Silhoutte on a Dark Night

The tomb of Paheri, an Eighteenth dynasty nomarch of Nekhen, has an eloquent description of this existence: Your life happening again, without your ba being kept away from your divine corpse, with your ba being together with the akh ... You shall emerge each day and return each evening. A lamp will be lit for you in the night until the sunlight shines forth on your breast. You shall be told: "Welcome, welcome, into this your house of the living!"

...and Another for Sisyphus

...is Sisyphus happy?

Examples like this indicate an approach to uptopias which leaves behind the usual focus on content (on the structure of society proposed in a utopian vision). Perhaps it is time to step back from the fascination with content and reflect upon the subjective position from which such content appears utopian. On account of its temporal loop, the fantasmatic narrative always involves an impossible gaze, the gaze by means of which the subject is already present at the scene of its' own absence. When the subject directly identifies its own gaze with the objet a, the paradoxical implication of this identification is that the objet a disappears from the field of vision. This brings us to the core Lacanian notion of utopia: a vision of desire functioning without an objet a and its twists and loops. It is utopian not only to think that one can reach full, unencumbered "incestuous" enjoyment; for it is no less utopian to think that one can renounce enjoyment without this renunciation generating its' own surplus-enjoyment.

- Slavoj Zizek, "Living in the End Times"

One for Nicrap...

I've been told that times in Bollywood are hard... and that for a few dollars, a tourists can "rent" a Bollywood studio and star in their own ten minute production. I didn't believe it when I heard the story on NPR, but now I'm not so sure... ;)

Euro-Socialist Fears of Freedom

Daughters of Eve

Lyn and Eva Neville were born in September of 1985 on a small farm in Western Kansas. The girls are Parapagus Tripus Dibrachius twins, conjoined at the side and sharing between them three legs, two arms, two hearts, three lungs, and a single liver. Orphaned when their mother died in labor, little is known about their early life until 1996 when they made their first public appearance with Dillard and Fullerton’s Traveling Circus. It was here that the “Evelyn” sisters developed their love of song and performance.

Unsatisfied with the grind of circus life, at the age of nineteen the twins decided to explore a solo career.

Pathos Ascendant

Porn for Pornographers

Bettie Page is still the rage
With her legs and leather;
She turns to tease the camera, and please us at home,
And we let her.

Who's to know what she'll show of herself,
In what measure?
If what she reveals, or what she conceals,
Is the key to our pleasure?

It's out of our hands, over our heads
Out of our reach, under this real life
Hidden in veils, covered in silk
We're dreaming of what might be

It's out of our hands, over our heads
Out of our reach, under this real life
Hidden in veils
We're dreaming of mystery.

She's a pornographer's dream, he said.
I knew what he meant.
But it made me imagine: what kind of a dream
He would have?

The Collective Can Only Afford One Guitar

Paean to Disordered Thinkers

...and other simpleton gasbags

Full Fathom Five

DA
Dayadhvam: I have heard the key
Turn in the door once and turn once only
We think of the key, each in his prison
Thinking of the key, each confirms his prison
Only at nightfall, aethereal rumors
Revive for a moment a broken Coriolanus

DA
Damyata: the boat responded
Gaily, to the hand expert with sail and oar
The sea was calm, your heart would have responded
Gaily, when invited, beating obedient
To controlling hands

I sat upon the shore
Fishing, with the arid plain behind me
Shall I at least set my lands in order?
London bridge is falling down falling down falling down
Poi s'ascose nel foco che gli affina
Quando fiam uti chelidon--O swallow swallow
Le prince d'Aquitaine a la tour abolie
These fragments I have shored against my ruins
Why then Ile fit you. Hieronymo's mad againe.

Da. Dayadhvam. Damyata. [from a Hindu fable: 'Give, have compassion, have self control']
Shantih shantih shantih [from a Hindu mantra: 'Peace...peace...peace']
-T. S. Eliot, "The Wasteland"

Still Not By the Book

Lifestyles for the young and gullible granting one the "illusion" of knowledge of ever more complicated "steps".