The strangest moment of all

The sun was reddening

"I woke up as the sun was reddening; and that was the one distinct time in my life, the strangest moment of all, when I didn't know who I was - I was far away from home, haunted and tired with travel, in a cheap hotel room I'd never seen, hearing the hiss of steam outside, and the creak of the old wood of the hotel, and footsteps upstairs, and all the sad sounds, and I looked at the cracked high ceiling and really didn't know who I was for about fifteen strange seconds. I wasn't scared; I was just somebody else, some stranger, and my whole life was a haunted life, the life of a ghost."

— Jack Kerouac (On the Road)

Beneath the Skies

What is that feeling?

"What is that feeling when you're driving away from people and they recede on the plain till you see their specks dispersing? - it's the too-huge world vaulting us, and it's good-bye. But we lean forward to the next crazy venture beneath the skies."

— Jack Kerouac (On the Road)

Deep In the Woods

Death

"For Death must be somewhere in a society; if it is no longer (or less intensely) in religion, it must be elsewhere; perhaps in this image which produces Death while trying to preserve life. Contemporary with the withdrawal of rites, Photography may correspond to the intrusion, in our modern society, of an asymbolic Death, outside of religion, outside of ritual, a kind of abrupt dive into literal Death." [Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography]

Department Archive (Box: 56)

Department Archive (Box: 34)

Meaningless

Love Is Like a Bottle of Gin

It makes you blind, it does you in
It makes you think you're pretty tough
It makes you prone to crime and sin
It makes you say things off the cuff
It's very small and made of glass
and grossly over-advertised
It turns a genius to an ass
and makes a fool think he is wise

(...)

It makes the sun shine, makes it rain
You just get out what they put in
and they never put in enough
Love is like a bottle of gin
but a bottle of gin is not like love


The Magnetic Fields
Love Is Like a Bottle of Gin
69 Love Songs

Faces

Untitled

I wanted to run out and kiss her fantastic beauty and say: 'June, you have killed my sincerity too. I will never know again who I am, what I am, what I love, what I want. Your beauty has drowned me, the core of me. You carry away with you a part of me reflected in you. When your beauty struck me, it dissolved me. Deep down, I am not different from you. I dreamed you, I wished for your existance. You are the woman I want to be. I see in you that part of me which is you. I feel compassion for your childlike pride, for your trembling unsureness, your dramatization of events, your enhancing of the loves given to you. I surrender my sincerity because if I love you it means we share the same fantasies, the same madnesses" [The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Volume 1: 1931-1934]

The Garden of Death

In Vain

i shall imagine life
is not worth dying, if
(and when) roses complain
their beauties are in vain

(...)

E. E. Cummings

Headless Boy

No Project

THE REAL creativity of the times is at the antipodes of anything officially acknowledged to be 'art.' Art has become an integral part of contemporary society and a 'new' art can only exist as a supersession of contemporary society as a whole. It can only exist as the creation of new forms of activity. As such, ['new' art] has formed an integral part of every eruption of real revolt over the last decade. All have expressed the same furious and baffled will to live, to live every possible experience to the full — which, in the context of a society which suppresses life in all its forms, can only mean to construct experience and to construct it against the given order. To create immediate experience as purely hedonistic and experimental enjoyment of itself can be expressed by only one social form — the game — and it is the desire to play that all real revolt has asserted against the uniform passivity of this society of survival and the spectacle. [The Revolution of Modern Art and the Modern Art of Revolution - Timothy Clark, Christopher Gray, Donald Nicholson-Smith & Charles Radcliffe, unpublished text (1967)]

Dead Sun Rising

Unitary Urbanism

Unitary urbanism is a critique, not a doctrine, of cities. It is the living critique of cities by their inhabitants: the permanent qualitative transformation, made by everyone, of social space and time. Thus, rather than say that Utopia is the total work of art, it would be more accurate to say that Utopia is the richest and most complex domain serving total creativity. This also means that any specific propositions we can make today are of purely critical value. On an immediate practical level, experimentation with a new positive distribution of space and time cannot be dissociated from the general problems of organisation and tactics confronting us. Clearly a whole urban guerilla will have to be invented. We must learn to subvert existing cities, to grasp all the possible and the least expected uses of time and space they contain. Conditioning must be thrown in reverse. It can only be out of these experiments, out of the whole development of the revolutionary movement, that a real revolutionary urbanism can grow. [The Revolution of Modern Art and the Modern Art of Revolution - Timothy Clark, Christopher Gray, Donald Nicholson-Smith & Charles Radcliffe, unpublished text (1967)]

Death Club

Untitled

The media invite us to "come celebrate the moments of your life" with the spurious unification of commodity and spectacle, the famous non-event of pure representation. In response to this obscenity we have, on the one hand, the spectrum of refusal (chronicled by the Situationists, John Zerzan, Bob Black et al.)--and on the other hand, the emergence of a festal culture removed and even hidden from the would-be managers of our leisure. "Fight for the right to party" is in fact not a parody of the radical struggle but a new manifestation of it, appropriate to an age which offers TVs and telephones as ways to "reach out and touch" other human beings, ways to "Be There!" [The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism, By Hakim Bey]