Glenn Beck's Scatological Imagination

Although Ebola has effectively receded from the American Terror Consciousness©, after cleaning out some old files on my computer this week I was reminded of the media tactics employed last year when the virus ostensibly threatened to spread to the United States. I remember witnessing one of the most fascinating exhibitions of this sort on Glenn Beck's program on The Blaze, to which a folder of screen shots entitled "Beck Feces" attests to both the bizarre nature of this particular display and my remaining fascination.

In a show that aired on October 15, 2014, Beck and his Blaze team members attempted to reveal apparent inadequacies in the CDC's protective protocol for doctors treating patients with full-blown ebola, and thus prove how easily ebola will spread internationally. But what this argument really provided was a flimsy pretext which allowed the host and his fellow Blazers with an opportunity to engage in one of the most obscenely regressive spectacles I have witnessed on cable television. To demonstrate the problems with the CDC's protective measures, Beck dresses in a smock and face mask while his helpers shower him in mixture of spaghetti and chocolate in attempt to stimulate the "projective vomiting and explosive diarrhea" that characterized the clinical conditions in Nigeria and other disease-stricken locations.

What I find most interesting about this performance is, first, its demonstration of the desire of Beck (and the far Right more generally) to return to a utopian, pre-Oedipal state before the law-of-the-father (participation in the symbolic economy) and its attendant social prohibitions (control of bodily fluids), which prohibit such aberrant and infantile behavior. While before the entrance into language, the subject participates in a fluid symbiosis with the mother in which the subject-object "cut" has not yet occurred, after the initiation into discourse, the subject must abandon this fluidity to enter the phallic symbolic economy, with its emphasis on the division between subject and object and the discrete, unitary (non-fluid) structure of language. 

Thus from this analysis, the far Right's resistance to discourse--as exhibited on such media outlets Fox News and The Blaze--emerges not simply as some superficial ideological manipulation by Murdoch and cronies, but as a deep-seated infantile desire to return to a pre-discursive, maternal intersubjective space in which the pressures of language and phallic law do not exist. This desire is certainly evinced in political discourse by the frequent invocation of the Edenic years of the 50s or the Reagan long 80s.

The second aspect I find fascinating by this display is its all too obvious relationship to a preceding transgressive visual culture of both performance art and popular images of torture. To the first point, Beck's performance is reminiscent of a salient tradition in Western performance art which explores the political body by employing paint, bodily fluids, and animal blood. The forerunner for this tradition is of course the Viennese Actionists. In ritualistic displays of extreme bodily states (often involving the self-laceration), artists of this movement (including Otto Mühl, Günter Brus, and Hermann Nitsch) explored the permeable boundaries of the body and the inter-corporeal relationship between multiple members of an artistic project. Below are images from performances by Mühl and Nitsch, respectively.

This second image, from Nitsch's "Orgies Mysteries Theater," brings me to my second point--the relationship between Beck's scatalogical explorations and images of torture. What I have in mind here is particularly those images that emerged during the Abu Ghraib prison scandal that came to light in 2003. Below is an infamous picture of DETAINEE-25, a prisoner who had been known to suffer from mental disabilities, and appears here covered in mud and feces.

What the homologies between these images (particularly that between Beck and DETAINEE-25) suggest is that rather than being a humorous diversion and thus an anomaly, Beck's performance last year actually reveals the law of the Right-wing American psyche. Instead of being "isolated" incidents, the rituals on Beck's program and those staged at Abu Ghraib actually constitute the fundamental iterative performances that reveal, in a horrifying visual display, the regression and infantilization (the need for "good guys and bad guys") that actually underpins the desires of the radical American Right. Thus, while we typically associate American conservatism with hyper-masculinity, this performance of masculinity is better understood as a supplement or mask to hide the primordial desire to return to a maternal symbiosis.

soda pop 101 presents You Don't Know Jack

We made it past the copyright censors!
soda pop 101 presents their first video (and first blunder) You Don't Know Jack
 Enjoy.




You Don't Know Jack from William Linhares on Vimeo.

The character revealed through Google searches

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one cannot lose sight of oneself, and of what one does when idle

-proverb

Sinatra In Space

"...And stop at the poolroom for a beer /

     And sadly say to myself /

     I don't know anyone here..."

100 Year Old Treasures: "Birth of A Nation" and Nicanor Parra

       One crude but unquestionable indication of his greatness was his power to create permanent images. All through his work there are images which are as impossible to forget, once you have seen them, as some of the grandest and simplest passages in music or poetry....
       This was the one time in movie history that a man of great ability worked freely, in an unspoiled medium, for an unspoiled audience, on a majestic theme which involved all that he was; and brought to it, besides his abilities as an inventor and artist, absolute passion, pity, courage, and honesty. "The Birth of a Nation" is equal with Brady's photographs, Lincoln's speeches, Whitman's war poems; for all its imperfections and absurdities it is equal, in fact, to the best work that has been done in this country. And among moving pictures it is alone, not necessarily as "the greatest" -- whatever that means -- but as the one great epic, tragic film.
-James Agee







"Birth Of A Nation" was released in 1915.  I don't think it's hyperbole to claim it is an impossible exercise in imagination to even begin to comprehend what the viewers would have felt watching a Griffith epic on an enormous flashing screen 100 years ago. 

...............................................................................................................


40 years ago the Oscar Nominees for Best Picture were the following:

"One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest"
"Jaws"
"Nashville"
"Barry Lyndon"
"Dog Day Afternoon"


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My first passionate feelings towards cinema seemed to coincide precisely with the industry's mainstream decline. This was the Bush/Cheney, post-9/11 what-have-you and it seemed like a new cast of rich and slimy men were wielding power and destroying things from all corners. I went to movies occasionally, with friends, at some megaplex across from some megachurch. It just wasn't part of the culture, and it certainly still isn't, not really, at least not as a central cultural conversation like it seemed to be in the golden days, whatever that means.

So it's also impossible for me to imagine that movies like the ones up for best picture in the 1975-6 season were available for every kid in the country to feast on. These were the films the studios were willing to sling money towards. Similar ones seemed to be making an impact in Europe, so why not? 


Studio bosses don't have the guts to take real chances on flicks these days. Cuz it's all about the loot, man.

Seriously how many more superhero movies can we endure? It's getting embarrassing just to see the incessant stream of commercials every week. 
When I see one, I switch it off immediately and then wipe the sweat from my brow. 


.................................................................................................................


In other news, the Chilean poet Nicanor Parra is 100 years old. 
He's seen it all. From Griffith to "Antman" :


The Trap

During that time I kept out of circumstances that were too full of mystery
As people with stomach ailments avoid heavy meals,
I preferred to stay at home inquiring into certain questions
Concerning the propagation of spiders,
To which end I would shut myself up in the garden
And not show myself in public until late at night;
Or else, in shirt-sleeves, defiant,
I would hurl angry glances at the moon,
Trying to get rid of those bilious fancies
That cling like polyps to the human soul.
When I was alone I was completely self-possessed,
I went back and forth fully conscious of my actions
Or I would stretch out among the planks of the cellar
And dream, think up ways and means, resolve little emergency problems.
It was at that moment that i put into practice my famous method for interpreting dreams
Which consists in doing violence to oneself and then imagining what one would like,
Conjuring up scenes that I had worked our beforehand with the help of powers from other worlds.
In this manner I was able to obtain priceless information
Concerning a string of anxieties that afflict our being:
Foreign travel, erotic disorders, religious complexes.
But all precautions were inadequate,
Because, for reasons hard to set forth,
I began sliding automatically down a sort of inclined plane.
My soul lost altitude like a punctured balloon,
The instinct of self-preservation stopped functioning
And, deprived of my most essential prejudices,
I fell unavoidably into the telephone trap
Which sucks in everything around it, like a vacuum,
And with trembling hands I dialed that accursed number
Which even now I repeat automatically in my sleep.
Uncertainty and misery filled the seconds that followed,
While I, like a skeleton standing before that table from hell
Covered with yellow cretonne,
Waited for an answer from the other end of the world,
The other half of my being, imprisoned in a pit.
Those intermittent telephone noises
Worked on me like a dentist's drill,
They sank into my soul like needles shot from the sky
Until, when the moment itself arrived,
I started to sweat and to stammer feverishly,
My tongue like a veal steak
Obtruded between my being and her who was listening,
Like those black curtains that separate us from the dead.
I never wanted to conduct those over-intimate conversations
Which I myself provoked, just the same, in my stupid way,
My voice thick with desire, and electrically charged.
Hearing myself called by my first name
In that tone of forced familiarity
Filled me with a vague discomfort,
With anguished localized disturbances which I contrived to keep in check
With a hurried system of questions and answers
Which roused in her a state of pseudo-erotic effervescence
That eventually affected me as well
With a feeling of doom.
Then I'd make myself laugh and as a result fall into a state of mental prostration.
These ridiculous little chats went on for hours
Until the lady who ran the pension appeared behind the screen
Brusquely breaking off our stupid idyll.
Those contortions of a petitioner at the gates of heaven
And those catastrophes which so wore down my spirit
Did not stop altogether when I hung up
For usually we had agreed
To meet next day in a soda fountain
Or at the door of a church whose name I prefer to forget. 

Welcome to soda pop 101! Educate Yourself

The MIT Guide to Lock-Picking:

click here::---> is it not nifty?

Introduction/Manifesto

Ain't It Nifty?
The decision to start this blog came to me in a coffee shop on a Sunday evening. It was a visceral impulse (what else?) and seemed to have a significant weight attached to it so I anticipated its trajectory and quickly texted a few accomplices to join the ranks. Then I sat and waited for their responses. 
I tried to read some Pascal but the words looked like tiny black bricks, or maybe tiny black bugs. I was all alone with a cup of iced coffee and a decision to start a blog. 
My head felt light and I thought I saw one of the black bugs crawl off the page onto my shoe. I realized with horror I was elapsing into an episode of madness: that specific kind of madness that seems to only find me in coffee shops on Sunday afternoons. 
Looking around the place (with eyes twitching and hands shaking), I saw at the booth next to me a girl with one arm reading a book I couldn't see the title of. Behind her, at a table with four cramped occupants (I was lounging in a booth all by myself), a lesbian with a mustache was discussing feminist discourse and the recent Supreme Court decision. I kept my eyes scanning until they landed on two young guys with "Black Lives Matter" shirts playing chess and beat-boxing quietly to each other as if they were careful not to disturb others, but just couldn't contain themselves. 
The rest of the tables were filled with people on headphones dead-locked into their computer screens, surfing the world-wide web for content, a ragged federation of discourse, simultaneously pathetic and brave.
Then my phone buzzed : vibrations : accomplices

This blog seeks to blow the sentimental travel blog from its shallow waters. It seeks to confront the crimes and deeds of popular culture and the cowardly ruminations of moralists promulgated by media and groupthink. Its contributors resemble a group of recently laid-off detectives trudging through the slopes of our Age (an Age that is more indecipherable each passing day), picking metaphysical locks and looking for clues.

Readers (if there are any) can expect explorations into subjects as audacious as :

the current state of cinema     micro-and macro-fashion       politic-o's (rad)    
girls w/ backpacks            lit. & writers            muzak              boys in fleece          
boys & girls in nature           sleep                venues & infrastructure        
the forgotten saints    &       the infinity of dreams        (which accepts us all)



Confession:
We wouldn't recognize Truth if it walked up to us and asked to the movies.



Also posted sporadically will be music, videos and other work of our own creation.
like everything we do, expect instinct & improvisation w/ a sub-conscious allegiance to pop culture.



and please don't make fun of us.


-soda pop 101

JULY 2015 AD