Nouvelle Vague

Code Switching - The Timorous Crossing of Social Boundaries/ Conventions

Times Square?

Dazzling lights
Throngs of people
Walking through crowded streets
Reminds us of why we live here
Costumed performers - Bright theatre marquees
Seeing those sights brings happiness
to native and tourist alike
Autumn - a chill in the air
Undaunted, the bustling crowds
head for dinner and a show
No place quite like it anywhere
The masses of people
are taking their full measure
of urban joy
Double decker buses move down the avenue
as newcomers to the Big Apple get their firs bite of it
Even those who have lived here
their entire lives
Still feel exhilarated as they pass Times Square
Electricity lights up the metropolitan scene
The city is working its magic
Untold thousands on the avenue
Eyes meet - a feeling of urban love
works its way into the hearts
of the masses gathered there
The city

- Mathew Anish, "from Times Square"

Exploiting the Voids

Solo Sale-ing

WHEN dawn's first cymbals beat upon the sky,
Rousing the world to labour's various cry,
To tend the flock, to bind the mellowing grain,
From ardent toil to forge a little gain,
And fasting men go forth on hurrying feet,
Buy bread, buy bread, rings down the eager street.

When the earth falters and the waters swoon
With the implacable radiance of noon,
And in dim shelters koïls hush their notes,
And the faint, thirsting blood in languid throats
Craves liquid succour from the cruel heat,
Buy fruit, buy fruit, steals down the panting street.

When twilight twinkling o'er the gay bazaars,
Unfurls a sudden canopy of stars,
When lutes are strung and fragrant torches lit
On white roof-terraces where lovers sit
Drinking together of life's poignant sweet,
Buy flowers, buy flowers, floats down the singing street.

- Sarojini Naidu, 'Street Cries"

Everybody Tangled!

Letting Go

20th Century Friendships...

I’m a tranquilizer.
I’m effective at home.
I work in the office.
I can take exams
on the witness stand.
I mend broken cups with care.
All you have to do is take me,
let me melt beneath your tongue,
just gulp me
with a glass of water.

I know how to handle misfortune,
how to take bad news.
I can minimize injustice,
lighten up God’s absence,
or pick the widow’s veil that suits your face.
What are you waiting for—
have faith in my chemical compassion.

You’re still a young man/woman.
It’s not too late to learn how to unwind.
Who said
you have to take it on the chin?

Let me have your abyss.
I’ll cushion it with sleep.
You’ll thank me for giving you
four paws to fall on.

Sell me your soul.
There are no other takers.

There is no other devil anymore.

- Wisława Szymborska, "Advertisement"

Fantasyland

"It is only through fantasy that the subject is constituted as desiring: Through fantasy, we learn how to desire." - Slavoj Zizek, "Looking Awry"

"Fantasy renders and sustains the structure of the forced choice, it tells us how we are to choose if we are to maintain the freedom of choice - that is, it bridges the gap between the formal symbolic frame of choices and social reality by preventing the choice which, although formally allowed, would, if in fact made, ruin the system" - Slavoj Zizek, "The Plague of Fantasies"

"Fantasy works both ways, it simultaneously closes the actual span of choices and maintains the false opening, the idea that the excluded choice might have happened, and does not actually take place only on account of contingent circumstances." - Slavoj Zizek, "The Plague of Fantasies"

"Fantasy if the means by which the subject maintains himself at the level of his vanishing desire, vanishing inashmuch as the very satisfaction of the demand deprives him of his object" - Jacques Lacan, "Ecrits"

"Everything we are allowed to approach by way of reality remains rooted in fantasy." - Jacques Lacan, "Seminar XX"

"Human reality is constructed on a previous foundation of hallucination" - Jacques Lacan, "Seminar VI (Desire and Its Interpretation"

Salvador Dali, "Gala Contemplating the Mediterranean Sea" (1974)

The importance of viewing life from a critical distance.

Sous le ciel de Paris

9/11: Bewitched with Melancholia

Iranian Exile Blues...

I snuffed out my god in your glass
I hug my homogeneous kinds to you at nights
a small rainbow on my fingertip
I killed my self and you at the just first kiss
i was crying constantly to my distinct sex
a sad Dracula was I at nights
and love was a mental malignant disorder
my loneliness was sentenced to group-sex
cigarette with alcohol by the taste of intercourse
means: forgetting…forgetting…forgetting…
after you alcohol deteriorated me.. slept plastered
after you I slept NEXT to whomever was and any one is
after you I became whole of wounds which is twisted circle of bones
I experienced whatever whit whomever that I could
loneliness among the crowd , in all alone
masturbating with sob and soap and sap and spit
Heartbroken of sparrows and painting pool
bestrewing your white color in the canvas
next glass : resolved pills in the poison
believe that I'm not scared of anything anymore
there was darkness behind the darkness of our world
You were my beloved & you are & you won't be
after you alcohol deteriorated me... slept plastered
after you I slept with whomever was and any one is
after you I became whole of wounds which is twisted circle of bones
I experienced whatever whit whomever that I could

Realities

The "real real": an unfathomable something that permeates things as a trace of the sublime.

- Wikipedia entry for Slavoj Zizek

Red

It little profits that an idle king,
By this still hearth, among these barren crags,
Match'd with an aged wife, I mete and dole
Unequal laws unto a savage race,
That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me.
I cannot rest from travel: I will drink
Life to the lees: All times I have enjoy'd
Greatly, have suffer'd greatly, both with those
That loved me, and alone, on shore, and when
Thro' scudding drifts the rainy Hyades
Vext the dim sea: I am become a name;
For always roaming with a hungry heart
Much have I seen and known; cities of men
And manners, climates, councils, governments,
Myself not least, but honour'd of them all;
And drunk delight of battle with my peers,
Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy.
I am a part of all that I have met;
Yet all experience is an arch wherethro'
Gleams that untravell'd world whose margin fades
For ever and forever when I move.
How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
To rust unburnish'd, not to shine in use!
As tho' to breathe were life! Life piled on life
Were all too little, and of one to me
Little remains: but every hour is saved
From that eternal silence, something more,
A bringer of new things; and vile it were
For some three suns to store and hoard myself,
And this gray spirit yearning in desire
To follow knowledge like a sinking star,
Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.

This is my son, mine own Telemachus,
To whom I leave the sceptre and the isle,—
Well-loved of me, discerning to fulfil
This labour, by slow prudence to make mild
A rugged people, and thro' soft degrees
Subdue them to the useful and the good.
Most blameless is he, centred in the sphere
Of common duties, decent not to fail
In offices of tenderness, and pay
Meet adoration to my household gods,
When I am gone. He works his work, I mine.

There lies the port; the vessel puffs her sail:
There gloom the dark, broad seas. My mariners,
Souls that have toil'd, and wrought, and thought with me—
That ever with a frolic welcome took
The thunder and the sunshine, and opposed
Free hearts, free foreheads—you and I are old;
Old age hath yet his honour and his toil;
Death closes all: but something ere the end,
Some work of noble note, may yet be done,
Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods.
The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks:
The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep
Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends,
'T is not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.
It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:
It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,
And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.
Tho' much is taken, much abides; and tho'
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

Sir Alfred Lord Tennyson, "Ulysses"

Einsteinturm

Potsdam, Germany (1921)