappointment is a fundamental moment of the search or of apprenticeship: in each realm of signs, we are disappointed when the object does not give us the secret we were expecting. And disappointment itself is pluralist, variable according to each line. There are few things that are not disappointing the first time they are seen. For the first time is the time of inexperience; we are not yet capable of distinguishing the sign from the object, and the object interposes and confuses the signs. Disappointment on first hearing Vinteuil, on first meeting Bergotte, on first seeing the Balbec church. And it is not enough to return to things a second time, for voluntary memory and this very return offer disadvantages analogous to those that kept us the first time from freely enjoying the signs (the second stay at Balbec is no less disappointing than the first, from other aspects).

(Gilles Deleuze, Proust & Signs, trans. Richard Howard, p. 34)

the climate

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I myself like the climate of New York
I see it in the air up between the street
You use a worn-down cafeteria fork
But the climate you don’t use stays fresh and neat.
Even we people who walk about in it
We have to submit to wear too, get muddy,
Air keeps changing but the nose ceases to fit
And sleekness is used up, and the end’s shoddy.
Monday, you’re down; Tuesday, dying seems a fuss
An adult looks new in the weather’s motion
The sky is in the streets with the trucks and us,
Stands awhile, then lifts across land and ocean.
We can take it for granted that here we’re home
In our record climate I look pleased and glum.

Edwin Denby, originally published in In Public, in Private, 1948, collected in Dance Writings and Poetry.

Also: MP3 (0:56, 889kb), from Edwin Denby’s page at Pennsound.

(see also: this Jacket feature.)

how to proceed in the arts

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“13. Youth wants to burn the museums. We are in them – now what? Better destroy the odors of the zoo. How can we paint the elephants and hippopotamuses? Embrace the Bourgeoisie. One hundred years of grinding out teeth have made us tired. How are we to fill the large empty canvas and the end of the large empty loft? You do have a loft, don’t you, man?”

(Frank O’Hara & Larry Rivers, “How to Proceed in the Arts” (formatted dreadfully, that link), written 1952, published 1961)

locus solus industries 002

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Locus Solus Industries continues apace. Here is our second t-shirt:

capitalism t-shirt

Also suitable for many occasions, perhaps even more than the last one.

But: alas. Say the good people at Cafepress:

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mnemotechne

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“And sometimes an hour of sleep is a paralytic stroke after which we must regain the use of our limbs, learn to speak again. Will is not enough. We have slept too long, we have ceased to exist. Waking is barely experienced, without consciousness, as a pipe might experience the turning-off of a tap. This is followed by a life more inanimate than that of a jelly-fish; one might think one had been dredged up from the depths of the sea, or released from prison, if one could think anything at all. But then the goddess Mnemotechne leans out from heaven and offers us, in the form of ‘habit of calling for coffee’, the hope of resurrection. But the sudden gift of memory is not always so simple. One often has at hand, in those first minutes when one is letting oneself slip towards awakening, a range of different realities from which one thinks one can choose, like taking a card from a pack. It is Friday morning and one is coming back from a walk, or else it is tea-time at the seaside. The idea of sleep and that one is in bed in one’s nightshirt is often the last to occur. Resurrection does not come immediately, you think you have rung, you haven’t, you turn over insane ideas in your mind. Movement alone restores thought, and when you have actually pressed the electric bell-push, you can say, slowly but clearly, ‘It must be ten o’clock. Bring me my coffee please, Françoise.’ ”

(Proust, The Prisoner, trans. Carol Clark, p. 109)

taste

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“But ugly, expensive things can be useful: they can impress people who do not understand us, do not share our taste, but with whom we might be in love, more than a difficult object which does not yield up its beauty at once. Now it is precisely and only those people who do not understand us whom it may be useful to impress with possessions, since our intelligence will be enough to win the regard of superior beings.”

(Proust, The Prisoner, trans. Carol Clark, p. 159)

two trees by george maciunas

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left tree at 80 wooster street

One night I was sleeping in the basement of 80 Wooster Street. I think it was the late Fall of 1967. George comes in, says, “Come help. I got these trees here, I have to plant them.”

“What, at this hour of night?” I hate to get up at night. But I did, and yes, he had these shabby trees lying on the sidewalk.

“I stole them from the parking lot on West Broadway,” he told me proudly, laughing. “They were digging up the whole place, with tractors, and I asked them to give me a couple of the trees, and they said no! So I waited until the night, and I took them, you see? We have to plant them now, it’s against the law to plant trees in SoHo.

The next day, or a day later, some city officials showed up. “No trees are permitted here,” they told me. “You’ll have to get rid of them.”

I go down to the basement, to George. He was making his Fluxus boxes or something, and he says, “Tell them if they don’t like our trees they can pull them out.” So I go back to the city officials, and I say: “No, George is not going to do it. He says you have to do it. And he wants me to take some pictures when you do it.”

The city people looked at me, then at each other, turned around, and we never saw them again.

But the trees grew and prospered. Big, big trees they are now, happy trees, the only trees on Wooster Street.

(Jonas Mekas, letter to Emmett Williams, 1993, in Mr. Fluxus: a collective portrait of George Maciunas 1931–1978)

right tree at 80 wooster street

statues of liberty

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Marcel Duchamp’s cover for André Breton’s Young Cherry Trees Secured Against Hares (1946):

Young Cherry Trees Secured Against Hares

The cover of the first American edition of Michel Butor’s Mobile (1963), designed by Janet Halverson:

mobile by michel butor

(I would have a better image of that, but there doesn’t seem to be one on the Internet and thieves stole the scanner cable, so the phone & Photoshop will have to do. Alas.)

One would imagine that someone would have similarly made a splendid cover for Kafka’s Amerika of the Statue of Liberty holding a sword aloft, but the closest one I can find is the New Directions cover by Gilda Kuhlman:

gilda kuhlman cover for amerika by kafka

But the best cover for Amerika that I could find is the poster for this French theatrical version of the novel, which captures more of the novel’s spirit:

french kafka

working, two theories

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I’ve never worked for a living. I consider working for a living slightly imbecilic from an economic point of view. I hope that some day we’ll be able to live without being obliged to work.

(Marcel Duchamp, interview with Pierre Cabanne, 1966)

In answer to your question – Fluxus way of life is 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. doing socially constructive and useful work – earning your own living, 5 p.m. to 10 p.m. spending time on propagandizing your way of life among other idle artists & art collectors and fighting them, 12 p.m. to 8 a.m. sleeping (8 hours is enough).

(George Maciunas, letter to Tomas Schmit, January 1964)