#montevidayo

Joe Milazzo responded to Johannes's previous post on kitsch. Milazzo writes, "As aesthetics, kitsch and camp inevitably raise issues of appropriation, power and their relationship to taste: what is tasteful, what is tasteless, how each can be mapped onto axes of high and low culture, and who defines the standards operative in each case. But taste never really debates essences, only visibility. Taste begrudges the existence of certain 'atrocities,' just so long as it does not have to be exposed to them. Undoubtedly, for Berryman to discuss his father’s suicide in a very public (if aestheticized) way in The Dream Songs is one of the ways in which the poems push at the boundaries of taste. To have survived his father’s suicide… I sometimes I want to believe that he-who-speaks-of-Mr. Bones—Henry’s friend and interlocutor, as Berryman describes that figure—is his dead father. In any event, the non-dialect language of The Dream Songs does labor at exposing the powerlessness exercised by certain traumatic experiences. Because there is no language for them, only a free-floating desire for form / shape, such experience becomes incredibly opportunistic. It latches on to whatever vocabulary and syntax is plentiful and convenient for its expression. Berryman’s Dream Songs are so multitudinous in their desperation both to offend our sensibilities and to win our sympathies. Simultaneously, even, so that the two become confused. But is this leveling of repugnance and 'delight' a productive confusion?" [Click] to continue reading

What really comes out when watching the full movie like this is how Kubrick intentionally divests the dialogic narrative of all emotional content (excepting HAL’s demise at the end, which is both ironically and genuinely heartbreaking) so he can introduce it instead non-diegetically and full volume, pumped in from the cavernous vacuum of outer space. It’s as if the lives we live are dimensionally reduced exercises in “being human beings”, while our cathartic interiorities are wired in remotely, via the endless darkness that surrounds this planet, and to which we all return upon death." [Click] to continue

Michael Martin Shea writes, "Like my dad always says, 'There’s more than one way to necropastoral.' And if we can think of the necropastoral as a mode of reading, (Joyelle calls it a 'reframing'), then it follows that, like any critical praxis, there are theoretical underpinnings, forerunners, sleeper-ideas that prefigure and inform the current moment. The ones who furnished the war-room with all these fancy snacks. The most obvious, of course, is Raymond Williams’ The Country and The City, but I’m more interested in the work of Giorgio Agamben and his theorization on the state of exception." [Click] to continue reading Michael Martin Shea is a poet and 2014 Fulbright Fellow to Argentina. His research interests include ecopoetics, political theory, Latin American poetry, and contemporary American avant-gardes. This essay is part of a larger project that attempts to historicize the Necropastoral, both philosophically and aesthetically. He lives in Las Vegas, Nevada.

"Jack Nicholson's mind is possessed. Like my body, my dress." Head over to Montevidayo to read excerpts from my translation of Sara Tuss Efrik's "The Night's Belly," a long poem of wombs and charred rooms influenced by Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980), the story of Sleeping Beauty (or Thorn Rose; Little Briar Rose), Little Red Riding Hood, and possibly even Polanksi’s Rosemary’s Baby (1968). “There are plots against people, aren’t there?” This is the question a frantic, phone booth-encased Rosemary desperately asked after being cruelly deceived by her husband. In “The Night’s Belly,” Efrik’s female protagonist similarly carries a child of unknown origin. A swelling devil-red child—sometimes described as having pincers, or flapping wings. A throbbingly painful monstrosity. Possibly the child of her husband’s “red mistress” (who later evolves into more of a Macbeth-style witch-mistress), Efrik’s protagonist continuously obsesses over the unfaithful husband’s activities. [Click] to continue reading

One of the film’s obscenities is the obscenely patent Orientalism of Refn’s mise-en-scene. The film unfolds in a claustrophobic Bangkok-as-‘Chinatown’ , on sets reminiscent of The Lady From Shanghai, Death of a Chinese Bookie, and Polanski’s iconic so-named film in which Chinatown stands in for Hollywood’s Heart of Darkness, complete with reddish-green lights, drug haze, voyeuristic, curtained chambers, catwalks and corridors, sightlines which don’t match up, and theatrical spaces like operas, burlesque stages, go-go cages, boxing rings and nightclubs. The obscene is that which should remain hidden but is not; in Refn’s film, the latent racism of Orientalist tropes so common in Western film is right out there into the open, neither ironized nor dressed up as Keanu-ish spiritualism for the benefit of the Western individual’s soul." [Click] to continue reading

"It seems a lot of people are troubled by Lana Del Ray saying that she wish she were 'already dead.' Seems that’s not an 'empowering' thing to say. We should all be energetic and as alive as possible. Working for a change in the anthropocene. Something I love about her songs is that she does sound already dead. They all seem written from a haze, from the other side." [Click] to continue reading

A provincialism the term itself takes to its limit, nervously marking it. As if the boundaries that prop up jingoist navel-gazing were finally being forced to dissolve." [Click] for the full article