On Wednesday Fox New’s Glenn Bleck launched into a wonderful tirade against The Coming Insurrectionby the anonymous Invisible Committee, a “dangerous book” about to be published in English by Semiotext(e)/MIT Press. Originally published in French in 2007, it has since been used as a crucial piece of evidence against the so-called Tarnac 9 in a controversial anti-terrorism trial in France, with the accused having received support from a myriad of intellectuals including Judith Butler, Slavoj Zizek, Alain Badiou, Giorgio Agamben (whose work, particularly The Coming Community, has been influential for the group), and more. Over a month before the book is actually published, an unauthorized launch at the Union Square Barnes & Noble a few weeks ago came to the attention of the NY Times.
Europe is on the brink of social collapse and/or revolution while the Japanese are forming unions! While Beck was trying to work his viewers into a frenzy over the growing danger of the ultra-left, his rant was an incredible advertisement for the book, which I immediately download as a pdf here. As Savonarola at the Institute for Conjectural Research put it to me in an email: “As Neocons go dada, detourning the detourners - my mind is blown. Is Glenn Beck part of some kind of situationist ’sleeper cell’?”
We are bored in the city, there is no longer any Temple of the Sun. Between the legs of the women walking by, the dadaists imagined a monkey wrench and the surrealists a crystal cup. That’s lost. We know how to read every promise in faces — the latest stage of morphology. The poetry of the billboards lasted twenty years. We are bored in the city, we really have to strain to still discover mysteries on the sidewalk billboards, the latest state of humor and poetry:
Showerbath of the Patriarchs
Meat Cutting Machines Notre Dame Zoo Sports Pharmacy Martyrs Provisions Translucent Concrete Golden Touch Sawmill Center for Functional Recuperation Saint Anne Ambulance Café Fifth Avenue Prolonged Volunteers Street Family Boarding House in the Garden Hotel of Strangers Wild Street
And the swimming pool on the Street of Little Girls. And the police station on Rendezvous Street. The medical-surgical clinic and the free placement center on the Quai des Orfèvres. The artificial flowers on Sun Street. The Castle Cellars Hotel, the Ocean Bar and the Coming and Going Café. The Hotel of the Epoch.
And the strange statue of Dr. Philippe Pinel, benefactor of the insane, fading in the last evenings of summer. Exploring Paris.
And you, forgotten, your memories ravaged by all the consternations of two hemispheres, stranded in the Red Cellars of Pali-Kao, without music and without geography, no longer setting out for the hacienda where the roots think of the child and where the wine is finished off with fables from an old almanac. That’s all over. You’ll never see the hacienda. It doesn’t exist.
“If there was no music, then the world would be silent” is the opening sentence of Afghan Star, uttered by a child blinded by war just after he sings his melody to the camera. Originally commissioned as a standard television documentary, the colorful excesses of this project reel were taken up and transformed into a cinema worthy docu style film. The powerful lamenting thrust that it starts with is later dropped and a simple subtle message takes over: the Afghan people are finally breathing hope into their nation and they will no longer be blinded by political impasses and religious chimeras.
A winner at this year’s Sundance Film Festival and opening at New York’s Cinema Village on Friday the 26th, Afghan Star is an inspired glimpse into modern-day Afghanistan, a country ravaged and stripped down after 30 years of nearly constant war and psychological and territorial oppression. Set in Kabul, it follows eleven contestants battling for a chance for pop stardom in the country’s equivalent of American Idol. Although the setting is different, the well-franchised format is familiar. The film follows the whole cast, from the brave producers of the show, Tolo TV, to the contestants over the course of the tournament. Reserved personal views about the contest’s symbolic nature are revealed, and an insight into the various factions or tribes that still divide the country internally and who effectively rig the votes to support their own candidate. We see the pioneering spirit of the young TV channel, pushing an untested genre within a very young TV studio, and a fleeting look at the more passionate and vocal supporters, such as the Khan family, confident that the very existence of the show is the mark of real change.
The first time R and I said “I love you,” what we really said was “Isle View,” which was a park on the Niagara River with a picnic table and a slipway for boats where R’s fat parents would drive us in the evenings, holding hands in the front seat while R and I groped in the back and whispered, “Isle View. Isle View forever.” Everyone knew the joke. It worked best to just mouth the words, or to say them aloud softly or quickly. One day, behind the garage, R said to me, “Isle View.” “Isle View,” I said. She said, “No. I’m serious. I really Isle View.”
I swallowed hard.
“Isle View, too,” I said, soft and quick.
She smiled, melted in my arms, and I stared with a cockeyed expression through her hair, wondering what we’d really said, that time and every time after.
At the unimagined crossroads of 1,001 Arabian Nights and Truly Tasteless Jokes stands The Book of Jokes, by Scottish songwriter Nick Currie, who goes by the pen-name “Momus.” The speaker of The Book of Jokes, “Sebastian Skeleton,” finds himself in prison, where he’s targeted by a Murderer and a Molester—those are their names—whose dreadful intentions can only be suppressed by Sebastian’s storytelling, which makes him a Scheherazade figure, whose subject is almost exclusively his own family. When Sebastian was a boy, the Skeleton family performed—embodied? experienced?—a particularly gruesome and hilarious array of dirty jokes, as when, for example, Sebastian’s father falls in love with a duck, and then grows jealous of this duck’s duck boyfriend, whose barn he sets on fire, and then parades his mistress duck before his wife, announcing, “This is the pig I’ve been fucking.” (33) And when his wife protests, he says, “I wasn’t speaking to you.”
As Sebastian escapes prison with the Murderer and the Molester, the stories he tells grow complex, self-referential and oblique, and while each one takes the shape of a joke, chapters do not necessarily end there, they press on in unexpected, melancholy forms. Sebastian’s mother, Joan, leaves his father and dates another woman named Joan, while his father subjects him and his sister to escalating abuses I had better not describe, and entertains a priest who tries to exorcise his demons, and who also tells the one about the butcher and the human-eating cat. The Molester and the Murderer confess that they are innocent of their crimes, and later turn out to be lying. Everyone goes chasing their desires and never quite achieves them, and they never really understand themselves, which Momus echoes formally by having the Murderer and the Molester argue throughout the book over whether a man can really be his uncle’s uncle. The Book of Jokes is not a collection of punchlines or tension-building schemes, it’s a flexible and sensitive solution to the problem of how to invigorate conventions like the novel using overlooked materials.
Not by choice. You swung the axe but it was not your choice. You have never looked at wood so closely. The carefully hewn boards fitted together so carefully. A man with responsibilities. Mouths to feed. You were at a saloon on Water Street. Witnesses say. You were taken out of the place and put on a sloop against your will. Witnesses don’t say. Let the record show that you are in possession of a bump on the back of your noggin.
The night did be dark in your favor. From the bridge you quickly did creep. Swung the axe at the forward lookout. Swung the axe at the boy coming up from below. Chopped away at the captain and when the devil wouldn’t let go of the taffrail you chopped off the devil’s hands.
Not by choice.
Let the record show you have a brick in your head. Let the record show your lovely penmanship. The scene of horror described by Captain Weed of the Second Police Precinct. The character of the captain described by one who knew him well. Proceeds to benefit. Read More »
“If there was no music, then the world would be silent” is the opening sentence of 
At the unimagined crossroads of 
Not by choice. You swung the axe but it was not your choice. You have never looked at wood so closely. The carefully hewn boards fitted together so carefully. A man with responsibilities. Mouths to feed. You were at a saloon on Water Street. Witnesses say. You were taken out of the place and put on a sloop against your will. Witnesses don’t say. Let the record show that you are in possession of a bump on the back of your noggin.