The Tomb of Thingness and Self-Doubt: Against the Cult of Infinity
“One concept corrupts and confuses the others. I am not speaking of the Evil whose limited sphere is ethics. I am speaking of the infinite.” — Jorge Luis Borges
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“One concept corrupts and confuses the others. I am not speaking of the Evil whose limited sphere is ethics. I am speaking of the infinite.” — Jorge Luis Borges
“These characters, alone or twinned, slumber in the blanket of the Natural Cliché and sit and wait, just as we long for a tinge of disgust, hysteria, or irreverence to dismantle stoic facades inherited from some icy cinematic factory.”
“Those denied redemption, obviously, cannot raise the ascending tower, and embrace their brokenness with a furious energy that smiles only in clumsy destruction.”
“Beyond religion, we have resorted to a more modern neurosis to calm our terrors and complement our pretended ennui: cuteness.”
Activist & Political · Essays · Exploitation & Erotica
Or Can Tea Party Porn Strike a Blow for the American Way?
“In our devotion to realism-as-catharsis, we’ve become so obsessed with psychologizing fictional characters that we forget we are the ones who need humanizing.”
Essays · Historical & Epic · Music & Musicals · Writers & Critics
“My God! — cried out a querulous voice within me — is it possible that we, artists of the stage, are doomed by the materiality of our bodies to eternal servitude and the representation of crude reality?” — Stanislavsky, questioning his Realistic method after a failed 1904 production of symbolist one-act plays by Maeterlink2 “The stage is art . . . There’s a genre painting by Kramskoy in which the faces are portrayed superbly. What would happen if you cut the nose out of one of the paintings and substituted a real one? The nose would be “realistic” but the picture would be ruined.” — Chekhov, explaining to an actor why offstage sounds of croaking frogs and buzzing dragonflies would not render a 1898 production of The Seagull more “realistic”3
“Allowing his acidity unfettered reign, Fassbinder concocts one of the most blistering excoriations of despotism ever committed to film.”
Essays · Exploitation & Erotica
“Nude on the Moon’s exploitation is as innocent as the Good Christo-Nudist’s reclaiming of a pre-figleafed (albeit non-recreational) Eden.”
Composers · Essays · Music & Musicals
“Alexei must be condemned to the pointless, loveless, and finally false freedom of a spinning limbo, as unfinished and unfinishable as the best Bakhtinian polyphony.”
Composers · Essays · Music & Musicals · Sound & Language · Writers & Critics
“Defenseless against music, I must submit to its despotism and, depending on its whim, be god or garbage.”
What’s in a name 1. The Rumpelstiltskin-God No matter how mightily I strive to intellectualize my living (not my life, my living, you understand), to sieve from it every iota[…]
C. Jerry Kutner’s proposition on noir-as-genre versus noir-as-style, “We shouldn’t be asking, “Is it noir or not-noir?,” but rather, “How noir is it?,” has prompted me to revisit my own[…]
“The more a man dreams, the less he believes.” ~ H. L. Mencken Preface: Why My Dreams Smell Like Nothing (Onto the Regime of Odor) On June 18, 2005 (I[…]
Essays · Experimental & Underground
As the covert bottom-line interests of capitalist film distribution circumscribe our viewing options as much as overt censorship ever could, we should earnestly applaud the arrival of the new “INDEX”[…]
Asian · Essays · Exploitation & Erotica · Thrillers & Action
Rescuing feminism from rape and queer theory
To construct musicality through expressionism, or to express musicality through constructivism?
After forty years, now serving porn as intentional camp for erotic consideration
Essays · Exploitation & Erotica · LGBT & Queer
Is queerness an angry chord or a beautiful harmony?
How to strike at the heart of a beast with the heart of a beast