The Beautiful Kids of Winter 2007/8

Last night rocked—thx for the awesome party Doug!

Recent Acquisition

I found this General Idea poster from 1979 online in excellent condition for cheap—supposedly it's pretty rare—awesome! This is before the American—Got Milk? campaign... probably inspired it! AA Bronson the surviving member of General Idea will have a show next at JCP... I made this ad for him and will be one of the nine young shamans in the show. Save the date! Below is also a video documentation of General Ideas work: Found Formats / Kunsthalle Zurich. They are my all time favorite collaborators!!! I saw this show at the Warhol in Pitts 2 years ago... it was better than Warhol.

Towards a Metalanguage of E V I L, Part II

In real heroics, a personal glamour death is one which highlights risk-taking or maniacal energy and fearlessness on the part of the hero. The suicide deaths of Mark Rothko and Diane Arbus were both action deaths. The death of James Dean was an action death—being an iconographic example, in Thorstein Veblen's terms, of honorific expenditure—in this case, in terms of James Dean-the hunk, and the Porshe itself.

Death by starvation, withdrawl, mass murder, appropriation, colonization, pornographic death, death by illness, death by natural disaster, any anonymous death in which one did not have, or almost have control, is the opposite, on a polar scale, of the personal or designer death. Death by choice, whether by bonafide suicide or by accident-on-purpose, is the death of choice, being the honorific death.


Being in a plane accident is not a glamour action death, although it is an action death. An action death requires that some acute movement totally skews the physical properties of the world for the person in question. The tabloids regularly feature "near-miss" or "brushes" with action death at the rate of one story per issue. The shuttle disaster was a designer action death. A designer death highlights the trashing of appealing supplies.

The psychopath is rarely suicidal. Although he would pretend to play the game to the last, and he would viciously press a peer to take on genuinely life-threatening risks, the psychopath always saves his own skin. The psychopath may court death, but it is someone else’s. The psychopath leaves a trail littered with the broken, discarded bodies and lives of others, he trashes them, leaving them as rotten matter as he proceeds to his next site. Where he gave the impression of being deeply involved in the life and death struggles he creates around the last victim, he was always vacuous and remote.

The psychopath is often mistakenly called asocial. As Dr. Hervey Cleckley describes him, he is over-socialized, and what is actually witnessed is the unwinding of the works of a bored and petulant machine with a taste for mischief.


Where the psychopath interacts with his target, a strange situation ensues where the interaction on the psychopath’s side exists on a shallow and taut level, and contrary to appearances, is rigid and scripted. On the mark’s side, the interaction exists in a deeper social space which admits some spontaneous response and flexibility. The behavior on the mark’s side is unguarded, and the boundaries which are adhered to have more to do with those which were socially influenced during the conditioning process than the careful, manageable limits required of X’s game.

In her essay, “The Pornographic Imagination”, Susan Sontag contrasts the endlessly reproductive and selfregenerating material of the pornographic novel to the deeply and lushly described social space of the Nineteenth Century novel. If these two structures were knit together, this hybrid would resemble the interaction of X and Y.


The model for the psychopath is a rotten egg or a wormy apple whose skin appears intact. Cleckley made an analogy between psychopathology and a medical disorder called semantic aphasia in which a trauma to or lesion on the brain affects an area which produces meaning, but where the outer apparatus of the tongue and mouth retain their apparent integrity. The patient speaks perfectly formed words and sentences, yet is unable to grasp the meaning of those words. So hidden is the psychopath’s disorder that examination in a clinical setting or courtroom may reveal nothing and function merely as a showcase for a sane, charming, and hearty human being. It is though the ACTIONS of the psychopath in contrast to their hollow and well-chosen words, the yawning canyon between what they do and what they say, that the depth of disturbance and deception must be measured.


In Robert Kegan’s model, the psychopath is arrested in an epistemological era associated with the childhood ages of 6 to 14. This era predates one in which the needs of others become integrated positively in one’s inner world. The battle which would later become a wrestling or struggling with one’s conscience is neither internalized nor abstracted for the 10-year-old or the psychopath. The world is polarized into tow camps: those who would satisfy his needs and those who would thwart them. If one’s needs, like the 10-year-olds, are experienced as all-encompassing and global, then the constant campaigning on one’s own behalf has a type of logic. Seen in this light, the formation of a Nazi Youth Party was an efficacious way of exploiting the ruthlessness of this epistemological era and colonizing the formation of the next, more advanced era, pruning and shaping it to their own ends.

Teenage Horniness is Not a Crime

The French hated it at Cannes and the critics here hate it too—maybe they just don't get it—but, Southland Tales ROCKS and Richard Kelly (Donnie Darko) is a hottie. Go see this film... it's the best of 2007 (besides Into The Wild). A rift in the space-time continuum—Neo-Marxism, Justin Timberlake, Buffy The Vampire Slayer, The Rock, Bai Ling... Apocalypse Now—this is the way the world ends.


Not with a bang but a wHimper. (Seann William ScOTt as Roland)

TS Eliot - The Hollow Men

A penny for the Old Guy

I

We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats' feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar

Shape without form, shade without colour,
Paralysed force, gesture without motion;

Those who have crossed
With direct eyes, to death's other Kingdom
Remember us - if at all - not as lost
Violent souls, but only
As the hollow men
The stuffed men.


II

Eyes I dare not meet in dreams
In death's dream kingdom
These do not appear:
There, the eyes are
Sunlight on a broken column
There, is a tree swinging
And voices are
In the wind's singing
More distant and more solemn
Than a fading star.

Let me be no nearer
In death's dream kingdom
Let me also wear
Such deliberate disguises
Rat's coat, crowskin, crossed staves
In a field
Behaving as the wind behaves
No nearer -

Not that final meeting
In the twilight kingdom


III

This is the dead land
This is cactus land
Here the stone images
Are raised, here they receive
The supplication of a dead man's hand
Under the twinkle of a fading star.

Is it like this
In death's other kingdom
Waking alone
At the hour when we are
Trembling with tenderness
Lips that would kiss
Form prayers to broken stone.


IV

The eyes are not here
There are no eyes here
In this valley of dying stars
In this hollow valley
This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms
In this last of meeting places
We grope together
And avoid speech
Gathered on this beach of the tumid river

Sightless, unless
The eyes reappear
As the perpetual star
Multifoliate rose
Of death's twilight kingdom
The hope only
Of empty men.


V

Here we go round the prickly pear
Prickly pear prickly pear
Here we go round the prickly pear
At five o'clock in the morning.
Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow
For Thine is the Kingdom
Between the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the Shadow
Life is very long
Between the desire
And the spasm
Between the potency
And the existence
Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the Shadow
For Thine is the Kingdom
For Thine is
Life is
For Thine is the

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

Get a-Head

The future is now...
S.T.H. 2008—we are now taking submissions for issue No. 67.

Coming Soon...

Towards a Metalanguage of E V I L

By Cady Noland (published in BALCON No. 4, 1989.)

Part 1

There is a meta-game available for use in the United Sates. The rules of the game, or even that there is a game at all, are hidden to some. The uninitiated are called naive or provincial, liars or suckers. To those unabused by an awareness of back door maneuvering, a whole world of deceit remains opaque. Those in the dark are still ripe for exploitation.


The game is a synthesis of tactics, played out in the social arena, in which advantage can be gained in an oblique way. Demonstrations of the game are now available on TV shows like DYNASTY and DALLAS. Cathesis is afforded minorities through Joan Collins or Diahann Carroll in DYNASTY, although with ceremonial structures clearly locking them outside the true hypno-whirlpool of the game. John Forsythe exists for the whole audience as a fossil bearing the contrivancs of the game. Gone is the ritualized cautionary debacle featured during the finale in earlier fictive explorations of the game, such as in the 1966 film, THE OSCAR.


Tabloids already use many of the game's tactics by foreshortening and cropping celebrities, blowing them up, and, in the case of NATIONAL ENQUIRER television commercials, reducing them to photo-objects and then animating these objects. These papers regularly publish little bits of the rules gleaned from popular psychology books about how to manipulate people. These books have their genesis in the old warhorse, HOW TO WIN FRIENDS AND INFLUENCE PEOPLE, by Dale Carnegie, whose on primogenitor is THE PRINCE by Machiavelli. According to Ethel Spector Person, the psychopath shares the societal sanctioned characteristics of the entrepreneurial male. Their maneuvers are differentiated mostly by decibel, the acts of the psychopath being the "louder".


The game is a machine composed of interconnecte mechanistic devices. These devices facilitate bad faith interaction... A con or snow job is the site at which X preys upon the hopes, fears, and anxieties of Y for ulterior motives and/or personal gain. The machinations which vehiculate this manipulation can have wide effect—ranging from the aftermath of minor mischief to serial or mass deaths. These machinations exists a priori of X or Y as an indifferent set of tools and could conceivably be picked up by anyone and used against anyone else. As befits the extreme artificiality of these devices, there is no group who is naturally a victim of this abuse. These are mechanistic devices and have nothing to do with nature. There are those who feel that their kind or type is immune to being worked over by X. Some of the most shocking moments in real life and in fiction occur when they are disabused of this synthetic notion. The mayor theme in film noir is that there is never a respite, in this world, from the game and the exploitations. The quintessential narrative through-line in film noir is where a cynical guy, Y, who is wise, gets taken one more time.

The game is a hero system where the organism tries to blow itself up at the expense of a real or imagined antagonist. The clinical psychopath embodies a gross internalization of the game at its most spartan, unpolluted by an internalized other with whom to negotiate.


The purpose of the enlargement or aggrandizement of the organism is to stave off anxiety about finity and death. This expansion, virtual or literal, may entail stockpiling of real supplies or the gathering of narcissistinc supplies implying a triumph over one smallness and the inevitability of one's own insignificant decay, as Ernest Becker argues in his books, THE DENIAL OF DEATH and THE STRUCTURE OF EVIL.

Although the psychopath displays a chilling fondness for the game, and would always prefer to operate via the game, he stops short of involving himself in the honorific courting of death except by proxy. It is in this way that his internalization of the game diverges from its rules. He is simply not involved in fair play of any sort. Those who would follow the official hero game to the letter, like Ernest Hemingway, will often make sure to have an action death, in order to purchase a symbolic piece of immortality in the process. The psychopath being the machine that it is, cannot imagine that it will cease to function, but in keeping with its obsession with control, it will shortcircuit itself at the last moment if it is unquestionably about to be "offed". This machine itself does not consider this a matter of heroics; it is done as a last petty gesture.

GETTING ANGRIER!

The Bullet is starting a book klub—Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse was our first in the series—this week's read...



"You can't reform profit capitalism and inhumanity. Just kick it till it breaks.
Revolution."

The Art of Necrophilia

Steven Parrino (1958-2005) was part of the downtown NYC art scene during the eighties and nineties—a time when painting was declared 'dead'—so, he decided to practice in some necrophilia. One of my favorite artists, Parrino's life was cut short on New Years Eve, 2005 when he lost control of his motorcycle on his way home from a party.

Gagosian uptown (980 Madison—accross from The Whitney), has an awesome show up currently which has been extended until this Wed... I highly recommend it—Parrino was a very important artist of his generation who's influence is felt today.


Spin Out Vortex 2, 2000

Halloween Polaroids

Simply applying Cortney's make-up:


Cortney as Bai Ling:


David as a Japanese teenage Ganguro girl:


Golomon as a cross between Whoopi Goldberg and Marilyn Manson:


Simply as Anna Nicole Smith in clown make-up:


Scotty as Howard K. Stern with Anna Nicole and baby Danny Lynn:


Fatima as very rich oil Saudi & Marie as a bounty hunter:


Khalid as Bobby Trendy with Anna:


DJ Michael Magnan as Goth Jock:


Cameron as Cameron:


Johnny Mischief as Johnny Mischief:


Lady Dang as Loco Nut:


My video tape of Anna (worth a lot of money!) will be released soon...