5 23 11

What was life *BG?

Furthermore, what was life **BTW?



(* BG = Before Gaga)
(** BTW = Born This Way)

Judas Kiss / Gaga Kiss

In her new video for her second single Judas from her third album to be released 23 May Born This Way Gaga reenacts the story of Jesus and Judas, modernized, with a middle Eastern aesthetic. There is so much happening in this video but I think the most provocative moment is the Judas kiss/Gaga kiss.

The Judas kiss is known to signify the betrayal of Christ.
Gaga inserts hereslf as a median between these two oppoisites - Jesus/light/goodness and Judas/darkness/evil. She not only inserts herself between them but also gives Judas a deadly kiss perhaps cancelling out the effect of his kiss that signifies the betrayal of Christ. She 'kisses' Judas wi th a gun that shoots lipstick as a bullet that Gaga smears on his face. The gun appears again in this video as a symbol of the phallus that Gaga herself is wielding, robbing Judas of his power.
Perhaps all of this also speaks to the need to abolish stereotypical dichotomies - light/dark, evil/good, the I and the other, activity/passivity - and recognize that in fact opposites are one.

Ergo, Gaga is not merely playing the role of median bringing opposites together, she is abolishing them completely demonstrating the Christ and Judas are one in the same.

le visible et l'invisible

... Le présent visible n'est pas dans le temps et l'espace, ni, bien entendu, hors d'eux: il n'y a rien avant lui, après lui, autour de lui, qui puisse rivaliser avec sa visibilité. Et pourtant, il n'est pas seul, il n'est pas tout. Exactement: il bouche ma vue, c'est-à-dire, à la fois, que le temps et l'espace s'entendent au-delà, et qu'ils sont derrière lui, en profondeur, en cachette. Le visible ne peut ainsi me remplir et m'occuper que parce que, lui-même, moi le voyant, je suis aussi visible: ce qui fait le poids, l'épaisseur, la chair de chaque couleur, de chaque son, de chaque texture tactile, du présent et du monde, c'est que celui qui les saisit se sent émerger d'eux à eux, qu'il est le sesible même venant à soi, et qu'en retour le sensible est à ses yeux comme son double ou une extension de sa chair. L'espace, le temps des choses, ce sont des lambeaux de lui-même, de sa spatilaisation, de sa temporalisation, non plus une multiplicité d'individus distribués synchroniquement et diachroniquement, mais un relief du simultané et du successif, une pulpe spatiale et temporelle où les individus se forment par différenciation. Les choses, ici, là maintenant, alors, ne sont plus en soi, en leur lieu, en leur temps, elles n'existent qu'au bout de ces rayons de spatialité et de temporalité, émis dans le secret de ma chair, et leur solidité n'est pas celle d'un objet pur que survole l'esprit, elle est éprouvée par moi du dedans en tant que je suis parmi elles et qu'elles communiquent à travers moi comme chose sentante. Comme le souvenir-écran des psychanalystes, le présent, le visible ne compte tant pour moi, n'a pour moi un prestige absolu qu'à raison de cet immense contenu latent de passé, de future et d'ailleurs, qu'il annonce et qu'il cache.

(Le visible et l'invisible de Maurice Merleau-Ponty)

Iceland

Summer approaches. Two weeks left of this term. La fin de session is almost at it's final fin.
This summer holds an incredible adventure for me: Iceland. I've been dreaming for many years of exploring this intriguing place, since 2006 in fact. It's high time I made it all the way there.
My summer adventure will begin with three courses taught through the University of Manitoba: Conversational Icelandic, Medieval Icelandic culture and Contemporary Icelandic culture and art. These three courses are taught through UM's Field School - all taught on site in Iceland. I leave around the 22nd of June which means I'll turn 28 in Iceland or on an airplane headed to Iceland - what a great birthday gift! We spend about three weeks together in Iceland, until the 15th July. At which point I will fly to Paris for the remainder of July to see friends, be in Paris, and go see a Claude Cahun art exhibition, another dream come true. August 1st will bring me back to Iceland where I will spend the remainder of August galavanting around, exploring, researching, reading, writing, swimming i hope, surrounded by mountains and sea!

So, to inspire me, and you too I hope, here's a selection of photos of things to look forward to in Iceland!

Sea and mountains. Reykjavik, Iceland.

(photo courtesy of http://waipio.wordpress.com/2010/10/12/crateworthy/)

Natural wonders. West Fjords, Iceland.

(photo courtesy of http://www.flickr.com/photos/planetadventure/254417968/)

Icelandic ponies!

(photo courtesy of http://www.horsesdiaries.com/icelandic-ponies-pasos-of-the-north/)

Puffins!!!

(photo courtesy of http://www.tripadvisor.com/LocationPhotos-g612424-w2-Skaftafell_National_Park.html)

Icelandic Sweaters!
(photo courtesy of http://www.eglifarm.com/index.php?cPath=41)

ART!!!

(Rainbow by Rurí, Keflavik Airport. photo courtesy of http://www.flickr.com/photos/langsx2/2120664833/)

random s**t

It is so amazing to me the weird stuff people make and buy in the world, and that we look at it on the internet.

These were too amazing not to share:







now... back to Rancière land and Merleau-Ponty sea.

gagamagoria

Wednesday night W.J.T Mitchell came to give two talks in Montreal. One at 12h30 at UQAM - Idolatry: Nietzsche, Blake, Poussin, and one at 18h30 at MAC - The Historical Uncanny and the War on Terror. In the second he talked about cloning terror, the phantasmagoria from the 19th century, and the viral effect images now have today - spreading like wildfire across the internet, being instantly accessible, even encoding time and place stamps on images to retrace where and when they were taken - which was the case of the hooded man, thought to be a terrorist who became the staple image for the war on terror and the ending of it (which will never happen). He said that it was thought this image could end the war on terror - are images so powerful that they could in fact end an entire world?

Transpose all this onto the mega pop queen transforming identity politics - Gaga. Her new video is literally a gagamagoria.
phantasmagoria is defined as: a sequence of real or imaginary images like that seen in a dream. in the 19th century there were phantasmagoria theatres where images of ghosts were projected onto smoke - they seemed to hang suspended in the air creating a dream like reality.
isn't it just this that gaga is doing? creating a race empty of prejudice, modeled after herself, the mother monster.

we live in gaga-magoria.


(image from Lady Gaga's new release "Born this Way")

Ísland. þetta sumar.
fyrír nám á Svartárkot.


Bárðardalur, Norður Ísland

Islanders always return to the island

- Shary Boyle projection drawing projects
- also Shary Boyle in the flesh conference at UQAM this week
- conferences to come: Nietzsche, Daniel Barrow = ohhhhhh yes!
- Queer parties + beer on the metro + little viles of liquid + beer on the street + talking heads and discotheques disco lights
- meeting Odile, Dounia, Amine, Vincent and most of all Angela
- adventure to St-Henri with Odile + chili + diamant perle + i heart this new life!
- petit rupture to discover the truth
- The Landscape in our Bodies
- Islenska
- Persona last night at Union Française - so very very amazing.
- experimental geography and better world books
- so much icelandic iceland ísland íslenska

Long ago my families left their islands and I have returned again and again to different islands. it's in my blood to be surrounded by the sea.
England
Corse
Montréal (yes, we are on an island)
next, Iceland.

Islensku

Iceland. Íslande.
Land of fire and ice. Land of eternal darkness and eternal light.

My golden white beacon.
My grounding.
My perspective.
You are what I hold onto, what I look towards and what I move into.
I look forward to you.

Never let me go.

Rökkurró - Sólin mun skína from Rökkurró on Vimeo.

A New Religion

In Le Gai Savoir para. 125 Nietzsche, for the first time, pronounces God is dead, and that we have killed him.


(Giuseppe Sanmartino, Vieled Christ, detail, 1753. Naples, Cappella di Sansevero)

N’avez-vous pas entendu parler de cet homme insensé qui, ayant allumé une lanterne en plein midi, courait sur la place du marché et criait sans cesse : « Je cherche Dieu! Je cherche Dieu! » - Et comme là-bas se trouvaient précisément rassemblés beaucoup de ceux qui ne croyaient pas en Dieu, il suscita une grand hilarité. L’a-t-on perdu? dit l’un.

S’est-il égaré comme un enfant? dit un autre. Ou bien se cache-t-il quelque part ? A-t-il peur de nous? S’est-il embarqué? A-t-il émigré? – ainsi ils criaient et riaient tous à la fois. L’insensé se précipita au milieu d’eux et les perça de ses regards. « Où est Dieu? cria-t-il, je vais vous le dire! Nous l’avons tué – vous et moi! Nous tous sommes ses meurtriers!

Embrace the new religion.
Follow the revolution.


(Lady Gaga, posing with veiled ensemble)

Re-incarnation.
For the love of little monsters, fame, bad girl meat and free bitchez.

Méditeranée at the Oceanographic Museum, Monaco

(Wu Zei by Huang Yong Ping. Photo courtesy of e-flux)

The Oceanographic Museum in Monaco presents an exhibition celebrating the Mediterranean sea. Bringing contemporary art and science together, this exhibition presents a series of maritime objects that illustrate the rich biodiversity and complexity of sea life.

This exhibition also presents a monumental installation by the Sing-Franco artist Huang Yong Ping. The installation consists of a 25 meter hybrid creation - the combination of an octopus and a cuttlefish that engulfs a Medusa-esque chandelier created by the German biologist, philosopher and free thinker Ernst Haekle. The octu-fish devours the chandelier while spreading its tentacles along the ceiling of the museum, stretching out and around the room, taking it over with it's presence.

The title "Wu Zei" is quite ambiguous. In Chinese "Wu Zei" means cuttlefish while the characters for Wu and Zei also connote different things: the colour black and stealing respectively. Yong Ping simultaneously eludes to urbanization of the coast of the Mediterranean sea, recent oil spill disasters and the omnipresence of global warming and climate change. Being one of the world's richest reservoirs of biodiversity, the Mediterranean is also one the places most at risk for corruption, pollution and disaster.

Finally, I will venture, unsurely into the land of Rancièrean discourse, that this could be an interesting example of the paradox of the aesthetic regime of art combining art and non-art, and the heteronomy and autonomy of art in an installation political engaged (the politics part is fuzzy, being a little too obvious; its very obviously politically engaged... in the politics of our ever increasingly fragile environment... however, i'm as yet, learning!)

website: www.oceano.mc
20 November 2010 - 20 May 2012

The Love Affair

with Nietzsche is not over. I think it might be life long. However, the Gaga fascination is fading. She's not so shiny anymore, so sparkly, so bizarre. It's all starting to look the same. But perhaps, Born This Way will sway me.
For now, my heart belongs to Nietzsche.

"This book [Human, All-Too-Human. A Book for Free Spirits] was begun in Sorrento during a winter when it was given to me to pause as a wanderer pauses and look back across the broad and dangerous country my spirit had traversed up to that time. this was in the winter of 1876-7; the ideas themselves are older. They were already in essentials, the same ideas that I take up again in the present treatises - let us hope the long interval has done them good, that they have become riper, clearer, stronger, more perfect! That I still cleave to them today, however, that they have become in the meantime more and more firmly attached to one another, indeed entwined and interlaced with one another, strengthens my joyful assurance that they might have arisen in me from the first not as isolated, capricious, or sporadic things but form a common root, from a fundamental will of knowledge, pointing imperiously into the depths, speaking more and more precisely, demanding greater and greater precision. For this alone is fitting for a philosopher. We have no right to isolated acts of any kind: we may not make isolated errors or hit upon isolated truths. Rather do our ideas, our values, our yeas and nays, our ifs and buts, grow out of us with the necessity with which a tree bears fruit - related and each with an affinity to each, and evidence of one will, one health, one soil, one sun. - Whether you like them, these fruits of ours? - But what is that to the trees! What is that to us, to us philosophers!"

(Nietzsche, Friedrich, On the Genealogy of Morals, Trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale, (New York: Random House, 1969), pg. 16)

I follow rivers

Lykke Li's new single "I follow rivers" from her upcoming album "Wounded Rhymes" release date: 2nd March 2011 in Sweden.

Shades of Shirin Neshat's films, Gagaesque in ways, dark, the pursuit but this time woman of man, sinister, provocative.
bear feet in the snow.
Political turmoil.

discovery: carla lonzi

Carla Lonzi. 1931 - 1982.
Italian art critic, writer, theorist and feminist.
Founder of the review Rivolta Femminile.



« Noi rimettiamo in discussione il socialismo e la dittatura del proletariato. La forza dell'uomo è nel suo identificarsi con la cultura, la nostra nel rifiutarla. Sputiamo su Hegel. Siamo contro il matrimonio. Accogliamo la libera sessualità in tutte le sue forme. Sono un diritto dei bambini e degli adolescenti la curiosità e i giochi sessuali. La donna è stufa di allevare un figlio che le diventerà un cattivo amante. Comunichiamo solo con donne. »
(from Manifesto di Rivolta Femminile.)

Dimanche...

...à montréal includes:

a) Passion Pit.


b) Nietzsche.


c) pancakes from the Joy of Cooking.

For Tess

Dionysiac

The Pre-God is Dead, Pre-Rupture with Wagnar, Pre-Nihilism aka the Romantic phase in Nietzsche's writing.



Not only is the bond between man and man sealed by the Dionysiac magic: alienated, hostile or subjugated nature, too, celebrates her reconciliation with her lost son, man. The earth gladly offers up her gifts, and the ferocious creatures of the cliffs and the desert peacefully draw near. The chariot of Dionysus is piled high with flowers and garlands; under its yoke stride tigers and panthers. If we were to turn Beethoven’s Hymn of Joy into a painting, and not to restrain the imagination even as the multitude bowed awestruck into the dust: this would bring us close to the Dionysiac. Now the slave is a free man, now all the rigid and hostile boundaries that distress, despotism or ‘impudent fashion’ have erected between man and man break down. Now, with the gospel of world harmony, each man feels himself not only united, reconciled, and at one with his neighbour, but one with him, as if the veil of Maya had been rent and now hung in rags before the mysterious primal Oneness.

Singing and dancing, man expresses himself as a member of a higher community: he has forgotten how to walk and talk, and is about to fly dancing into the heavens. His gestures express enchantment. Just as the animals now speak, and the earth yields up milk and honey, he now gives voice to supernatural sounds: he feels like a god, he himself now walks about enraptured and elated as he saw the gods walk in dreams. Man is no longer an artists, he has become a work of art: the artistic power of the whole of nature reveals itself to the supreme gratification of the primal Oneness amidst the paroxysms of intoxication. The noblest clay, the most precious marble, man is kneaded and hewn here, and to the chisel-blows of the Dionysiac world-artist there echoes the cry of the Eleusinian mysteries, ‘Do you bow low, multitudes? Do you sense the Creator, world?’

(Nietazsche, Freidrich, The Birth of Tragedy: Out of the Spirit of Music trans. Shaun Whiteside, (London: Penguin, 1993) pgs 18-9)

le maître ignorant

Rancière published Le maître ignorant or The Ignorant Schoolmaster in 1991. It is an interpretation of the story of Joseph Jacotot - the original ignorant schoolmaster - who went to Holland as an educator in the 18th century but didn't teach a thing to his students. He didn't teach a thing, not in the sense we disenchanted youth would use that phrase, but in a different sense. He gave his students an edition of Télemacque written in French, of which they did not know a single word, with an edition of the same text in Dutch. The students read the book with the help of the translation and at the end of this experiment were asked to write an essay, in French, a language that they apparently did not know, or rather had never been taught. They each wrote an essay, and succeeded, on the text they had read, in a language they did not speak.

Thus, the ignorant schoolmaster.

This is a text that every person involved in education should read: new educators, older educators, those about to become educators. A revolutionary look at education. Rancière argues here that intelligence is equal, that equality can be a starting point rather than a destination, that intelligence is virtually boundless.

You can download an English version of Rancière's text here: http://ranciere.blogspot.com/2008/03/ignorant-schoolmaster-free-download.html
as well as check out this blog entirely dedicated to Rancière's writings. Despite being a French philosopher (of Algerian decent) most of what Rancière has written has been translated into English, illustrating what an erudite writer he is in the 21st Century.

For the Love of God

Damien Hirst (2007)

currently on exhibition at Palazzo Vecchio in Florence, Italy.

i resoluti

no. 1 Yoga. a) for a healthier mind, body and spirit and b) to rock the limbo line at next year's party of the year

no. 2 Less internet. and by that I mean less of the wasteful kind of Internet, not the great kind of looking up books at the library, learning Icelandic, etc.

no. 3 Grow a spine.


new projects:
- knitting a sweater: the boat-necked easy c/o make it with Mademoiselle circa 1987.
- morning routine of tea, yoga and Bach.
- paper to write: Gaga + Neitzsche's Dionysiac + Adorno's Negative Aesthetic.
- creative project: pattern making leading to clothes making (thanks to one of my christmas presents: Little Green Dresses.)
- learning Icelandic online.
- frequent library trips (I <3 you Bibliothèque Nationale)
- wednesday evening ritual 5 à 7 à l'Hotel de la Montagne with my Concordia friends.