Words to live by.
The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism by F.T. Marinetti 1909
We had stayed up all night, my friends and I, under hanging mosque lamps with domes of filigreed brass, domes starred like our spirits, shining like them with the prisoned radiance of electric hearts. For hours we had trampled our atavistic ennui into rich oriental rugs, arguing up to the last confines of logic and blackening many reams of paper with our frenzied scribbling.
An immense pride was buoying us up, because we felt ourselves alone at that hour, alone, awake, and on our feet, like proud beacons or forward sentries against an army of hostile stars glaring down at us from their celestial encampments. Alone with stokers feeding the hellish fires of great ships, alone with the black spectres who grope in the red-hot bellies of locomotives launched on their crazy courses, alone with drunkards reeling like wounded birds along the city walls.
Suddenly we jumped, hearing the mighty noise of the huge double-decker trams that rumbled by outside, ablaze with colored lights, like villages on holiday suddenly struck and uprooted by the flooding Po and dragged over falls and through gourges to the sea.
Then the silence deepened. But, as we listened to the old canal muttering its feeble prayers and the creaking bones of sickly palaces above their damp green beards, under the windows we suddenly heard the famished roar of automobiles.
“Let’s go!” I said. “Friends, away! Let’s go! Mythology and the Mystic Ideal are defeated at last. We’re about to see the Centaur’s birth and, soon after, the first flight of Angels!... We must shake at the gates of life, test the bolts and hinges. Let’s go! Look there, on the earth, the very first dawn! There’s nothing to match the splendor of the sun’s red sword, slashing for the first time through our millennial gloom!”
We went up to the three snorting beasts, to lay amorous hands on their torrid breasts. I stretched out on my car like a corpse on its bier, but revived at once under the steering wheel, a guillotine blade that threatened my stomach.
The raging broom of madness swept us out of ourselves and drove us through streets as rough and deep as the beds of torrents. Here and there, sick lamplight through window glass taught us to distrust the deceitful mathematics of our perishing eyes.
I cried, “The scent, the scent alone is enough for our beasts.”
And like young lions we ran after Death, its dark pelt blotched with pale crosses as it escaped down the vast violet living and throbbing sky.
But we had no ideal Mistress raising her divine form to the clouds, nor any cruel Queen to whom to offer our bodies, twisted like Byzantine rings! There was nothing to make us wish for death, unless the wish to be free at last from the weight of our courage!
And on we raced, hurling watchdogs against doorsteps, curling them under our burning tires like collars under a flatiron. Death, domesticated, met me at every turn, gracefully holding out a paw, or once in a while hunkering down, making velvety caressing eyes at me from every puddle.
“Let’s break out of the horrible shell of wisdom and throw ourselves like pride-ripened fruit into the wide, contorted mouth of the wind! Let’s give ourselves utterly to the Unknown, not in desperation but only to replenish the deep wells of the Absurd!”
The words were scarcely out of my mouth when I spun my car around with the frenzy of a dog trying to bite its tail, and there, suddenly, were two cyclists coming towards me, shaking their fists, wobbling like two equally convincing but nevertheless contradictory arguments. Their stupid dilemma was blocking my way—Damn! Ouch!... I stopped short and to my disgust rolled over into a ditch with my wheels in the air...
O maternal ditch, almost full of muddy water! Fair factory drain! I gulped down your nourishing sludge; and I remembered the blessed black beast of my Sudanese nurse... When I came up—torn, filthy, and stinking—from under the capsized car, I felt the white-hot iron of joy deliciously pass through my heart!
A crowd of fishermen with handlines and gouty naturalists were already swarming around the prodigy. With patient, loving care those people rigged a tall derrick and iron grapnels to fish out my car, like a big beached shark. Up it came from the ditch, slowly, leaving in the bottom, like scales, its heavy framework of good sense and its soft upholstery of comfort.
They thought it was dead, my beautiful shark, but a caress from me was enough to revive it; and there it was, alive again, running on its powerful fins!
And so, faces smeared with good factory muck—plastered with metallic waste, with senseless sweat, with celestial soot—we, bruised, our arms in slings, but unafraid, declared our high intentions to all the living of the earth:
Manifesto of Futurism
We intend to sing the love of danger, the habit of energy and fearlessness.
Courage, audacity, and revolt will be essential elements of our poetry.
Up to now literature has exalted a pensive immobility, ecstasy, and sleep. We intend to exalt aggresive action, a feverish insomnia, the racer’s stride, the mortal leap, the punch and the slap.
We affirm that the world’s magnificence has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed. A racing car whose hood is adorned with great pipes, like serpents of explosive breath—a roaring car that seems to ride on grapeshot is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace.
We want to hymn the man at the wheel, who hurls the lance of his spirit across the Earth, along the circle of its orbit.
The poet must spend himself with ardor, splendor, and generosity, to swell the enthusiastic fervor of the primordial elements.
Except in struggle, there is no more beauty. No work without an aggressive character can be a masterpiece. Poetry must be conceived as a violent attack on unknown forces, to reduce and prostrate them before man.
We stand on the last promontory of the centuries!... Why should we look back, when what we want is to break down the mysterious doors of the Impossible? Time and Space died yesterday. We already live in the absolute, because we have created eternal, omnipresent speed.
We will glorify war—the world’s only hygiene—militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of freedom-bringers, beautiful ideas worth dying for, and scorn for woman.
We will destroy the museums, libraries, academies of every kind, will fight moralism, feminism, every opportunistic or utilitarian cowardice.
We will sing of great crowds excited by work, by pleasure, and by riot; we will sing of the multicolored, polyphonic tides of revolution in the modern capitals; we will sing of the vibrant nightly fervor of arsenals and shipyards blazing with violent electric moons; greedy railway stations that devour smoke-plumed serpents; factories hung on clouds by the crooked lines of their smoke; bridges that stride the rivers like giant gymnasts, flashing in the sun with a glitter of knives; adventurous steamers that sniff the horizon; deep-chested locomotives whose wheels paw the tracks like the hooves of enormous steel horses bridled by tubing; and the sleek flight of planes whose propellers chatter in the wind like banners and seem to cheer like an enthusiastic crowd.
It is from Italy that we launch through the world this violently upsetting incendiary manifesto of ours. With it, today, we establish Futurism, because we want to free this land from its smelly gangrene of professors, archaeologists, ciceroni and antiquarians. For too long has Italy been a dealer in second-hand clothes. We mean to free her from the numberless museums that cover her like so many graveyards.
Museums: cemeteries!... Identical, surely, in the sinister promiscuity of so many bodies unknown to one another. Museums: public dormitories where one lies forever beside hated or unknown beings. Museums: absurd abattoirs of painters and sculptors ferociously slaughtering each other with color-blows and line-blows, the length of the fought-over walls!
That one should make an annual pilgrimage, just as one goes to the graveyard on All Souls’ Day—that I grant. That once a year one should leave a floral tribute beneath the Gioconda, I grant you that... But I don’t admit that our sorrows, our fragile courage, our morbid restlessness should be given a daily conducted tour through the museums. Why poison ourselves? Why rot?
And what is there to see in an old picture except the laborious contortions of an artist throwing himself against the barriers that thwart his desire to express his dream completely?... Admiring an old picture is the same as pouring our sensibility into a funerary urn instead of hurtling it far off, in violent spasms of action and creation.
Do you, then, wish to waste all your best powers in this eternal and futile worship of the past, from which you emerge fatally exhausted, shrunken, beaten down?
In truth I tell you that daily visits to museums, libraries, and academies (cemeteries of empty exertion, Calvaries of crucified dreams, registries of aborted beginnings!) are, for artists, as damaging as the prolonged supervision by parents of certain young people drunk with their talent and their ambitious wills. When the future is barred to them, the admirable past may be a solace for the ills of the moribund, the sickly, the prisoner... But we want no part of it, the past, we the young and strong Futurists!
So let them come, the gay incendiaries with charred fingers! Here they are! Here they are!... Come on! set fire to the library shelves! Turn aside the canals to flood the museums!... Oh, the joy of seeing the glorious old canvases bobbing adrift on those waters, discolored and shredded!... Take up your pickaxes, your axes and hammers and wreck, wreck the venerable cities, pitilessly!
The oldest of us is thirty: so we have at least a decade for finishing our work. When we are forty, other younger and stronger men will probably throw us in the wastebasket like useless manuscripts—we want it to happen!
They will come against us, our successors, will come from far away, from every quarter, dancing to the winged cadence of their first songs, flexing the hooked claws of predators, sniffing doglike at the academy doors the strong odor of our decaying minds, which will have already been promised to the literary catacombs.
But we won’t be there... At last they’ll find us—one winter’s night—in open country, beneath a sad roof drummed by a monotonous rain. They’ll see us crouched beside our trembling aeroplanes in the act of warming our hands at the poor little blaze that our books of today will give out when they take fire from the flight of our images.
They’ll storm around us, panting with scorn and anguish, and all of them, exasperated by our proud daring, will hurtle to kill us, driven by a hatred the more implacable the more their hearts will be drunk with love and admiration for us.
Injustice, strong and sane, will break out radiantly in their eyes.
Art, in fact, can be nothing but violence, cruelty, and injustice.
The oldest of us is thirty: even so we have already scattered treasures, a thousand treasures of force, love, courage, astuteness, and raw will-power; have thrown them impatiently away, with fury, carelessly, unhesitatingly, breathless, and unresting... Look at us! We are still untired! Our hearts know no weariness because they are fed with fire, hatred, and speed!... Does that amaze you? It should, because you can never remember having lived! Erect on the summit of the world, once again we hurl our defiance at the stars!
You have objections?—Enough! Enough! We know them... We’ve understood!... Our fine deceitful intelligence tells us that we are the revival and extension of our ancestors—Perhaps!... If only it were so!—But who cares? We don’t want to understand!... Woe to anyone who says those infamous words to us again!
Lift up your heads!
Erect on the summit of the world, once again we hurl defiance to the stars!
Wednesday, May 26, 2010
The ROZZ-TOX Manifesto
Words to live by.
The ROZZ-TOX Manifesto
(a 1980 artifact with end of the millenium resonances)
Gary Panter
Item 1: The avant-garde is no corpus. It merely lies in shock after an unfortunate bout with its own petard. It feigns sleep but one eye glitters and an involuntary twitch in the corner of the mouth belies a suppressed snicker. The giggle of coming awake at one's own funeral dressed in atomic TV beatnik furniture. A mutant with a mission.
Item 2: There are twenty years left in the twentieth century. Twenty years to reap the rewards and calamities that have been put in motion in this period. At this time a current of aesthetic function is emerging: the inevitable culmination of concepts and experiments pioneered and conducted in this century. We declare society an amusement park and one to be dead reckoned with.
Item 3: A deadly texture and tone have taken the cereal Nirvana: a misanthrope born of capitol realities, tendencies, and inter-office memos. Sightless businessmen-posed-entertainers shovel up tons of soulless Saturday morning animation. Would that you could make cost effective the rubbery genius that was the Saturday morning of our youth.
Item 4: We say enough to the instigators of game show design for we are sick and dizzy. Show us the backs of these monstrous facades, for even bare plywood is a healthier texture. Oh you seekers of the new who run terrified from history into the clutches of an eternal life where no electric shaver can be built to last.
Item 5: Close the bars! We require well lit media centers that serve soft drinks and milk. We require that top-40 radio stop it. And this for extant executive entertainers: We know when to laugh. Machines don't, and it is irritation to hear them laugh at the wrong time. They laugh at nothing and nothing isn't funny.
Item 6: Find the evil doers, the merchant peddlers of Pavlovia who use our unmentionable parts against us. Will you hide behind a scrim of two-dimensional phosphorescence when Biology exacts its reward?
Item 7: Profound faith in glamour is a surefire way to not see that you kill what you eat. We believe and worship a two-dimensional world. No god printers save us when we stand naked and brainless before an uncompromising and impartial physicality. We are sick now/get wise to the media. Join the art police. We call for posting of cow pictures in every fast food franchise. And for vegetarians, recordings of screaming vegetables at every salad bar.
Item 8: Beautiful and effective communicative marketing and aesthetic media are not innately evil; merely seductive. However, seductive aesthetics and media are prone to undermine common sense and vision in a capitalistic culture. Our own creations have shamed us. Teaching us that the hand and opinion of the individual are not as legitimate as that of opinion transmuted and inflated by broadcast ... especially when that opinion is on 80-pound coated stock, in full color ... or when that opinion steals invisibly and incomprehensibly into a box in our homes. Would that society reveled in certain varieties of vandalism and disarray. May we mow our lawns and remain civilized.
Item 9: It is unfortunate and unacceptable what vile and lazy do-nothings are given unwarranted credence for mouthing such foul and mean clichis as "rip-off" and "sell-out." They have no understanding of our economy and the time it takes society to go. Confess and shut up! Capitalism good or ill is the river in which we sink or swim. Inspiration has always been born of recombination.
Item 10: In a capitalistic society such as the in which we live, aesthetics as an endeavor flows thorough a body which is built of free enterprise and various illnesses. In boom times art may be supported by wildcat speculation or my excess funds in form of grants from the state or patronship as a tax write-off. Currently we are suffering from a lean economy. By necessity we must infiltrate popular mediums. We are building a business-based art movement. This is not new. Admitting it is.
Item 11: Business 1. To create a pseudo-avant-garde that is cost effective. 2. To create merchandising platforms on popular communications and entertainment media. 3. To extensively mine our recent and ancient past for icons worth remembering and permutating: recombo archaeology.
Item 12: Waiting for art talent scouts? There are no art talent scouts. Face it, no one will seek you out. No one gives a shit.
Item 13: Market saturation was reached in sixties - everyone knows that. Fine Elitist Art is of diminishing utility. There is not more reward for maintaining or joining an elite and sterile crew.
Item 14: Elitist art cannot help the emergent complex through its painful and potentially stupidly dangerous adolescence. Start or support primitive industry, propaganda to no dogma, and environmental jarrs.
Item 15: Law: If you want better media, go make it.
Item 16: We are born capitalists and manufacturers of alternative goods and services. We are made propagandists and propose an antimedia to no dogma. We call for popular environmental manipulators, primitive industry, an avant-garde placed squarely in the entertainment field, for archaeologists and synthesizers.
Item 17: A call for mutant intuition and wrestling is real. A current that synthesizes ideas and entertainment .. an antimedia that creates, participates, and services and broader-based lunatic fringe and one that is capable of finishing the century outright. An avant-garde that has no mean diversion and stocks the supermarket.
Item 18: Our lack of popularity in high school was led us to think and thinking has lead us to this. No war is waged here; only a strain, a virus, a toxoid, a Rozz-Toxoid. The emergent complex asks for just twenty years of your time. Now, stand and sing ...
Final Note: Capitalism for good or ill is the river in which we sink or swim, and stocks the supermarket.
The ROZZ-TOX Manifesto
(a 1980 artifact with end of the millenium resonances)
Gary Panter
Item 1: The avant-garde is no corpus. It merely lies in shock after an unfortunate bout with its own petard. It feigns sleep but one eye glitters and an involuntary twitch in the corner of the mouth belies a suppressed snicker. The giggle of coming awake at one's own funeral dressed in atomic TV beatnik furniture. A mutant with a mission.
Item 2: There are twenty years left in the twentieth century. Twenty years to reap the rewards and calamities that have been put in motion in this period. At this time a current of aesthetic function is emerging: the inevitable culmination of concepts and experiments pioneered and conducted in this century. We declare society an amusement park and one to be dead reckoned with.
Item 3: A deadly texture and tone have taken the cereal Nirvana: a misanthrope born of capitol realities, tendencies, and inter-office memos. Sightless businessmen-posed-entertainers shovel up tons of soulless Saturday morning animation. Would that you could make cost effective the rubbery genius that was the Saturday morning of our youth.
Item 4: We say enough to the instigators of game show design for we are sick and dizzy. Show us the backs of these monstrous facades, for even bare plywood is a healthier texture. Oh you seekers of the new who run terrified from history into the clutches of an eternal life where no electric shaver can be built to last.
Item 5: Close the bars! We require well lit media centers that serve soft drinks and milk. We require that top-40 radio stop it. And this for extant executive entertainers: We know when to laugh. Machines don't, and it is irritation to hear them laugh at the wrong time. They laugh at nothing and nothing isn't funny.
Item 6: Find the evil doers, the merchant peddlers of Pavlovia who use our unmentionable parts against us. Will you hide behind a scrim of two-dimensional phosphorescence when Biology exacts its reward?
Item 7: Profound faith in glamour is a surefire way to not see that you kill what you eat. We believe and worship a two-dimensional world. No god printers save us when we stand naked and brainless before an uncompromising and impartial physicality. We are sick now/get wise to the media. Join the art police. We call for posting of cow pictures in every fast food franchise. And for vegetarians, recordings of screaming vegetables at every salad bar.
Item 8: Beautiful and effective communicative marketing and aesthetic media are not innately evil; merely seductive. However, seductive aesthetics and media are prone to undermine common sense and vision in a capitalistic culture. Our own creations have shamed us. Teaching us that the hand and opinion of the individual are not as legitimate as that of opinion transmuted and inflated by broadcast ... especially when that opinion is on 80-pound coated stock, in full color ... or when that opinion steals invisibly and incomprehensibly into a box in our homes. Would that society reveled in certain varieties of vandalism and disarray. May we mow our lawns and remain civilized.
Item 9: It is unfortunate and unacceptable what vile and lazy do-nothings are given unwarranted credence for mouthing such foul and mean clichis as "rip-off" and "sell-out." They have no understanding of our economy and the time it takes society to go. Confess and shut up! Capitalism good or ill is the river in which we sink or swim. Inspiration has always been born of recombination.
Item 10: In a capitalistic society such as the in which we live, aesthetics as an endeavor flows thorough a body which is built of free enterprise and various illnesses. In boom times art may be supported by wildcat speculation or my excess funds in form of grants from the state or patronship as a tax write-off. Currently we are suffering from a lean economy. By necessity we must infiltrate popular mediums. We are building a business-based art movement. This is not new. Admitting it is.
Item 11: Business 1. To create a pseudo-avant-garde that is cost effective. 2. To create merchandising platforms on popular communications and entertainment media. 3. To extensively mine our recent and ancient past for icons worth remembering and permutating: recombo archaeology.
Item 12: Waiting for art talent scouts? There are no art talent scouts. Face it, no one will seek you out. No one gives a shit.
Item 13: Market saturation was reached in sixties - everyone knows that. Fine Elitist Art is of diminishing utility. There is not more reward for maintaining or joining an elite and sterile crew.
Item 14: Elitist art cannot help the emergent complex through its painful and potentially stupidly dangerous adolescence. Start or support primitive industry, propaganda to no dogma, and environmental jarrs.
Item 15: Law: If you want better media, go make it.
Item 16: We are born capitalists and manufacturers of alternative goods and services. We are made propagandists and propose an antimedia to no dogma. We call for popular environmental manipulators, primitive industry, an avant-garde placed squarely in the entertainment field, for archaeologists and synthesizers.
Item 17: A call for mutant intuition and wrestling is real. A current that synthesizes ideas and entertainment .. an antimedia that creates, participates, and services and broader-based lunatic fringe and one that is capable of finishing the century outright. An avant-garde that has no mean diversion and stocks the supermarket.
Item 18: Our lack of popularity in high school was led us to think and thinking has lead us to this. No war is waged here; only a strain, a virus, a toxoid, a Rozz-Toxoid. The emergent complex asks for just twenty years of your time. Now, stand and sing ...
Final Note: Capitalism for good or ill is the river in which we sink or swim, and stocks the supermarket.
Monday, May 24, 2010
Against Community
From Andy Warhol's POPiSM
"On the plane coming home, Paul (Morrissey) reflected, "You know, there's alot to be said against San Francisco & its love children. People are always so boring when they band together. You have to be alone to develop all the idiosyncrasies that make a person interesting. In San Francisco, instead of becoming outcasts like you're supposed to when you take drugs, they organize communities around it! Then they get pretentious & call it a religion - then they get hypocritical & say some drugs are good, others are bad..."
"On the plane coming home, Paul (Morrissey) reflected, "You know, there's alot to be said against San Francisco & its love children. People are always so boring when they band together. You have to be alone to develop all the idiosyncrasies that make a person interesting. In San Francisco, instead of becoming outcasts like you're supposed to when you take drugs, they organize communities around it! Then they get pretentious & call it a religion - then they get hypocritical & say some drugs are good, others are bad..."
Friday, May 21, 2010
Happy Birthday Pac-Man!!!
It's Pac-Man's 30th birthday! Pac-Man is one of the best characters AND video games EVER created complete with an awesome iconographic langauge of ghosts, cherries & other fruits & the mad dash to clear screens & eat those pesky ghost monsters. The game holds up after thousands & thousands of plays, i just downloaded an NES version to play on my Wii a week or so ago & my 2 & 4 year old obsess over Pac-Man just like i did when i first saw him. 
"The game was developed primarily by a young Namco employee Tōru Iwatani, over a year, beginning in April 1979, employing a nine-man team. The original title was pronounced pakku-man (パックマン?) and was inspired by the Japanese onomatopoeic phrase paku-paku taberu (パクパク食べる?),[25] where paku-paku describes (the sound of) the mouth movement when widely opened and then closed in succession.[26] Although it is often cited that the character's shape was inspired by a pizza missing a slice,[6] he admitted in a 1986 interview that it was a half-truth and the character design also came from simplifying and rounding out the Japanese character for mouth, kuchi (口) as well as the basic concept of eating.[27] Iwatani's efforts to appeal to a wider audience—beyond the typical demographics of young boys and teenagers—eventually led him to add elements of a maze. The result was a game he named Puck Man."
Wednesday, May 19, 2010
Sunday, May 16, 2010
Why the future doesn't need us & other stupid statements.
"Given the incredible power of these new technologies, shouldn't we be asking how we can best coexist with them? And if our own extinction is a likely, or even possible, outcome of our technological development, shouldn't we proceed with great caution?" -Billy Joy, founder of Sun Microsystems. I remember when this piece first came out, but wasn't compelled to comment on it or share it for some reason. I think i was over-futured out at that point, but here i am again. I popped this up because Feral House has released a collection Ted Theodore Kaczynski's writings called "Technological Slavery". I'm not a fan of Kaczynski, never have been, but i think it's a good move on Feral House's part to publish his work, no matter my opinion on how poisonous & mentally ill it is. They also published a big Trojan Horse of a book supposedly about Black Metal & the satanic aspects of Rock & Roll music, but inside was an absurd amount of information on Black Metal's own Louis Farrakhan: Varg Vikernes. This isn't a criticism, i quite enjoyed the book & the content by Varg & the shaping of Black Metal as a mystic racial concept was pretty interesting. I'm just emphasizing that it fits in with Feral House's general ISM. Anyhow, my point, pure & simple is that the idea of technology overtaking humanity & this somehow being rationalized (not unlike Battlestar Galactica) is bloody stupid, self-hating humans are mentally ill & should be treated as such, technology is part of what we do as a species & complicates things sure, we're not just fucking chimpanzees eating bananas all day, & that's a damn good thing. Anti-civilization theory is a mistake, it might bring up some interesting angles, but ultimately it's a pathetic, loser mentality for cowards that don't have the balls to pick up the torch that was handed off to us. You don't drop the torch, waving your hands around as the flame lightly scorches your arm hair, you hold the torch out & RUN WITH IT.
Friday, May 14, 2010
Wednesday, May 12, 2010
Saturday, May 8, 2010
Goblinko Vending Machine Expansion
Goblinko vending machines are now to be found at MECCA, the Bijou, Kitsch & Olive Juice, all in unlikely Eugene, Oregon. Currently in the machines are Monsters, Weirdos & Creeps cards, Sticker Please! stickers & just released PIZZA PARTY character cards with ROSHAMBO fighting action! Check them out!
Sunday, May 2, 2010
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Posts
