Talking Knots

So my car was towed tonight…

…

which sucks, cos it was actually my parent’s car;

which sucks, cos I was only parked in this vacant lot for like an hour;

which sucks, cos I was visiting friends (in Baltimore, the scummiest of scummies) when my car was towed;

which sucks, cos the tow company of course doesn’t advertise its, er, right to tow your car;

which sucks, cos the tow company requires cash only, oh, and “we don’t make change here [where I am, finally, basically haggling—why not—for my car], you’ll have to be mailed a rebate of your change”;

which sucks, cos the cab ride out to the tow company’s lot cost me about a third of the total towing costs, not to mention the fact that the towing lot, which—according to the city officers I spoke with soon after my car was towed—is by law required to be within an 8-mile radius of the spot where the car was towed, was not by any measurement within 8 miles of the towing spot;

which sucks, cos—do you know where I got the cash to pay this impounding fee? I used the money that was just wired to me a day ago by Emory university’s English department as an award for a graduating senior. But instead of buying $250 worth of books, I got to buy $250 worth of legalized robbery. Thank god, I happened to stumble upon a taxi driver who has actually successfully sued Baltimore City for wrongfully towing his cab. But really, amazing luck there.

which sucks, cos I know (and could see, based on the number of cars being impounded in this, haha, what did they call it, a “parking lot”?) that there are hundreds of people/month (at this one company only. keep in mind that there was another privately-contracted towing impound lot across the street) who are screwed out of their means of getting to work, the doctor’s, hospitals, whatever, by whatever faceless gentrifying landowner. I mean, come on, these towing companies make their profits because they own land in undesirable parts of the city and can somehow legally subcontract to tow cars that park illegally (though unknowingly) park in some other rentier’s other wise utterly useless space; for god’s sake, it’s an unpaved, unimproved vacant lot in Baltimore, but you can charge people a monthly sum just so they have a “safe” (whatever, or whatever else it could be) place to park their cars. Fuck you!

which sucks, cos I know at least two people attending my alma mater (Emory) and whose parents are sending to college on the backs of people who, unlike me, can’t sue for their wrongfully-extorted money back in court. One of these college students, her father is the head of Big Boyz Bail Bonds, a bail bond company so nefariously evil I can’t even imagine (they so petty, they advertise themselves with pens to the point where they have a website devoted to their pen distirbution: http://www.bigboyzpens.com/); the other’s dad has some sort of pawn shop conglomerate. And I went to school with these sort of people? Yes, and I’m reminded very forcibly of the world whose oppression they base their entire status off of and on whose back they essentially are standing.

ok, maybe the above picture’s overreacting, but I don’t care. drunk, pissed off, broke, and jaded.

from “The Painter of Modern Life”

I have told you that I was reluctant to describe him as an artist pure and simple, and indeed that he declined this title with a modesty touched with aristocratic reserve. I might perhaps call him a dandy, and I should have several good reasons for that; for the word “dandy” implies a quintessence of character and a subtle understanding of the entire moral mechanism of this world; with another part of his nature, however, the dandy aspires to insensitivity, and it is in this that Monsieur G.[uys, Constantin], dominated as he is by an insatiable passion—for seeing and feeling—parts company decisively with dandyism. “Amabam amare,” said St. Augustine. “I am passionately in love with passion,” Monsieur G. might well echo. The dandy is blasé, or pretends to be so, for reasons of policy and caste. Monsieur G. has a horror of blasé people. He is a master of that only too difficult art—sensitive spirits will understand me—of being sincere without being absurd. I would bestow upon him the title of philosopher, to which he has more than one right, if his excessive love of visible, tangible things, condensed to their plastic state, did not arouse in him a certain repugnance for the things that form the impalpable kingdom of the metaphysician. Let us be content therefore to consider him as a pure pictorial moralist, like La Bruyère.

The crowd is his element, as the air is that of birds and water of fishes. His passion and his profession are to become one flesh with the crowd. For the perfect flâneur, for the passionate spectator, it is an immense joy to set up house in the heart of the multitude, amid the ebb and flow of movement, in the midst of the fugitive and the infinite. To be away from home and yet to feel oneself everywhere at home; to see the world, to be at the centre of the world, and yet to remain hidden from the world—such are a few of the slightest pleasures of those independent, passionate, impartial natures which the tongue can but clumsily define. The spectator is a prince who everywhere rejoices in his incognito. The lover of life makes the whole world his family, just like the lover of the fair sex who builds up his family from all the beautiful women that he has ever found, or that are—or are not—to be found; or the lover of pictures who lives in a magical society of dreams painted on canvas. Thus the lover of universal life enters into the crowd as though it were an immense reservoir of electrical energy. Or we might liken him to a mirror as vast as the crowd itself; or to a kaleidoscope gifted with consciousness, responding to each one of its movements and reproducing the multiplicity of life and the flickering grace of all the elements of life. He is an “I” with an insatiable appetite for the “non-I,” at every instant rendering and explaining it in pictures more living than life itself, which is always unstable and fugitive. “Any man,” he said one day, in the course of one of those conversations which he illumines with burning glance and evocative gesture, “any man who is not crushed by one of those griefs whose nature is too real not to monopolize all his capacities, and who can yet be bored in the heart of the multitude, is a blockhead! a blockhead! and I despise him!”

(from part iii, “L’Artiste, Homme du Monde, Homme des Foules et Enfant”)

—I’d like to have shoehorn hands.

Unpacking my library

So I was looking around in one of my boxes of books today, and I came across a book from one of my French classes a few years ago. By Daniel Pennac, it’s called Comme un roman. Here’s the back cover:

Daniel Pennac

Comme un roman

LES DROITS IMPRESCRIPTIBLES DU LECTEUR

1. Le droit de ne pas lire.

2. Le droit de sauter des pages.

3. Le droit de ne pas finir un livre.

4. Le droit de relire.

5. Le droit de lire n’importe quoi.

6. Le droit au bovarysme (maladie textuellement transmissible).

7. Le droit de lire n’importe où.

8. Le droit de grappiller.

9. Le droit de lire à haute voix.

10. Le droit de nous taire.

Oh, and here’s what pictured on the front cover:

perhaps some more posts to follow—forgot how interesting this book is.

Just putting it out there: the “David Harvey” tag is longer than the “Musée d’Orsay” tag.

This means nothing.

mohandasgandhi:

““You don’t wait until they acquire the capability and they build it and they deploy it—then it’s too late, you cannot act,” Mr. Barak said. “The Iranians are patient. They say to themselves, ‘We waited 4,000 years until we have a nuclear power, we can wait another four weeks or four months or four quarters.’ ””

—

Israeli Defense Minster Ehud Barak

That sound you hear is my head hitting my desk.

(via fearandwar)

Yo, Ehud, you’ve seriously lost it, buddy. Go sit down.

—I can’t wait until we have a nuclear power

autochthones:

amouthygirl:

autumn-and-eve:

I suck at chess but whatever it’s for fucking fascist feudalists anyway
Kings and queens? Bullshit
In anarchist chess every piece would be able to function a variety of ways based on the consensus of the other pieces and white wouldn’t be able to initiate force against black anyway

Autumn is onto something here.

“Let us take a limited example and compare the war machine and the State apparatus in the context of the theory of games. let us take chess and Go, from the standpoint of the game pieces, the relations between the pieces and the space involved. Chess is a game of State, or of the court: the emperor of China played it. Chess pieces are coded; they have an internal nature and intrinsic properties from which their movements, situations, and confrontations derive. They have qualities; a knight remains a knight, a pawn a pawn, a bishop a bishop. Each is like a subject of the statement endowed with a relative power, and these relative powers combine in a subject of enunciation, that is, the chess player or the game’s form of interiority. Go pieces, in contrast, are pellets, disks, simple arithmetic units, and have only an anonymous, collective, or third-person function: ‘It’ makes a move. ‘It’ could be a man, a woman, a louse, an elephant. Go pieces are elements of a nonsubjectified machine assemblage with no intrinsic properties, only situational ones. Thus the relations are very different in the two cases. Within their milieu of interiority, chess pieces entertain biunivocal relations with one another, and with the adversary’s pieces: their functioning is structural. On the other hand, a Go piece has only a milieu of exteriority, or extrinsic relations with nebulas or constellations as bordering, encircling, shattering. All by itself, a Go piece can destroy an entire constellation synchronically; a chess piece cannot (or can do so diachronically only.”

Deleuze & Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus 

“The King stay the King”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7bR3T1eThJU