image by Tom Will Juxtaposition is the most basic element of creation, and therefore of writing, and therefore of writing poetry. The term juxtaposition should be understood less as the extreme farness of the elements gathered, and understood more as the extreme nearness of their new shared location. Juxta-near, posit-place.  Juxtaposition is the 2 coming … Continue reading Juxtaposition & Obfuscation: A Manifesto

A stage. Two actors rehearse a scene while their director watches. The actress is in greek dress and lays on a royal bed, while the actor is dressed as an African warrior and sits over her. They kiss, and she falls her head down on the bed. ACTRESS. Son of Hannibal, release me to heaven, … Continue reading Mondo Teatro

"What's that so black agin' the sun?" said Files-on-Parade. "It's Danny fightin' 'ard for life", the Colour-Sergeant said. "What's that that whimpers over'ead?" said Files-on-Parade. "It's Danny's soul that's passin' now", the Colour-Sergeant said. -- "Danny Deever", Rudyard Kipling “It's no longer your film” It is the almost graceless, almost graceful mystery of life leaving … Continue reading “It’s no longer your film”

“World War III is a guerilla information war with no division between military and civilian participation” -Marshall McLuhan In 1978, Pere Ubu released the EP Datapanik in the Year Zero. With its release came the first intimations of “Datapanik,” a concept developed by the band’s singer, David Thomas, and their graphic designer, John Thompson. In … Continue reading War at 33 1/3: Throbbing Gristle, Public Enemy & Datapanik

I decided to read some of the Old Testament a while back, during high school. I took the liberty of assuming the New Testament is too preachy and would lack the exotic zest of the Old Testament, which felt much closer to an aggregation of myths from a bygone era. I was especially interested in … Continue reading Jacob From the Machine

“Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit - all of these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided. It’s the sound of failure: so much modern art … Continue reading My2K: A Multi-Format Journey Through the Early ’00s

We all think of Alfred Hitchcock as a kind of pervert, or at least as the kind of man with fetishes and morbid curiosities that he dares not to say out loud. What we typically call perversion film critics have always tended to call auteurism. The common perception of Hitchcock as an auteur grew out … Continue reading Hitchcock Kills Dad

"Good God! The long-haired boys have lost control," exclaimed an unnamed army officer at Alamogordo New Mexico, in response to the first atomic bomb blast in July 1945. The atomic bomb, this infernal invention of Man, for it requires the splitting of the atom—the essence of existence, the building block of all that is—the division … Continue reading The Cosmic (B)OM(B)

Nuclear holocaust--Last year’s nightmare, this year’s dream.A mushroom cloud blooms. An appropriate, and if not appropriate then humorous, subtitle for Adrienne Rich’s poem “Trying to Talk with a Man” would have been “or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Admit My Relationship Has Failed.” And, much like Kubrick’s film (of a similar title), Rich’s … Continue reading Trying to Talk with a Man About Nuclear Armageddon: Adrienne Rich & the Nuclear Gothic

“In the not-too-distant future, sex will be illegal… but there will be rollerbabies.” Pornography has often tended to have a utopian dimension to it. This can be seen in at least two divergent ways, one experiential and the other symbolic. The first is the notion common to porn studies of pornotopia, which Steven Marcus described … Continue reading Touring a Few Porn Utopias