LXXXI
Some say the world is made for Funkadelic
(and so do I)
Toyota Prius
Lexus Priapus
What is it, to go before?
I was a Jewess for the FBI
But enough about me, how do you like my gaze?
What is the relation between the frim-fram sauce with the ausenfay and the flim flam floogie with a floy floy?
Strap-ons.
Snap-ons
Adduction, abduction, subduction, seduction and the geomancy of all that melts and freezes.
Counting the holes in the bullet-proof glass.
“It isn’t that kind of boom,” said Ronnie Lowenstein, director of the city’s Independent Budget Office. “It isn’t ‘Bonfire of the Vanities’…” Many of the new jobs are in lower-paying businesses such as hotels and restaurants. But, for a change, fast-growing and well-paying Internet companies like Google, Facebook and BuzzFeed are adding jobs at a fast pace. Reports Patrick McGeehan, “In NYC Jobs Come Back Without Wall Street.” New York Times, February 16, 2015. 1:6.
People are making money hand over fist.
People are making fists. Hand over money.
Netflix. Neckflex. Fixed fastforard head.
Bell, book and Kindle.®
Fanshen. To turn over. To turn the body. To overturn.
“Figuratively,” to enter a new world.
Fansong. To relax, to slacken as in giving a little play to a taught rope.
Also to unbind, as in taking down one’s long hair and letting it fall. But there is no implication of dissipation or collapse, only permitting space and movement.
Fang song the body electric
Harmonize the amplitude and voltage
Regulate capacity and resistance
Yong ye bu yong li.
Half a pig, half a pig onward
A partial artist… oh, I thought you said a martial artist
A partial bird apportion – d’you mean cut up some chicken?
Part and partial.
Concept for a new, irresistible unisexual perfume: The Preciousssss.
Branding heaven.
Bell, book and candle; candle, book, and bell
Forward and backward, to curse Faustus to hell…
And what rough and ready beast makes its move when the ridiculous can no longer be sublimated?
Crónica de la mala educación
Opposable thumbs: coolest app yet
The tangent plangent lambent
Wide dance of the double belly beast
Pardon me, boy, is this the Via Dolorosa?
Aladdin American Studies: ¡Abre Sésamo!
I dream of genealogy. In white, black, y indio.
Sí, hay castillos en España. Y Castellanos tambíen.
Whitman and Barnum. Separated at birth, yet, somehow, freakishly, unholily, conjoin’d.
Mind the gap and it will mind thee
Eugene V. Deb(utante)s
Past, present and suture.
Now, what [asks Jullien], does Chinese theory have to say about painting? “It is easy to paint the mountain in the rain or the mountain under clear skies. But when fine weather is turning to rain, or when the sun begins to shine again through the rain; to take shelter one evening surrounded by mist and fog…, when all the landscape is lost in confusion, emerging – immerging between there is and there is not: that is difficult to figure” [Qian Wenshu]. Not a definite, clear-cut state of things, but the moment of change from one state to another, between the opposite actualizing and undifferentiated stages: Chinese painting shows the trans-formation from one to the other, captures the effect of vague haziness – the undecidedness (huang hu, as it is said in the Laozi,§41) – that goes hand in hand with change. But everything is always in the process of change. Whereas Greek thought attributes greater value to the formed and the distinct, which gave rise to the cult of the definitive Form exemplified by the Nude, China thinks – and paints – the transitional and the indicial (in the modes of the “subtle,” the “tenuous,” the “indistinct”). It is in this that Chinese thought is invaluable, for Greek thought, based on the principle of contradiction and in which clarity is all-important (Descartes again: clear and distinct ideas…), has left us strangely unequipped to think (depict) the indistinctness of transition. […Nude, pp. 75-77]
Now it seems to me that, working off Jullien’s ideas of form vs. Form, that one can re-examine the divergence between Chinese and European genres of “landscape” in a different light. While the literati painting of mountains and pine trees may bear the stamps of its “ownership,” one would be in error to imagine that the mountains and pine trees depicted could be thought to be possessed in the sense of Real Estate, or, put another way, Fee Simple. There is (simply) no Chinese equivalent of Wivenhoe Park for the very good, and deeply non-aesthetic reason that landscape conceived of as “breath-energy” and landscape as a delimited and fixed “property” are as categorically incommensurable, in their way, as “being” and “non-being.” In this case the significance of signification is worth ten thousand words.
To which the Domesday Book and ten thousand other artifacts attest.
But let us look at where we are in terms of global, national and local cultures and relate it to this passage from Bisio’s Decoding the Dao:
If yang [fire-FIRE as in Finance, Insurance, Real Estate] is allowed to expand endlessly without the regressive, inward movement of yin [world respiration], the cycle ultimately moves out of balance. Uncontrolled, the upward and outward movement of the liver and the downward spreading action of the lung – the action of the dragon flying upward and the tiger pouncing (i.e. undirected creativity and excitement coupled with feeling, emotion and sensation) – spirals outward, depleting the body’s essence and disturbing the harmony of the spirit. In his translation of The Secret of the Golden Flower, Richard Wilhelm tells us that the normal movement of the Five Powers allows our passions, emotions and interactions with the external world [emphasis mine] to lead and influence the clarity of our heart-mind and spirit, thereby gradually diminishing our life energies and dimming the clarity of our Spirit [Shen]. This is a kind of death.
The question is not whether the reversal occurs, but when.
So Greeks, beware Germans bearing Euros. Next time.
Yin (again), begin again.
Fin?
Look at a photographic portrait of Lincoln, or at his image on the five dollar bill, and you’ll see how dead his eyes are.
I yam that I yam. The King James version of Popeye.
Or vicee versee.
Yin and yang cycling endlessly
Big bang and Lance need not apply
Theory itself merely spectates
Tour de respiration: ne va pas off-piste.
Fiction: the anti-essence. How much greater authority inheres in not claiming Truth.
Yet + And = Y’and
Given a sufficiently funky subway PA, “this is an uptown C local train,” sounds like “colloquial train,” or “cloacal train.” And indeed, are these platforms not informal? Are these tunnels not a kind of intestine?
But if an A, then Y no Z train?
The Book of Honest Creatures
Something there is that does not love a Walmart.
You’ve known it cognitively for years, but today, some tender rays of implication begin to dawn on you. There is, in Huntington Station, on darkest Long Island, a mall named for Walt Whitman.
Ka-ching!, the body electric. In the ever-expanding eidlonosphere.
Dead eyes. Yes, our vision of Lincoln is so freighted we don’t see the obvious. No shen emerging from those eyes. None what so ever.
And if he was our first zombie president, what of Barack, that uncanny valley East African-American Ken Doll – that, well, ambulating drone?
Triumph of the will
o’ the wisp…
Huang hu: undecidedness. Laozi,§14.
We are all a waddling pair of ducks
And the web, worldwide and otherwise wesides in our two weft feet
We can weave any time we want to
Y’and the spectacle, like Kronos, Erysichthon, and Ugoloino for whatever and all sins and reasons, devouring their children, with or without relish.
Thessalonian king, who sold his meal ticket, his daughter Mestra, into slavery, in the end – for in Ovid as in all things springing from the loins of Greece there is an end – having eaten everything but himself, had only himself left to consume.
Y’andeed, as the philosopher once said: the undigested life is not worth a shit.
Stone alphabet soup. Mmm-mmm… gut! Ja! Wohl!
Triumph of the Wilhelm.
But the Greeks say: Nein, we whol not.
It is said that during early Renaissance, when the ancient statues, half-buried or interred, their myriad fragments, blunting the evermore aggressive ploughs, were believed to have been generated by the earth herself.
Lovely Rita, Demeter Maid
Ah, Western Civ:
it was just spectacular
Yellow’s the new gray
