Wednesday, October 27, 2010

wanted: your help

If you were to write an essay about Lady Gaga and her place within the visual arts in the 21st century, which lyric (of the following choices) would you choose for your title:

a) He ate my heart, and then he ate my brain
b) I want your ugly, I want your disease
c) Silicone, saline, poison, inject me
d) show me your teeth
e) other: please state.

Wednesday, October 20, 2010

*

Quanta / quantum
Diachronic
Metaphysics
Ontological
Causality
Subatomic
Panpsychism
Substratum / substrata
Contingent
Naught


* sometimes I really don’t like living with a roommate, especially an absent minded one who forgets to pay our telephone/internet/cable bill. Although, life is somehow less complicated when those extraneous distractions are removed.

Maëva and Nietzsche get to know each other a little better.

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(photo credit: wikipedia)

Sunday, October 17, 2010

caught from the raw fissure in the rock

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Anna and Maëva.
Les calanches de Piana.

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more graffiti at Québec City bar. Taken during the Défi Pepy film festival.
Québec City, QC.

Saturday, October 16, 2010

L'impropre

Dégoût d'une nourriture, d'une saleté, d'un déchet, d'une ordure. Spasmes et vomissements qui me protègent. Répulsion, haut-le-coeur qui m'écarte et me détourne de la souillure, du cloaque, de l'immonde. Ignominie de la compromissions, de l'entre-deux, de la traîtrise. Sursaut fasciné qui m'y conduit et m'en sépare.

Le dégoût alimentaire est peut-être la forme la plus élémentaire et la plus archaïque de l'abjection. Lorsque cette peau à la surface du lait, inoffensive, mince comme une feuille de papier à cigarettes, minable comme une rognure d'ongles, se présente aux yeux, ou touche les lèvres, un spasme de la glotte et plus bas encore, de l'estomac, du ventre, de tous les viscères, crispe le corps, presse les larmes et la bile, fait battre le coeur, perler le front et les mains. Avec le vertige qui brouille, le regard, la nausée me cambre, contre cette crème de lait, et me sépare de la mère, du père qui me la présentent. De cet élément, signe de leur désir, "je" n'en veux pas, "je" ne veux rien savoir, "je" ne l'assimile pas, "je" l'expulse. Mais presque cette nourriture n'est pas un "autre" pour "moi" qui ne suis que dans leur désir, je m'expulse, je me crache, je m'abjecte dans le même mouvement par lequel "je" prétends me poser. Ce détail, insignifiant peut-être mais qu'ils cherchent, chargent, apprécient, m'imposent, ce rien me retroune comme un gant, les tripes en l'air: ainsi ils voient, eux, que je suis en train de devenir un autre au prix de ma propre mort. Dans ce tranjet où "je" deviens, j'accouche de moi dans la violence du sanglot, du vomi. Protestation muette du symptôme, violence francassante d'une vonvulstaion, inscrite certes en un système symbolique, mais dans lequel, sans vouloir ni pouvoir s'intègrer pour y répondre, ça réagit, ça abréagit. Ça abjecte.

"L'approche de l'ajection" dans Pouvoirs de l'horreur: essai sur l'abjection par Julia Kristeva. pgs. 10-11.

post 202

my heart (and feet) hurts.
teeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeth.
rum and coke
love my roomie
brunch
aristote
platon.
plotin.
sooon this will all be over.
one week till home.

Thursday, October 14, 2010

Gaga + TK = eaten heart

Lady Gaga has already mimiced many famous amazing milestone artists.
Now Gaga teams up with Canadian performance artist Terence Koh. On several occassions. Anyone see the co-performance with Elton John? Where Gaga is thrown into an inferno machine and emerges with him at a double ended piano with arms extended raising from the middle? the piano was designed by Terence Koh.

then there is the odd performance where the two (Gaga and TK) count out and place in a tea cup 88 pearls. (called 88 pearls). but they skip numbers, recreating their own system for counting.

Now I found, via Gaga journal, GAGAKOH - a performance that they performed together in Tokyo.

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(images c/o littlemonster.blog.com)

You can read more about the performance as well as Gaga's role as HIV/Aids activist - one of many activist roles she incorporates - in the latest entry to the Gaga Journal (here!)
the title is one of my favourite of her lyrics: I want your disease.

hyacinth colour

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Les calanches de Piana.

Piana is a village in the south west of the island. Just outside of the village is the UNESCO world heritage site of Les Calanches de Piana. The calanques are massive red rocks that have been shaped and worn away by the wind and the sea. They are most famous for the shapes that they resemble like the head of the dog, the lovers and the castle, among the breathtaking views of the sea, from sheer drops off cliffs.

Piana, Corse.

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graffiti in a bar bathroom.
Québec City, QC.

Tuesday, October 12, 2010

Gaga Does Dada

In a wild turn of events, Gaga uses her mimetic skillz on one of the most famous Dadaist works by one of the most famous 20th century artists.

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Armitage Shanks: "I'm not Fucking Duchamp but I love pissing with you"
(image courtesy of Gaga Stigmata)

It seems like the logical next step in this ever evolving machine of spectacle and flux.
There has already been homage to the body and the performance art that emerged from the 60s notably Carolee Schneemann. Then the mimesis of Madonna, MJ and other landmark big shoe pop stars that Gaga somehow can over shadow despite the shortness of her career. the move from fame to fame monster was an interesting step - we are in love with a monster who is nothing but grotesque.
More mimesis - too literal maybe of Jana Sterbak and the meat dress Vanitas, but also recalling the ideas of decay and mortality that is present in the amazing work of Kiki Smith.
more outfits than we could ever imagine, that are so intense in and of themselves. one must wonder where she stores them, and how she can stand wearing them. forget comfort folks. life is a performance.
Jo Caledrone - alter ego of Ms. Gaga.
And finally Dada. It is very logical, I wish I could have foreseen it but I wasn't at all prepared for this, despite her work already resonating the Dadaist vision quite a bit.
*sigh* when will I learn.

but reflex of the earth

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les calanches de Piana.

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Peanut butter cookies made with olive oil, maple syrup and topped with a smartie, in the perfect green village des valeurs cast iron pan. c/o 101 cookbooks.
Drummondville, QC.

Sunday, October 10, 2010

what had my face to offer

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Cala d'Orzu.

The Rive Sud draws to a dramatic climax at Capo di Muro, on whose sheltered northern flank a particularly picturesque watchtower rises from a dense cover of maquis. Follow the signboards off the main road and you’ll drop down a rutted piste to a magnificent beach on the south side of the promontory called Cala d’Orzu. One of the two bar-restaurants behind it, Chez Francis, made international headlines when it was destroyed in an arson attack – not by separatist or Mafia guerrillas, as is normally the case in Corsica, but by undercover French police acting, or so it turned out, under direct orders from the state’s most senior offcial on the island.

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Once Rashleigh Peugeot arrived, my life changed and started involving a lot more greenery and time spent in this lovely river side park. Also a lot of four leaf clover finding started again. Early summer is the loveliest kind of light.
Drummondville, QC.

Saturday, October 9, 2010

the fire of your own presence?

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One day, this house may no longer exist.
Bonifactio, Corse

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the beginning of summer is so joyful, everyone's hearts are lifted.
park on rue Jogue, Drummondville, QC.

Friday, October 8, 2010

the light of your own face,

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Bonifacio, Bonifaziu, the village hanging precariously over the sea.

Bonifacio enjoys a superbly isolated situation at Corsica’s southernmost point, a narrow peninsula of dazzling white limestone creating a town site unlike any other on the island. The haute ville, a maze of narrow streets flanked by tall Genoese tenements, rises seamlessly out of sheer cliffs that have been hollowed and striated by the wind and waves, while on the landward side the deep cleft between the peninsula and the mainland forms a perfect natural harbour. A haven for boats for centuries, the anchorage is nowadays dominated by a swish marina that attracts yachts from all around the Mediterranean.

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Christmas present. Paper whites. Winter time flowers. in my corsica shaped indoor garden.
Drummondville, QC.

Thursday, October 7, 2010

MTL part dix-sept

Dear UQÀM,

Lots of people know you as Université du Québec À Montréal. I'm renaming you today Université de Quelque sort de (à becomes de here) Maudite merde.

Tuesday, October 5, 2010

la vie rhizomatique

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Today, we are going to embrace the "Rhizome" care of Deleuze and Guattari a couple of French/Italian God's I've loved from a far in my bedroom cozy corner for some time now.

what was it you saw in my face?

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Bonifacio II

It could be that Bonifacio’s first documented appearance is as the town of the cannibalistic Laestrygonians in the Odyssey; Homer’s description of an “excellent harbour, closed in on all sides by an unbroken ring of precipitous cliffs, with two bold headlands facing each other at the mouth so as to leave only a narrow channel in between” fits the port well. The unploughed land that Odysseus comes across inland of the harbour could be a reference to the plain beyond the Bonifacio promontory, and it’s also possible that he Neolithic tribes that once lived in this area where the barbaric attackers of Odysseus’s crew.

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fiber optics art amongst the lipstick trees.
nuit blanche 2010, Montréal, QC

Sunday, October 3, 2010

women's lib(ia)

"La femme, elle se touche d'elle-même et en elle-même sans la nécessité d'une médiation, et avant tou départage possible entre activité et passivité. La femme 'se touche' tout le temps, sans que l'on puisse d'ailleurs le lui interdire, car son sexe est fait de deux lèvres qui s'embrassent continûment. Ainsi, en elle, elle est déjà deux - mais non divisibles en un(e)s - qui s'affectent."

- Luce Irigary de "Ce sexe qui n'en est pas un" p. 24.

and your glance?

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Bonifacio. A magical town. Right at the most southern tip of the island, the cliffs have been shaped by the winds of the Mediterranean Sea. This town was brutally massacreed by pirates way before Napoleon's time and it is also rumored that this the port city that Odyssey comes into during his journey.
A beautiful, eerie place. The rock you see in this photo, mammoth and majestic, is called 'le grain de sable' - humorous.

Bonifacio, Corse.

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Ninja Knittas the night we installed Red Trees
Drummondville, QC.
I miss that apartment, and those Angie times so much.

Saturday, October 2, 2010

with the light from yours

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The village of Bastica. Nestled in the mountains not far from the "urban centre" of Ajaccio, this sleepy village is the birth place of Sampiero Corso, one of the fathers of the nation. He is memorialized in the town square as a Gold Statue triumphantly about to draw his sword.
Bastica, Corse.

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...
there is no number 52.
my numeration skills are drastically declining.