And getting married (more Barbecue verse novel draft)

I've changed my mind in
these my gray beard days
and now that my hair is blond
and grown longer then ever

I wanna get married, get married
to another gray beard who can
skipper my boat around the globe
sailing away together, old sea salts

me his last days loves, also eternal
love, old love, like the first loves
of adolescence; marry me,
when the laws change.

...and making video poems: notes

One hope, along with connecting the Barbecue verse part of the book to a still life series, is to also make some video poems using the verse text, low cost cameras, Linux and free open source video editing software.

(See: http://abdevpoetics.blogspot.com.au/2011/03/bbq-still-lifes.html for large format photo still lifes  and verse novel idea.)

Picking up an indirect quote which describes digital as: deep ontological and phenomenological shifts that are transforming the future medium of cinema; we have a common enough claim, found in the mainstream media and connected with large film studios. This is not to be believed, of course.  Marketing hype.

Working with and beginning to edit digital video on a netbook (albeit multimedia Toshiba) Vertok comes easily to mind. The collage (or montage; after Eisenstein's film sense) potential is there. So are we to believe history is repeating itself and digital cinema has taken us back to early 20th century film poetics and aesthetics?

The traditional poetics and narrative structure of films like, The Matrix, situation - action - altered situation (narrative as image; Deleuze Cinema 1) may certainly appear this way with claims The Matrix is the paradigm of this new digital cinema.

The Matrix is just another old school Hollywood action film. Eisenstein's film sense may have invented this form, but Hollywood repetitions become boring. Digital effects have little to offer as technologies  which can transform a medium,  given these examples.

There have been historic changes to film aesthetics and poetics since Vertov, after World War 2, but any discussion of digital cinema seems reluctant to engage with this new cinema. It seems to get filed away as experimental, gay and queer. Not mainstream, no real consequence. Even Warhol's experimental films get ignored or put to the side. Too much to think about; or ask that there be critical thinking in film?

This reluctance seems further entrenched if one were to believe in the software design of digital editing applications and follow the example laid out by this design.  Using examples from open source and free software, this becomes obvious and often explicit. The innovation is the idea of open source free software and not the software itself.

Digital video, cheap cameras, phone cameras, provides an easily available technology that can work with a changing and potentially novel cinema poetics. But that is all. Digital technology can hardly be claimed as a complete transformation of a medium.

Practical editing is another matter. Because video editing on a netbook does not easily allow real time editing, the separation of the sound track and sound image from the visual image becomes almost mandatory. Recording the sound track and laying it down first becomes the easiest way out of this technical limit, when working with digital video on a low power computer.

This way of working also allows the sound track to be cut at any point, sounds removed or added and opens to a video production which is capable of producing novel poetics and aesthetics. But film has already invented this, not digital media. A poetics of digital cinema has yet to be invented (and is being invented.)

A failure to understand Warhol's poetics opens up a grave danger for the opening indirect quote. But the acutely critical aspects of Warhol are an embarrassment to such a quote which would feel better if it did not have to face any critical undertaking. (Any critical moves by repetition are ignored or sent to the side. Critical narrative can follow this move.)

It would be simpler if history were to end and marketing hype could claim for digital cinema a transformation as a repetition without any need to take on any new critical practices. The denial of critical undertakings, hoped for by the opening quote, are precisely those of an undertaker. It is a logic of suicide presented as the end of cinema. A dead future.

It is the logic of a narrative which foreshadows itself as death which is contained in the opening indirect quote. A traditional action film narrative. Big budget Hollywood. A list actors.

(It remains that critical approaches can invent a new digital cinema.)

more BBQ draft verse

More verse lines, still to be revised, as a contribution to the Barbecue book. More and more Barbecue is forming into something that may be going toward verse novels. Not knowing what is to become of  a writing project, except the collage like collection of lines of verse, which seem to break off in directions not expected... at one time this fitted in with the large format still life series posted earlier and now finds a part place with digital video production...

        *        *        *

And in the morning:

In the local village supermarket store
the radio plays an electronic remix
of Johnny are you queer

Late 20th century disco hit
Costello's late night boy bar
Kellet Street/ Kings Cross
we ate breakfast at Tiffany's

and went home/ where ever that was
his father frowns at me in his bed
too young to screw around; he says
after a night together in the boy bar
streets of late 70s inner city Sydney

crusades for our rights/ too young he says
to want human rights as I lay awake in his bed
and his father pokes his head through the door
he is jealous he says on awakening/ has a hangover
was he too young/ was I too young/ I should
be dead. He may be is.

And those lines last night/ still white powder
in the plastic pouch/ at the next stop we
shoot smack to bring us down and in the
afternoon his father pokes his head in the door
and awake in his bed I see his wink:

was that disproval

...some more Barbecue lines

These are some more lines of verse to add to the end the Barbecue book I am working with. These need editing but I forget how to do this. Posting it here also means I will not loose them on a burnt out computer hard drive.

              *      *     *


Lovers of myself; dead do they suffocate me?
He swims naked in tan flesh in the long ocean beach
and can I still remember him? Did I really live longer
lover of me in my past I remember you still in drug
induced sleep, illness his old age; memories back
alive, like now, should I feel the shame of wiping
old man tears from my eyes. I feel this shame;
they are dead; it should be me, what I do to
survive as that which should be dead, are told.
Sunflower's life defy and still it remains. There,
eternally there; he says the beautiful and touching
short films of teenage coming out and first loves;
he remembers the name of his first love again how
it feels, again that feeling. Should this be his
triumphant first love; again. Saying old love, in
years as fresh as first infatuations of adolescence,
while being taught in the cold lecture theatre.

Narcotic patches...

Started some new narcotic patches on Thursday night, for Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and Ross River Fever. My mouth carries the perpetual taste of metallic chemicals and tired, so tired. Except at night, when one would like to sleep. And nausea, nausea, nausea; my dentures (oral prosthesis) need to be removed to prevent gagging.

Notes: Written across history and crisis.

Written across history is to say written through crisis and history after crisis; which is to say afterwards as resistance, and so often hysterical. By way of an introduction. These are  rough notes, perhaps in the way of extended endnotes and  the writing style needs much work but it serves enough to introduce an idea. Basic stuff, but it seems repeating this is worth it since it may not be assumed to be taking as granted. (Too tired right now to check this text, again.)

A-priori, nothing new, which is truly novel, can happen. The creation of newness and of the novel happens after a-priori sensual experience ...

to quote Hegel's lecture on Kant:
a. The a priori fact of sensuous existence, the forms of sensuous existence, constitute the beginning of this transcendentalism. Kant calls the judgment of the same the transcendental aesthetic. Nowadays aesthetic signifies the knowledge of the beautiful. But here the doctrine of intuition or perception is taken from the point of view of its universality, i.e. from what in it pertains to the subject as such.
(Hegel’s Lectures on the History of Philosophy, Section Three: Recent German Philosophy, Kant, Critique of Pure Reason)

Within this scheme the production of a new aesthetic and new conditions of experience is not possible. It remains ungrounded. Only then, absolute deviation is able to exceed this and establishes itself within sameness as that which can only come afterwards; after the initial a-priori conditions laid down by Kantian aesthetics. In this way is universal force, after a-priori conditions and becomes an aesthetic ground, without yet having any real substance beyond it's modes of existence. So it is with a poetics.

This can be difficult to understand and a caesura is needed. While having no real substance that be can understood as an object of contemplation, which is to say no real sensuous existence as an aesthetic object of beauty or even sublime experience, absolute deviation comes into existence as a force outside of what is given a-priori and is able to establish grounds, in which even while still being outside what has already been established a-priori, is still something which can be done. This happens outside the closures given by a-priori substance which limit aesthetic experience to what exists. Within the conditions of existence only that which can be experienced is given status as possible and what is outside is given over to what is given a-priori as impossible. A dialectic, as with Kant and Hegel, cannot form here as an opposition of possible and impossible since this remains limited by a-priori substance. Resistance is always somewhere else. An absolute deviation poetics outside this dialectical maneuver would be making history and as such comes into being as what is given afterwards and outside any given a-priori ground.

Absolute deviation gives sameness in itself difference which is more immediately real then the a-priori existing state of which it is said to be available to sensual aesthetic experience. Being made available here is an aesthetics beyond that already established by Kant and Hegel. This is to say beyond Romanticism which has already established itself on existing nature as substance. Such poetics may be considered as resolutely modernist. It gives only what is novel. That which is resolutely and relentlessly new. It appears suddenly, as if a sublime process, so may well be associated with a later Kantian sublime. It may appear as a difficulty.

This is also a giving such that Absolute Deviation Poetics comes to exist in a relation to history and can be discussed as being in relation to history. This may be a history of art but is also a history of humanity. This does not harbour an anti-humanist sentiment since this limits what is human to a-priori existing substance and does not allow for even the hope of a people to come. Any such Utopian hope is then dismissed by such an anti-humanism as only that which exists and so it may be further claimed this cannot exist and cannot be real. What becomes at stake is reality itself and so disputed becomes outlaw.

But, this is to be done with philosophy and this can be used as a limited idea. Kant and Hegel offer a  limit after which there is no philosophy of poetics and philosophical aesthetics. It is here that one may also find Absolute Deviation Poetics, giving to capital letters more then a proper noun which it may well not have need of, except as a spirited free indirect style and a confusing of noun and verb. The nature of this founding is something else. Poetics as a way of making intimately with aesthetics and technical problems belonging to that of writing poetry, making images and media arts.

This way of introduction obviously carries references to Foucault and Deleuze and a thanks needs mention given especially their writings on modernist poetics and aesthetics. Philosophy does indeed have its own way to go and lets leave it that path. What is hopefully introduced above is the separate streams open to art which has an aesthetics belonging with art and also a way into understanding how art is to be modernist. Being outside is both before and after, now. Now is novel. A phantom like appearance.