There’s an order on the other side
too brightly lit to talk about, recall, gone.
An anemic red settles gel-like at winter’s
base bringing into bas-relief summer’s
white heat.

i see you at the edge

of a rinsed beam

I’d left the world of cultured people behind
For incandescence and whatnot
Your astral stern and cranial vault
I’m bouncing back to infinity through
Though

Finally Tár throws up her arms. Whatever, she tells Max. If you want to avoid Bach, fine. Because, after all, the soul selects her own society. That’s not just a cutting remark about creative vision. It’s the first line of an Emily Dickinson poem.

It’s not the whole hand but the fingers – digits – which, true to form, the digital activates: scroll, type, click.

In the Halloween universe, there are two rules: there are no accidents and Michael Myers is very, very hard to kill. Even if something looks like an accident…

Olivia Wilde’s second film Don't Worry Darling suffers from an inability to deal with the past and with people it doesn’t understand with anything other than contempt.

Though many critics insist on reading it as a straight biopic, Blonde, based on the novel of the same title by Joyce Carol Oates, is a horror film about the creation of the image of Marilyn Monroe. Those who scorn the film as “dehumanizing,” “cruel,” or “torture porn” can’t tolerate the ambivalence and ambiguity that Blonde depicts and demands.

what got stuffed into those minutes

emitted in light’s diurnal oil

placed in steel

container paste-like

transgressing the horizon

night’s acutest angle slips

tube-shaped

whose literal ecstasy

reminds me

BOY PEELING FRUIT

of Caravaggio in 1592

SUNSET BOULEVARD

of Joe Gillis in 1950 afloat

scab-like in the gray pool

of the aging star

whose emissions

lit this

Confetti has seven sections and the diagrams compiled here are from the final section which is “set” in the desert, a zone I think of as both pre- and post-cinema where forms come apart and wed in odd and mirage-like plays of light. A site of mystical illumination and terror, a screen of excess sun. Two films appear in this section, both shot in the deserts of California by European directors: Zabriskie Point (1970) and Twentynine Palms (2003) where sun seems to prophesy violence and/or ecstatic fusion while also pointing to cinema as a medium of light. There are wide and God’s eye shots that feel both awe-inspiring and paranoia-inducing, a weirdly wired air buzzing with surveillance and freedom as seen through the eyes of outsiders. […] lovers stare into light and get blotted out, revealing how the exposed eye/I might get dissolved, overwhelmed, and dazzled. Bodies fuse with screens, light, and other bodies. “Love is not consolation,” wrote Simone Weil, “it is light.”

Above the green grass, ecstatic, as children play, a different sort of spin begins. We twirl faster and faster, green leaves and white sky, green and white, green and white, all the way. Somewhere. To the beginning. Maybe. A violent pulse of obliterating light before the beginning and after the end. The words TIME DESTROYS ALL THINGS appear against a black background. The credits play backwards.

In the beginning, there’s the sound of metal. A black screen gives way to zoomed-in tentacles, lustrous metallic innards of car or creature. The sound of metal spins, piercing the air. At this proximity, it’s hard to tell sight from sound, metal from muscle. Now a wide shot reveals a road. Now a car. Now a young girl is humming in the backseat, her father at the wheel. Now the car crashes. Now an operating room where, at disorientingly close proximity, an ornate metal plate gets fused, pearlescent and silvery and red, to a head.

Near the end of “The Dedication” entry in A Lover’s Discourse, Barthes tells us that the visitor in Pasolini’s Teorema is definitely an angel, as he does not speak but rather “inscribes something within each of those who desire him – he performs what the mathematicians call a catastrophe (the disturbance of one system by another): it is true that this mute figure is an angel.” The silence of the angel engraves, leaves a mark. The silence is what happens. An encounter, a puncture, rippled beginnings of texture. Barthes’s “We are our own demons” entry begins with the assertion that the lover is sometimes possessed by a demon of language. The lover is inhabited – an inflamed vessel who babbles hyperspeak. Love and writing are processes of possession and exorcism – stretching bodies to catastrophic limits (the projectile vomit and spinning head in The Exorcist; the catatonia caused by the angel in Teorema). Babble, convulsion, expulsion, inflammation. One system disturbs another. Love> – > l … o ///*& v← )))) e.

To be in a state of ecstasy is to be driven out of oneself, to (however briefly, thrillingly, fearfully) stand outside of the I. One is here. One is also there, on screen, as an image and gleaming under the raw inexorable light of information and communication. This light, as Byung-Chul Han points out in Transparency Society, is not exactly light, but rather see-through lightless radiation, penetrating and intrusive. Metaphysical light sourced from the sun or divinity creates hierarchy and processual order whereas transparent non-light carries power differently, as in Hamlet 2000 where surveillance cameras, glass houses, and reflective smooth surfaces proliferate. The new violence obliterates light and shadow with see-through mediums, hypermediation gets ecstatic where everyone everywhere is present all the time everyone everywhere present here and now even when they are absent everyone everywhere present….

During star death, light pulsates and quivers, expanding before collapsing fantastically. Erlanger’s works remind us that to look at a planet is to view what it’s infused by. Saturn’s famous rings are comprised of glimmering pieces of asteroids, moons, comets, and unknown materials upheaved then reconstituted, clinging and spinning. The planet is the farthest we can see with our naked eyes—a spec of barely-there light. Erlanger’s worlds evoke the limits of sight: very close (snow globe, a world in weird miniature) and very far away (a planet). Sight stretched to its strange ends melts into touch. Pupil is skin, skin is animate porousness unhooked from orbit.

Static artworks are delivered from fixity and into deranging mobility as they alter the relationship between viewer/viewed, consumer/consumed. A painting that exceeds its frame. A mirrored installation for summoning the dead. A series of killer artworks, porous and mutilating where painting becomes a passionate threshold, mirror, shield, portal.

“Mountains and abysses, such is the relief of the grotesque body; or speaking in architectural terms, towers and subterranean passages,” writes Mikhail Bakhtin in Carnival Ambivalence. The harlequin body, the body at the banquet or feast, disrupts, according to Bakhtin, social hierarchies through exaggeration and excess. A body ever in a state of becoming. A body as passage where passage is light, encryption, daze, trap, shock, deliverance, vivification, spillage… where horror and humor are electric twins spinning transmission, underpass, and drift. This everted body troubles the modern image of a body atomized, individualized, pathologized. A body at a limit: on a high wire, down a drain.

Both love and recording are associated with the form and feel of the heart: a muscle, an image, and a flutter in the chest. To record is to repeat, reiterate, recite, rehearse, know by heart. And the heart (from the Latin cor) is a specific kind of recording device. My Bloody Valentine (dir. George Mihalka, 1981) is a wildly underrated slasher dealing in every way with the heart: its horrors, holidays, memories, ticks, and red paper scribbles. Its capacity for recollection and return. Its bloody, heavy, folded, and candied forms.

Material things, says Thomas Aquinas, must have something holding them together other than their parts. A slice of meat THROWN

into a field of light to make it loop, enter

a body, loop, leave a body, loop, become a body.

Angels and other immaterial creatures of organization (like us) are always dying. MOVING in wave disturbances. An energy-carrying medium.

An angel, says Aquinas, might be pure form. The distance between wave crests. “Spiritual substance” or the speed of a wave divided by frequency or “divine thing” or when the medium’s wings glow then vanish upon delivery. Delivery. Something speaks. A throw of the die’s knife-edge between there and here along wired-up

ROBERT GROSSETESTE’S MEDIEVAL THEORY OF LIGHT

13th cen. experimentum

some matter is opaquer than

other matter mysterium

tremendum i miss your

light passes through

accordingly coupling

with matter i miss you

tremendously while some

matter is opaquer than other

you are the opaquest yet

at the beginning was a light

form without matter maybe

some matter is opaquer than

other matter mysterium tremendum

i miss you 13th century 21st century

tremendously

The light is leaking.

Thirty-nine minutes in, I begin.

Page, ocean, page, ocean, detuned television.

In the clinic’s hallway near the other dusk

The same but colossal and slivery

with blue at night. The thing is to slide

the self out of the way, says Weil.

Bachmann’s Malina weaves a labyrinthine love triangle in a corner of postwar Vienna. The narrator is in love with Ivan and lives with Malina. The first section, “Happy with Ivan,” tells of how the world can feel changed-charged by desire, a name can be a password, a cure for decay, a way to unlock a blocked flow, get devoured, disappear, become multiple. Bachmann writes: “It’s Ivan. Ivan, again and again.” She describes a virus which moves between bodies and locations, love or sickness or lovesickness. Often, she waits.

THE FORM OF THE HEADLIGHT

It begins and ends at night, David Bowie’s “I’m Deranged” playing over the Lost Highway, smudges of white headlights emblazoning the road in fast flickers. The yellow line of road disappears under whatever vehicle we’re inside of. Again and again. A mechanism pushes forward and meets itself, affixing the start to the finish. Almost. Lines fall fast out of frame and into pure night. We appear to be rushing forward. Towards what?

In “Fate and Character,” Walter Benjamin describes what the fortuneteller can teach us about time: “The fortuneteller who uses cards and the seer who reads palms teach us at least that this time can at every moment be made simultaneous with another (not present).” Magical reading breaks then overflows seemingly linear cause and effect chains. Something new gets written as we read. Telepathic, near and far hook-up. It’s a spell, an incantation. Residues of wolf hours and gone pasts make slippery what we thought we could grab. The clock stops. We see this world differently. The Magician, an emergency brake, breaks stuff.

In the trilogy of books written during World War II, Georges Bataille connects the writings of Nietzsche with those of the Christian mystic Angela of Foligno (1248-1309), whose bodily devotions included washing hands and feet of lepers and then drinking the water, stripping naked in front of the cross, convulsing, and meditating on portions of Christ’s crucified flesh. This unlikely connection, I think, has to do with unmediated experience. The I/eye of the philosopher, dazzled, might become the I/eye of mystic.

A past fastens onto metal mouths and the sky tilts as a raccoon runs across the road which my friend lovingly points out before departing for a longstanding appointment with our dealer. My hair dyed propitiously blonde. Atmospheric chemical glint under cardboard stars. We speak into machinic dream. Timed metallic hiss of buses near cluster of orange trees. Lukewarm coffee and floating eye divulge partially this thin glimmer.

In contrast to the “transparent communication,” uniform and flat, that Byung-Chul Han says we’re plagued by these days under digitized neoliberal capitalism, Bataille continues the above thought with an attempt to define an entirely different kind of communication, intimate and excessive, open but not exactly transparent: “The communication of two individuals occurs when they lose themselves in sweet, shared slime...” Selves get lost in a slime reminiscent of Mel Bochner’s gridded textures of colorful vaselines and creams. In an erotic and intimate communication, we can never really attain or grasp the Other, piece of art, text, atmosphere, on and on. We try, we slip.

Seen the angels. When other forces move from black and white to technicolor away blows our paper money. You wrap me in your Wings of Desire trench coat.

The camera in Hoarders doesn’t roll back to reveal processes of accretion that the hoarders may have undergone or the factories and conditions under which these objects were produced so that the show itself doesn’t become a critique of capitalism.

Grace is a divine phenomenon that Simone Weil wrote about often. She chose to spend a year working in a factory in order to understand the workers’ conditions firsthand. In Gravity and Grace, she writes, “To assume power over is to soil. To possess is to soil.”

It’s summer in Baton Rouge, and everything seems to be sweating: 1989.

In alchemy, the action happens inside the vessel. The container is typically transparent, which allows us to see the grit of transmutation.

Sugar and lead. Lead is a heavy metal and a poor metal. Druggy summer almost-dusk sun’s made its decision.

in a lux hotel suite

with a new version of you

teeth or the moon shining in my face

as if we weren’t just on Love Mountain

at the edge of Pennsylvania getting quietly

golden periapts got loosed from her throat

sounded like bangles jingling

on the wrists of fashionable women

reflected back to me many times

slim and ultra-glam

my captor

In the early 2010s, I often dreamt that I was driving into a forest fire, transfixed-terrified by flames’ voracity. The decade opened in California. Then: Pennsylvania, Louisiana, Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey. I began the decade with Anne Carson’s Nox, which gave me the bodily relief of a very heavy book written by a woman after years of being instructed to read big books by dudes.

fizzing over miniature cakes

down my throat some octilinear perturbance

faux snow seeming to dive

at The Grove in illumined flurries

like the hair of an animal technically feral

How much of oneself is defined by the culture that calls one into being? Is it possible to ever feel like “simply ourselves,” after being called into being as a woman, an anorexic, a depressive, a working-class person, and so forth? What if we don’t heed the call? Is it possible to write back into the space “before I began”? The middle space that Cruz describes, a space where she neither has to adhere to social norms nor eschew them, is one of a healing nothingness, of a thoughtful not-knowing. It is the space of poetry.

In a class society, attempted adherence to social norms can make us sick, but resistance to those norms makes us sick too, at least according to prevailing definitions. How then, do we define true health, true sickness?

“Bring night to your imaginings. Bring the darkest passage of your holy book,” wrote Carolyn Forché in “Prayer.” All month, these lines return to me: winter and its depletion of light. We see the moon more than the sun. Forché composed “Prayer” in Paris when her son was an infant. Of his own birthplace, Rudhyar described nerve-debauch, nerve-storms, and dead beautiful forms.

Wolowiec’s warm-up (2013) also deals with the physicality of the spoken word. Loudspeakers embedded in wooden beams lean against walls in various diagonals. Viewers/listeners have to position themselves close to the beams in order to hear the sounds of performers reciting voice exercises. The act of the warm-up in preparation for a performance is central to Wolowiec’s practice, as she places the unseen, unheard, and often overlooked at the center, creating a new context. The gaps between the conception of a work, the making/rehearsing, and the presentation are left open.

upon waking I skyped with a Los Angeles

healer in a wooden paneled room and asked

why and when asked him to ask the entities

to see what arrival pulsed the now and dreary

underbelly my laptop on my pillow slanted

insidious glare but so silver

The tumultuous she. The brainwaves looking sharp on the tundra. Especially you who. Were sought after, arranging the archive, going to just store it away or find a method for display. A whale moves in the night ocean.

Deeper inside the house, fresh white three-hundred-thread-count sheets.

The horizon is an imaginary line. The archive is vertical. The horizon is unchanging. The tides are changing. As in temperament. The body becomes more muscular, then softer. Forms and unforms. Steps between wave and archive. Words drip into water.

The house no doubt overtaken by weeds. WEED QUICKER he says he says but it may look better ruined I say. And in ruin so too my pixels become analog. Line Line Line. | | | What we found on the railroad tracks and took into the house. What we took from one site to another. We cited and are still centering in the mind using I, me, mine.

On Matt Kleberg’s paintings.

Online reviews of NYC art shows including works by Bas Jan Ader, Helen Mirra, Tacita Dean, Sophie Calle, Sarah Greenberger Rafferty, Vivienne Griffin, and Davina Semo in Artcritical.