There is eternity to blush in

→ Sep 2018

8/18

Denzel Curry, Imperial; Denzel Curry, TA13OO; Playboi Carti, Playboi Carti; cLOUDDEAD, cLOUDDEAD; Steve Hauschildt, Dissolvi; Sweet Trip, You Will Never Know Why; Perfume Genius, No Shape; Felicita, Hej!; Nostrum Grocers, Nostrum Grocers; Young Thug, Barter 6; Eleventeen Eston, At the Water; Michael Pisaro / Reinier van Houdt, Shades of Eternal Night; De Leon, De Leon; Shawty Pimp feat. Reddog, Comin’ Real Wit It; Carl Stone, Electronic Music From the Eighties and Nineties; Drumloop, Revenge Body; Brigitte Fontaine & Areski Belkacem, Je ne connais pas cet homme; R. Andrew Lee, The Time Curve Preludes; Nina, Complications; Tor Lundvall, Insect Wings, Leaf Matter & Broken Twigs - Early Ambient Recordings: 1991-1994 Volume 2; Kallie Lampel, Perennials; Amnesia Scanner, Another Life; Brave Little Abacus, Masked Dancers: Concern in So Many Things You Forget Where You Are; Michael Pisaro, Étant donnés; Ssaliva, WYIN; Ssaliva, Thought Has Wings; K-S.H.E., Routes Not Roots; Brave Little Abacus, Just Got Back From the Discomfort–We’re Alright; Clearing, Moonbath; The Savage Young Taterbug, Shadow of Marlboro Man; Keith Fullerton Whitman, Lisbon; Felicita, Frenemies; Tirzah, Devotion; DJ Sprinkles, Where Dancefloors Stand Still; Felicita, ecce homo; Charli XCX, Vroom Vroom; Luxury Elite, Prism; Helena Hauff, Qualm; Caterina Barbieri, Born Again in the Voltage; Portishead, Third; Ka, Honor Killed the Samurai; Ytamo, Mi Wo; The Necks, Body; Yowler, The Offer; Yo La Tengo, And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside-Out; Bliss Signal, Drift; Fishmans, 98.12.28 男達の別れ (98.12.28 Otokotachi no Wakare); Fishmans, Long Season; Kali Malone, Organ Dirges 2016-2017; Kali Malone, Cast of Mind; Mitski, Be the Cowboy; Dr. Yen Lo, Days With Dr. Yen Lo; Roy Montgomery, Suffuse; Young Thug, JEFFERY; Young Thug, Beautiful Thugger Girls; Hermit and the Recluse, Orpheus vs. The Sirens; Ian William Craig, Durbē; White Poppy, Drifters Gold; øjeRum, Skygge; poemme, Moments in Golden Light; 夕方の犬(U ･ｪ･), ʕ•̫͡•ʕ•̫͡•ʔ•̫͡•ʔ•̫͡•ʕ•̫͡•ʔ•̫͡•ʕ•̫͡•ʕ•̫͡•ʔ•̫͡•ʔ•̫͡•ʕ•̫͡•ʔ•̫͡•ʔ♡; Alvin Curran, Fiori chiari, fiori oscuri; Eva-Maria Houben, Breath for Organ; Matt Karmil, Will; Anadol, Uzun Havalar; Larry Wish, How More Can You Need?; Sonae, I Started Wearing Black; Autechre, Incunabula; Autechre, Amber; Ahnnu, Parallax; North Atlantic Drift, Departures, Vol. 2; Less Bells, Solifuge; Ka, The Night’s Gambit; SHXCXCHCXSH, SsSsSsSsSsSsSsSsSsSsSsSsSsSsSs; Ariel Kalma, Le temps des moissons; K. Leimer, Imposed Order; 吉村弘 [Hiroshi Yoshimura], Green; 芦川聡 [Satoshi Ashikawa], Wave Notation 2: Still Way; Dickie Landry, Fifteen Saxaphones; Andrea Schiavelli, End of the Game; Wim Mertens, A Man of No Fortune, and With a Name to Come; F.J. McMahon, Spirit of the Golden Juice; Kero Kero Bonito, TOTEP; Twin Sister, In Heaven; James Ferraro, Four Pieces for Mirai; Bedhead, Transaction de Novo; Ñaka Ñaka, Mundo Harsh; Saba, Care for Me

→ Sep 2018

John Cage “2 Pages, 122 Words on Music and Dance” in Four Statements on the Dance collected in Silence: Lectures and Writings by John Cage

→ Sep 2018

from Chris Marker’s Le Dépays

→ Aug 2018

from “Kafka and the Work’s Demand” in Maurice Blanchot’s The Space of Literature, translated by Ann Smock

When he is not writing, Kafka is not only alone – “alone like Franz Kafka,” he will say to G. Janouch – but a prey to a sterile, cold solitude, a petrifying cold which he calls torpor and which seems to have been the great threat he feared. Even Brod, so anxious to represent Kafka as a man without anomalies, acknowledges that he was sometimes as if not there or dead. Again, this is very similar to Hölderlin: “I am dumb, I am made of stone.” And Kafka: “My incapacity to think, to observe, to determine the truth of things, to remember, to speak, to take part in the life of others, becomes greater each day; I am turning into stone … . If I don’t save myself in some work, I am lost” (July 28, 1914).

“If I don’t save myself in some work … .” But why should the effort of writing be able to save him? It seems that Kafka recognized in precisely this terrible state of self-dissolution, where he is lost for others and for himself, the center of gravity of writing’s demand. His feeling profoundly destroyed is the first intimation of the profundity which replaces destruction with the possibility of the greatest creation. This is a marvelous reversal, a hope always equal to the greatest despair. And how understandable it is that he should draw from this experience confidence he will never willingly question. Thus the effort of writing, especially in his early years, becomes something like a means of psychological (not yet of spiritual) salvation: it is an effort to create something “which might be linked word for word with his life, which he draws into himself so that it might draw him from himself.” He expresses this most naïvely and most forcefully in these terms: “Today I have a great yearning to write all my anxiety entirely out of me, write it into the depths of the paper just as it comes out of the depths of me, or write it down in such a way that I could draw what I had written into me completely” (December 8, 1911). However somber it may become, this hope will never fail completely; always, at every period, we find in his Diaries notes of this sort: “The firmness which the most insignificant writing brings about in me is beyond doubt and wonderful. The comprehensive view I had of everything on my walk yesterday!” (November 27, 1913). At such moments writing is not a compelling call; it is not waiting upon grace, or an obscure prophetic achievement, but something simpler, more immediately pressing: the hope of not going under, or, more precisely, the hope of sinking faster than himself and thus of catching hold of himself at the last minute. This, then, is a duty more pressing than any other, and it leads him to note down on July 31, 1914 these remarkable words:

I have no time. General mobilization. K. and P. have been called up. Now I receive the salary of solitude. But it is hardly a salary; solitude only brings punishments. It doesn’t matter, I am not much affected by this misery, and more determined than ever … . I will write despite everything, at any price: it is my fight for survival.

→ Aug 2018

Alvin Curran – Fiori chiari, fiori oscuro

Nuno Canavarro – Plux Quba

→ Aug 2018 "But what she loved more than anything was making clay figurines, which no one had taught her. She’d work on a small cement path in the shade, next to the last window of the basement. When she wanted to with great strength she’d go down the road to the river. On one of its banks, which was slippery but scalable, she found the best clay that one could desire: white, supple, sticky, cold. Just by touching it, feeling its deliciously joyful and blind delicateness, those timidly alive bits, a person’s heart would warm and soften, almost ridiculous. Virgínia would dig with her fingers that pale and washed earth–in the can tied to her waist the amorphous segments would be collected. The river in small gestures wet her bare feet and she’d wiggle her damp toes with excitement and brightness. With her hands free, then, she’d carefully leap over the bank to the flat surface. In the small cement courtyard she would deposit her riches. She would mix the clay with water her eyelids fluttering at attention–concentrated, her body on the lookout, she could obtain an exact and nervous proportion of clay and water with a wisdom that would be born in the same instant, fresh and progressively created. She’d get a clear and tender material from which she could shape a world. How, how to explain the miracle … She’d grow scared, thoughtful. She said nothing, she didn’t move but inside without any words she repeated: I am nothing, I have no pride, anything can happen to me, if - - - they want they can stop me from mixing the clay, - - - if they want they can crush me, ruin me entirely, I know that I am nothing. - - - it was less than a vision, it was a sensation in the body, a frightened thought about whatever let her accomplish so much with the clay and the water and before which she had to humble herself with seriousness. She would thank it with a difficult joy, fragile and tense, she felt in - - - some thing like one you cannot see with closed eyes–but one you cannot see with closed eyes has an existence and a power, like darkness, like darkness, like absence, she would contain herself consenting, ferocious and mute with her head. But she knew nothing of herself, she would travel innocent and distracted through her reality without recognizing it, like a child, like a person.
After obtaining the material, in a slump of exhaustion she could lose her desire to make figurines. Then she’d go on living forward like a girl.
One day however she was feeling her open and thin body and deep down a serenity that couldn’t hold itself back, alternating between not recognizing itself and breathing in joy, things incomplete. She herself sleepless like light–wild, fleeting, empty, but deep down an ardor that was a desire to head toward one thing only, an interest that would make her heart speed up without rhythm … suddenly how vague it was to live. All this could pass too, night falling suddenly, the darkness upon a warm day. But sometimes she’d remember the wet clay, run fearful out to the courtyard–plunge her fingers into that mixture, cold, mute, constant as waiting, kneading, kneading, slowly extracting forms. She’d make children, horses, a mother her a child, a mother alone, a girl making things out of clay, a boy at rest, a happy girl, a girl seeing if it would rain, a flower, a comet with a tail sprinkled with washed and sparkling sand, a wilted flower beneath the sun, the cemetery of Upper Marsh, a girl looking …. Much more, much more. Little shapes that meant nothing but that were in fact mysterious and calm. Sometimes tall like a tree, but they weren’t trees, they weren’t anything … Sometimes like a little running river, but they weren’t a river, they weren’t anything … Sometimes a little object in an almost starry shape but tired like a person. A task that would never end, that was the most beautiful and careful thing she’d ever known: since she could make anything that existed and anything that did not!
After they were ready the figurines were placed in the sun. Nobody had taught her but she would deposit them in the patches of sun on the ground, patches with neither wind nor heat. The clay would dry gently, keeping its light tone, not wrinkling, not cracking. Even when it was dry it seemed delicate, evanescent, and moist. And she herself could mistake it for the sticky clay. Those little figures seemed quick almost as if about to move. She was looking at the immobile figurine. Out of love or merely going on with the works she’d close her eyes and gather herself into a live and luminous force with the quality of danger and of hope, into a silky power that would run through her body quickly with an urging that was destined for the figure. When at last she let go, her fresh and tired well-being would come because she could send something away though she didn’t know what. - - - maybe. Yes, she sometimes had a taste inside her body, a high and distressing taste that would tremble between power and fatigue–it was a thought like heard sounds, a color in her heart. Before it smoothly dissolved quick in her inner air, forever fleeting, she’d touch an object with her fingers, surrendering. And when she wanted to say something that came subtly, dark, and smooth and that could be dangerous, she’d rest just one finger, a pale, polished, and transparent finger–a trembling finger pointing. In the slenderest and most hurt part of her feeling she would think: I will be happy. In fact she already was in that instant and if instead of thinking “I am happy” she sought out the future that was because she was darkly choosing a forward movement that would serve as a form for her feeling." — Clarice Lispector – from The Chandelier, translated by Benjamin Moser and Magdalena Edwards

→ Aug 2018 "Sitting in the shade of a tree, she’d soon be surrounded by empty instants because nothing had happened for a while and future seconds would bring nothing–she’d foresee. She’d calm down–she couldn’t quite disguise the broad inexplicable well-being that would sink her deep into her own pensive body, the being leaning toward a delicate and difficult sensation–but she’d hide herself for some reason trying to see the stones on the ground, her eyebrows furrowed, deceitful, all of her sly and stupid. Some curious and cold thing was happening to her, something a bit smiling with contempt but careful to go to the end, making her almost think in a futile and ironic urge: if thou art as thou sayest a living creature, bestir thyself .. and she’d almost want to stand and pluck a slightly tender bright weed. Within her face notions were whispering liquefying in decomposition–she was a girl resting. She was looking, looking. She’d close her eyes observing all the impenetrable points of her narrow body, thinking all over herself without words, recopying existence itself. She was looking, looking. Slowly, from the silence, her being was starting to live more, an abandoned instrument that started making sound all by itself, her eyes discerning because the first matter of the eyes was looking. Nothing would inspire her, she was isolated inside her capacity, existing through the same weak energy that had caused her to be born. She was thinking simply and clearly. She was thinking small and clear music that was stretching a single thread and unfurling bright, fluorescent and moist, water in water, meditating a silly arpeggio. She was thinking untranslatable sensations distracting herself secretly as if humming, profoundly unaware and stubborn, she was thinking a single swift streak: in order to be born things must have life, for birth is a movement–if they said that movement is necessary only for the thing giving birth and not for the thing that is born that’s not right because the thing that gives birth cannot give birth to something outside its nature and thus always gives birth to a thing of its own kind and so it was with movements too–in this way stones were born that have no power of their own but were once alive otherwise they wouldn’t have been born and now they’re dead because they don’t have movement in order to give birth to another stone. No thought was extraordinary, words are what would be. She was thinking without intelligence about her own reality as if discerning and could never use what she was feeling, her meditation was a way of living. It was coming to her without a shape of its own yet at the same time within it was chiming some precise and delicate quality like thin numbers entangled with thin numbers and suddenly a new light number ringing polished and dry–while the true sensation of her whole body was expectant. And finally something was happening so far away, ah so far away and maybe reduced to a yes that she was growing tired to the point of annihilation, thinking now in words: I am very, very tired, you know. Go, go, something profoundly satiated and already known in her body was murmuring with a certain anguish, go, go. But where? The wind, the wind was blowing. Barely hushed and on the lookout, as if facing the north or the east she seemed to be headed toward some true thing through the great incessant taking-shape of tiny dead events, leading the delicateness of being in the direction of an almost exterior feeling as if by touching the earth with her bare and watchful foot she might feel inaccessible water flowing. She was traversing long distances simply by assigning herself a direction, immobile, sincere. But she couldn’t quite be sucked in, as if it were her own fault. She’d help herself by feeling a vague notion of travel, of the day she’d leave for the city with Daniel, a bit of hunger and fatigue, barely touching her lunch. Sometimes she’d almost approach a thought but she never reached it though everything around her was breathing its beginning to her; she’d look with astonishment at the space devoid of mystery, the breeze would raise shivers of understanding on her skin; an instant would yet penetrate the silence seeking in its depths a thread to grab on to. And if a bird were flying or the cry of a winged creature gushing from the nearby forest, she was wrapped by a cold whirl, the wind spinning dry leaves and dust, vague unfinished beginnings, in a vortex of her and of whatever no longer was her. The moment had arrived to let climb to her outermost nerves the wave that was taking shape on the near side of her weakness and that could die of its own urging. From particle to particle, however, the indistinct thought was coming down violently mute until opening in the middle of her body, on her lips, complete, perfect, incomprehensible because it was so free from its own shaping–I need to eat. She took from it then nothing more than its softness, barely alighting on her being; she could go forward without being pushed, without being called going along simply because moving was the quality of her body. That was her impression and her stomach was plunging deeper, joyful, famished. But she was still seated. She didn’t seem to know how to stand up and actually guide herself, distressingly she was lacking a direction. She stretched into the distance as if slowly she could lose her shape–she thought she could hear the voices and the sounds from the mansion and leaned forward to try to make them out. She leaned back against the tree, rubbing one of her dusty feet, going beyond her understanding and with a kind of irrepressible force attaining misunderstanding like a discovery. Now unsettled, motionless, reality seemed to bother her. She was thinking with her mother’s languid voice: I’m nervous. In a misgiving without sweetness, she was fluttering aridly in the fanciful and hysterical immobility. Until the tautest rope would snap, as if a presence were abandoning her body and she was getting closer to her own ordinary existence. Pushed, extraordinarily indifferent and no longer very hungry, she was forgetting everything forever like a person who’s forgotten." — Clarice Lispector – from The Chandelier, translated by Benjamin Moser and Magdalena Edwards

→ Aug 2018

ulla straus - at a table (c- mix)

→ Aug 2018

because sometimes she’d think such slender thoughts that they’d suddenly break halfway before reaching the end. and since they were so thin, even without completing them she understood them all at once. though she could never think them again, even point to them with a single word … in some mysterious way her fainting spells were connected to this: sometimes she’d feel a thin thought that was so intense that she herself was the thought and since it broke, she’d interrupt herself in a faint.

Clarice Lispector, from The Chandelier, translated by Benjamin Moser and Magdalena Edwards

→ Aug 2018

it’s like this: when you see a firefly you don’t think it appeared, but that it disappeared. as if someone died and that were the first thing about them because they hadn’t even been born or lived, you know? you wonder: what’s the firefly really like? answer: it disappears

Clarice Lispector, from The Chandelier, translated by Benjamin Moser and Magdalena Edwards

→ Aug 2018

from Rosmarie Waldrop’s translation of Paul Celan’s “Backlight”

→ Aug 2018

from Rosmarie Waldrop’s translation of Paul Celan’s “Backlight”

→ Aug 2018 "Yes, yes, little by little, softly, from her ignorance the idea was being born that she possessed a life. It was a feeling with neither fore- nor afterthoughts, sudden, complete, and united, which could neither be increased nor altered by age or wisdom. It wasn’t like living, living and then knowing that you possessed a life, but it was like looking and seeing all at once. The feeling didn’t come from facts present or past but from her own self like a movement. And if she died young or took the veil, the warning that she had a life was just as good as having lived a lot. That’s another reason she was a little tired perhaps, for as long as she could remember; sometimes only with an imperceptible effort did she manage to keep afloat. And above all else, she’d always been serious and false." — Clarice Lispector – from The Chandelier, translated by Benjamin Moser and Magdalena Edwards

→ Aug 2018 "And then what? the future…”
"Yes, but it’s horrible, isn’t it?“ she’d say fiery and smiling.
Profoundly ignorant she’d do little exercises and comprehensions involving things like walking, looking at tall trees, waiting on a bright morning for the end of the day but just waiting for an instant, picking out one ant just like all the rest from many, strolling slowly, paying attention to silence by almost grabbing on to a slight sound with her ears, breathing quickly, placing an expectant hand over the heart that didn’t stop, looking emphatically at a stone, at a bird, at her own foot, swinging about with her eyes closed, laughing out loud when she was alone and then listening, dropping her body onto the bed without the least strength almost aching all over from such an effort to annihilate herself, trying coffee without sugar, looking at the sun until she cried with pain–space would then turn woozy as before a terrible rain–, carrying in the palm of her hand a little bit of river without spilling it, placing herself beneath a flagpole in order to look up and grow dizzy with herself–changing with care the way she lived. The things that would inspire her were so brief. Vaguely, vaguely, if she’d been born, plunged her hands in the water and died, she’d exhaust her strength and her forward movement would have been complete–that was her impression without thoughts." — Clarice Lispector – from The Chandelier, translated by Benjamin Moser and Magdalena Edwards