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.