I cite

ghosts from the future

  New Orleans Hyatt 
  Originally uploaded by Jodi3425.

Our hotel is allegedly a ghost hotspot. It's on all sorts of lists of most haunted places. Real ghostbusters have been called in to assess the situation. Identified ghosts have been a depressed young girl and a couple from the 1920s. One guest claims that a white-haired woman sat on the side of his bed, stroking him and saying she would never let him go. Although the hallways and stairwells have a bit of the Overlook Hotel in them, we haven't been troubled by ghosts here at all.

But in other places, maybe. I've had a vague sense of haunting my own past self--the child getting her portrait painted in Jackson Square, visiting Santa at Maison Blanche; the teenager trying to sneak as many mimosas as possible during breakfast and break free to roam the Quarter alone;  the college student in her first strip club, at a football game in the Superdome; the adult trying to find an affordable Rodrique, at an anthropology meeting at the Hyatt, finding the outsider artist known for painting shoe shine advertisements on slate, dragging her kids to get beignets. I feel rather like the ghost of Christmas yet to come, the messenger from the bad future, the future into which we are headed and are not likely to avoid.

The shoeshine painter is gone from Jackson Square. A gallery owner told me he's in Texas. In St. Bernard Parish, what appears most strongly is what's missing, a parish-wide ground zero outside Liebeskind's range. Banners advertise a new Trump tower, opening in December 2007. It doesn't seem to have been built. I was surprised the Hyatt is closed. No indication of renovation or repair. It just remains as a too large building, occupying too much space. An office building, perhaps called New Orleans Centre, had been adjacent to it. Now part of that building is a clinic. The rest seems abandoned. We saw a strange sign: first floor spoiled rotten.

New Orleans has always been decaying--it's built in a swamp. It's always been a memory of someone's dream of it, from the time that it was pitched to French investors. It has always been mired in a past fantasy. Now, if such a term is even possible here, now it's stuck in the future, the future of a country that doesn't have the money or energy to clean itself up and that is learning to expect no better.Yes, there are facades, spaces for consumption and things to do and buy and forget and discard. The weeds grow up around these places, taking back the old places till we forgot why they were ever there at all.

Lars and the Real Community

We watched Lars and the Real Girl last night. I completely loved it.

I'm reading In Defense of Lost Causes. The second chapter has some wonderful readings of movies and Kafka letters. The basic idea involves the core Oedipal drama, a narrative that persists underneath all sorts of other stories. One of the strongest and most detailed discussions is of Frankenstein and the French Revolution. It's straightforward, so I won't summarize it here. It interests me, though, because of the way Lars and the Real Girl can't be reduced to an obvious familial drama but instead only works as an account of a supportive community, or more specifically, of the supports that community provides, the community on which people's identities depend.

The familial drama: Lars enters into a delusional psychosis. The triggering factors include the death of his father, the return of his brother after years of being away, Lars' consequent feeling like a stranger in his own home and his moving to the garage, the pregnancy of his sister-in-law (Lars' mother died giving birth to Lars), and the arrival of a new woman at work who stirs up suppressed feelings of desire. Lars orders a sex doll, Bianca, and treats her as his girlfriend. But he doesn't have sex with her. Because both he and Bianca are religious, Bianca sleeps in the room that was his mother's in the house now occupied by his brother and sister-in-law.

The charm of the movie consists in the willingness of the entire town to take Lars' delusion absolutely seriously. He takes Bianca to church, to a party. Bianca gets a job modeling for a local store. She volunteers at the hospital reading to children. She's elected to the school board. She is more than an object for Lars. She is an object for the entire community. So it's not simply that Lars displaces all sorts of feelings and desires onto Bianca. Rather, the community gives her a place. It lets her take a place and in this taking place to enable Lars to see that there is a place for him. More than a domestic drama about guilt and reconciliation, psychosis and recovery, the film is an allegory for the Symbolic as a providing place and meaning.

Of course, Bianca has to die. As Lars gets better, becomes more integrated, acquires a sense of place, learns more about what it is to be man (a lesson which has to do with accepting responsibility and which he demonstrates having learned in a wonderful scene where he performs CPR on a strangled teddy bear), Bianca becomes ill and eventually dies (she might even drown, but this wasn't clear to me). There is a funeral for her and priest remarks, without irony, that she has been loved, that she has contributed, and that she was truly helpful and unique.

Bianca was Real. A Real object for everyone. The gap or space she opened, occupied, and left as an object enacts subject as lack in the structure, the Real of the subject. The drama of the film, then, concerns the Symbolic order of the community providing a place when one of its members feels itself displaced (in one scene, as Lars' brother and sister-in-law go to the church to ask that its members help out and make Bianca feel welcome--the psychologist has advised them to go along with Lars' delusion--as one member voices aversion to treating a sex doll like a person and to socializing with a psychotic, another reminds them that they all are close to people with idiosyncracies and disorders; it's as if she reminds them all that even as deviance and transgression are the underside of the community, they are nonetheless part of the community; perhaps once could say that she is not so naive as to disavow the 'nightly law' but instead recognizes its inseparability from the bonds of sociality; or maybe it's better to say that all nights or all nightly laws are not the same; they can be differentiated, acknowledged, or disavowed in different ways).

Some theory friends (I'm thinking about Jane Bennett here) draw from Latour to extend and develop the agenic properties of objects. At times, that theoretical orientation seems at odds with a Lacanian one. I've wondered, though, if the Lacanian object might suggest more possibilities for convergence or intersection than often seems to be the case. Here, the material object Bianca animated relationships, friendships, opportunities to help, support, be together, speak, and eat that had otherwise seemed less alive. And she did this not simply as an object onto which fantasies or delusions were projected but as a material object and as a Real object. Her materiality incited various physical events (she weighed 125 pounds so dressing and bathing and moving her wasn't easy). And her insistence as a gap/lack and as an excess inscribed or reminded everyone of the prior inscription of a place in the community for Lars.

Ktismatics on Ciné-Musique

An insightful engagement with Patrick Mullins' 2005 book. Read the whole thing, including the "interview" in the comments: Ciné-Musique « Ktismatics?.

[Patrick Mullins (aka Jonquille de Camembert) has been a sporadic and memorable commenter here at Ktismatics. I just read his book...]

In ciné-musique we live a movie fiction that was first suggested to us by real movies. To keep living this ciné-musique, we turn the materials of movies into objects that go beyond them. - Patrick Mullins, Day of Ciné-Musique, 2005

A cumulative artifact assembled from cinematic objects gathered from very specific but diverse sources, Day of Ciné-Musique (2005) transports the reader to an abstract aesthetic milieu that author Patrick Mullins calls “reality fiction,” a sort of tangible imaginary space he discovers beneath the hypnosis of a lifetime of infection by Hollywood.

The book begins and ends with a series of visual images: photographs of works created by Swiss painter Christian Pellet. Each image appears abstract and iconic in isolation, but collectively they function like screen shots excerpted not from a particular movie but from the protean arche-movie that spawns all films. Oddly, the poses and gestures have been transposed from “real” movies and re-staged by live models. These transmutations, conveying a sense of artifice in the extraordinary attention paid to seemingly irrelevant details — clasped hands, buttons of a vest, part of an armchair — lend a formal gnostic aura to the book. This process of abstract idealization, where cinematic events intertwine with the material world, mirrors Mullin’s writing, in which he juxtaposes real visits to L.A. with idiosyncratic glimpses of mostly obscure Hollywood movies. The cumulative effect of these transformations is the assembly of a ciné-musique landscape that verges on the surreal, perhaps bordering on Melanie Klein’s psychoanalytic territory of disembodied organs and childhood fantasy. The approach also calls to mind the novels of Alain Robbe-Grillet, who, through attention to details that repeat themselves in different times and places, paradoxically creates a sense of eternal transcendence. It’s appropriate then that both Mullins and Pellet cite the film version of Robbe-Grillet’s enigmatic novel Last Year in Marienbad. But Mullins’ writing is more subjective than Robbe-Grillet’s, more personal and romantic.

Return Of The Demented Dolls

  Return Of The Demented Dolls 
  Originally uploaded by ~EvidencE~.

for the longest time

Hieronymus Bosch for kids.

Pop tarts

The second best thing about tabloids is that they don't pretend to be useful (the first best thing are the photos of celebrity fat, cellulite, and surgeries gone awry). Tabloids don't pretend to make a difference. They aren't speaking to or in behalf of the people. They don't pull at any of us to try to be better than we are. They are explicitly and avowedly elements of commercial entertainment culture, devoted simply to greasing media/celebrity wheels and making them spin faster and faster.

Since Donna Rice, the msm has increasingly emulated the tabs, but it isn't proud of this fact. So, it continues to question itself, to report on its own process, to lament its own status as a commodity as it blames the need to make a profit, the demands of the market, and the 'concerns of publishers' on its failure to function as a fourth estate. But the tabs, my god, they exhibit no such self-doubt. They know who they are and what they do. No apologies necessary.

And none expected. A reflective tabloid would be like a diet snickers, completely unsatisfying and all too moralistic and self-righteous (like getting a low fat latte and a reduced fat muffin--just eat the damn cupcake already).

Academics like me are likely worse than the msm. We are driven to reflect on tabloids, to interpret Britney's appeal, to outline the narratives of love, engagement, marriage, infidelity, and divorce that provide the storylines that accompany the photos of Brad, Jen, and Angelina. We look for meaning in rehab and even when we try not to adopt an attitude of condescension, the very way we position tabloids and celebrities as objects of our gaze supports a supposition of superiority. Even when we are supportive, embedded, immersed, we have a distance that produces condescension: we argue against the elitism of high culture and in favor of the practices of the masses; we historicize opera and the theater, pointing out how they were previously popular rather than elite forms of entertainment. Bla bla blah. It's still justification within the context of a sense of what is a healthy or worthwhile endeavor.

But the tabloids--they don't justify themselves. They are selling ads and selling celebrities and selling movies, television shows, and music. They are connecting us to the stars and the stars to us. They create and destroy our sense that stars are different and special and that they are just like us.

Do we care about Britney? Is care the right word? Are we interested in her life? Neither care nor interest seems quite right. Interest is too abstract--oh yes, we are interested in the unfolding events in Pakistan. Care suggests a feeling associated with generosity, perhaps even with a sense that one should intervene, that one should do something. But the specific delight of tabloids is that they require absolutely nothing. They provide no direction. They ask nothing and expect nothing. There is nothing at all to do. It's like they provide a real of freedom from injunctions to think or act or do something (anything). We can feel connected by not obliged. We can care without consequence or responsibility. 

But what kind of caring is this?

Another year

Better? For whom? How will better be determined? By measures and benchmarks? By possibilities realized? By potentials that remain? And, is the "happiness" of a new year an appropriate goal or ideal? When we wish another a happy new year, are we speaking of a moment or of something more? And, what if the friend for whom or in whose behalf we are wishing has a sense of happiness that we find ill-conceived or distorted? A sense so contradictory to our own that it can damage the happiness of our new year? What do we wish then?

I would resolve to be less predictable, but I worry and wonder, would I then cease to be who I am? Perhaps a better resolution would be to try, with some kind of regularity, to think and write differently, otherwise? But perhaps this isn't possible, perhaps as this thinking or writing becomes mine, it becomes inflected and conditioned, losing its potential to be other from the ways I've thought and written. It's easy to lapse into self-parody and in so doing no longer to be able to tell what is a joke, a gesture, a citational giggle, and what is an attempt to break out (if not free) if only momentarily. Fortunately, identifying with the symptom, gesture, or ideological promise, forgoing the fiction of an alternative (of alterity?), has its own potential.

Clue

5.    There are four of us. We are very old, but also young. We are inside and outside at the same time. And best of all--we are close to Santa. Find us and find a clue.

(this is a clue for a Christmas eve treasure hunt for my kids and their friends)

All best during the holiday season. If you have a chance, take the time to listen to Simon and Garfunkle's version of Silent Night and the 7 o'clock news.

lives of things

The post belong is from the yolk: A Blog Theory. Read the whole thing. It's a wonderful meditation on an estate auction, moving in part because the author's grandparents' things are up for sale.

After a long, hot, exhausting day in the auction warehouse I have come to some conclusions about the allure of the auction. In the crowd there are people drawn by excitement, a good deal on laundry detergent, their online business, but most importantly, a chance to touch the aura imbued in others’ used stuff. An elderly woman bought my Oma’s collection of porcelain flower figurines. She packed them in packing paper she had brought from home for that specific purpose. I began to see the encouraging light side of auctions. Trinkets and things of all sorts were each being given new lives. Auctions represent a sentimental, encouraging type of recycling.

I once bought a faux leopard skin ottoman at an estate sale. It is now in the gallery, the word we use for my daughter's attic playroom and art center (she has posted operating hours as well as a supplied a small gift shop). As I walked through the tables of goods, I learned that the ottoman had belonged to a single school teacher. She also collected rhinestone pins and biographies of Republican women. Many of the pins, quite elaborate, seem to have been designed to be worn on the 4th of July. I didn't buy any and I passed over the books. But I'm happy about the ottoman.

Kant: wrong for America

Look at the Kant political attack ad: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7M-cmNdiFuI.

(You Tube doesn't support Typepad. Sorry).

Random Paragraphs

Who needs the Symbolic? From the amazing Random Paragraph Generator courtesy of Dominic:

Zizek disturbs Badiou next to a clothed mystic. Why does a shaking creep work below Badiou? How can Badiou grow? Zizek contracts the glad psychologist beside the virtual brush. Zizek folds Badiou. Why does a magnetic paradox mature around Zizek?

When will the Real frustrate the chemist's rope? The Real refutes the imaginary underneath the manual blackmail. The popular idiot briefs the imaginary near the misprint. The Real believes! Why can't the imaginary dance in the Real?

The substitute cautions on top of Badiou. Zizek pins a massive risk. Badiou frowns! Zizek strains into the less pot. Zizek rules before Badiou. A mass wrecks Badiou behind the neighbor.

The Real brains a cancelled designer above the essence. The Real junks a politician above the reserve metric. Her requisite mails the Real outside a store chaos. The map shadows the Real next to the dictatorship.