Hut Journal November



October 5, 199

These are my new Rules of the Road and which is basically, ONE rule, to wit: 1) Never believe what anyone tells you..or even better, believe the exact opposite of what they tell you. If they say "I believe in honesty", get ready for a lie; if they say "I would never leave you", pack your bags; if they say I really believe you can do it", look for the pot hole they are busy digging; if they say "I'm a cynic at heart", that means they are an extreme idealist and have been burned so many times they mistake the holes in their heart for cynicism; if they say 'I'm pretty idealistic overall", then watch when things go wrong and they begin to assembly their weaponry...

But then...I'm basically a cynic at heart...

10.8
THE DEAD NEVER LEAVE

I went to see the movie 'Stigmata' yesterday. In watching the previews, I was struck by the number of movies now out or about to come out on the theme of the raising of the dead (the new Scorscese film) or the return of the dead, communication with the dead ("The Sixth Sense", "Stir of Echoes") or maybe the messianic return of the dead (perhaps the yet unreleased new Schwartzenegger film--looks like it from the one-sheet ad). Probably many others I just can't remember right now. The interesting thing is that these are not necessarily horror films (like 'Night of the Living Dead') where the sole purpose is to create some visceral thrill. It's almost as if the concept of return is taken for granted and then the real world consequences of that are developed: what if there really WERE a continuum of the living and the dead?

That same serendipitous afternoon I saw an interview with George Anderson, a medium, who was being interviewed (on CNBC of all places) because of a documentary that a couple of women had made on him and that was going to be on HBO that night. They showed a film clip where he 'discerned' (his term) a couple's dead son and told them some info about/from him.

How interesting the close link between the living and the just dead! It seems we are willing to accept (some of us) that we can make contact with the fairly recently dead but the 'deep dead' are more problematic for us! We can just maybe conceive of ONE layer of the dead, clinging tenuously to us the living by some thin tattered gossamer ether (or maybe it is the other way round!!...maybe it is the living who cling like bats to the sheer vertical wall of the dead, disappearing below us and above us into the mist, occasionally hearing their cries and intuiting distant vague shapes of those who have dropped off next to us)

But to have the millennia of dead crawling around us?? (and why stop at the human? why not ALL the dead? Only human hubris would assert otherwise...all the silvered fragments of ALL life that has ever been, hanging thinly everywhere unseen but not uneffecting, a dust cloud of motes rising and falling around the earth. (I'm reminded of the British artist, Cornelia Parker I think, who had a garden shed blown up and then hung all the charred remaining pieces she could find, large and small, in the air, recreating the shed in some vague fashion...The piece was called 'Cold, Dark Matter' but, in a way, the matter lives more widely now that it did as a shed...)

The net sometimes seems to me as that exploded shed. life and mind abstracted from its living, functional condition, detourned to a new, colder, more abstract, even bizarre, 'hanging' in space, with new terms, new movements, barely choate arrangements of understanding and relation -- nevertheless, a gathering in the midst of dispersal, a constant remembering, gathering in power by the day, literally....A Confluence of Codes let's call it.

The sodden entangled mass of life blown up, then eviscerated, pried open like a starfish opens an oyster, pushing its stomach into the soft insides

A true messianic project of the recovery of all the dead through time becomes a 'feasible' reflection of the gathering/recovery of the living now, AKA Frank Tipler's thesis http://www.math.tulane.edu:80/~tipler/tipler/tipler2.html -- as the individual can only grieve the immediately passed, the species necessarily covers a wider span, since it includes a structural memory of the deep dead.

the Return and Gathering becomes 'feasible' now not because of any 'facts' concerning such but rather because of a supersaturated communicational state that humanity is now moving into (it might even be said that the person walking around with a cell phone talking and the one hooked to the net are only small METAPHORS for this larger, denser -- 'heavy metal' as Novalis put it -- State of Communication. And isn't that state even larger, more encompassing than the state of grace?

10.11

CHANCE
hookay, kitten don't wanna correspond wid her cyberlover any more... but here's some Bataille for her anyway-- one more tomorrow, then you'll be shut of me dearest...(been doin' some research for ze xxxxxx show)

"A good game only has value if the cards are properly shuffled and cut, and not set up in a prior arrangement, which would constitute cheating. The player's decisions must themselves be chancy, due to his ignorance of the other players' hands. The secret force of loved ones and the value of their conjunction cannot result from decisions or intentions determined in advance. It is true that, even beyond prostitution or marriage, the world of lovers is still more the realm of trickery than is the world of gambling. There are no precise limits, but instead there are numerous nuances between the ingenuous meeting of persons incapable of hidden motives, and the impudent flirtation that ceaselessly arranges frauds and maneuvers. But naive unconsciousness alone has the power to conquer the world of miracles where lovers meet."
G.B. from 'Visions of Excess'

10.14.99

I went to a public panel discussion yesterday on the controversy surrounding a controversial piece in a controversial exhibit in a new show that opened in new york. (doesn't necessarily matter what the piece or the exhibit was, the controversy always swirls around the same issue: "My (sex, religion, gender, nation, self-image) is terribly offended by this; why are we giving you money to make us feel bad?" Really not much more to be said about it that hasn't been said by hundreds of commentators seeking 'shed some light' on the situation (keeping in mind J. D. Peters comment that "...communication as a bridge always means an abyss is somewhere near.")

Then later that day I went to see the films "American Beauty" and "The Thomas Crown Affair". They were both depressing but "The Thomas Crown Affair' slightly more so really. I assume most people would think the opposite. But I'm terribly familiar with the abjection of "American Beauty", with it's self-centered nihilism, its disconnections, its failures, losses, fatigues, critiques, it's the watermark of 'good, thought provoking film' now, that somehow, the thought in the back of the brain goes, it will make you a better person if you deal with this, come to grips with it, be TRANSFORMED by it, is the critique's plea perhaps. Although god knows transformed into WHAT...as if staring into an asshole will make us understand shit better, come to appreciate its aesthetic qualities. (Just as in the panel discussion becomes inchoate at a certain point because no one even knows what art IS anymore, what function, if any, it's supposed to serve--or rather, to be more precise, EVERYONE knows what art is -- and each definition is different...which says to me that we are in the realm of Gillespie's thesis on self-extrapolating annihilation, i.e., nihilism,..and the devil take the hindmost; it's a slippery slope at that point since ALL viewpoints, even ostensibly redemptive ones --Freud, Marx, etc.--, can and will be allotted their moment under the black sun.)

So how depressing for one's whose 'expectations,' such as they are, are in coherence with "American Beauty", to then see the 'happy ending' of "The Thomas Crown Affair"! And it's sobering to also realize that it's a remake of a film from years ago and to see the distance that the culture has moved -- or at least some of the official organs of that culture which certainly have some reflective components (and probably some constructive components too).

But all three events seem to be mining the same territory: how can the self best take flight from itself and other selves, or even --hypocritically--how can the self take flight from itself by pretending to be interested in other selves? But of course, the scenarios are never framed that way, but rather in the exact opposite way: we (or you, as it rounds the corner into smaller and larger totalitarianisms) are lost; how can we find our selves (or help you find yours).

I'm reminded of a quote from Kafka I read recently:
"Written kisses don't reach their destination, rather they are drunk on the way by ghosts. It is on this simple nourishment they multiply so enormously. Humanity senses this and fights against it and in order to eliminate as far as possible the ghostly element between people and to create natural communication, the peace of souls, it has invented the railway, the motor car, the airplane, [the net?]. But it's no longer any help, these are evidently inventions being made at the moment of crashing."
Kafka
10.15

How can one know what is significant in one's life? We often find out only later.

--"How can you say that? We make decisions all the time based on what we think is significant."

A glance, a passed word...only later do we know the import of it, where it places us. For most, 'work' is what is significant...but isn't one's life the most significant? isn't 'work' added later?

--"You're not making much sense to me. 'Work', 'life'...you speak in these vast generalities. Who can live there, in those non-places?"

We live where we live. Who are you to tell me where and how I can or cannot live? You wish to live in a state of distraction perhaps, away from certain internal places of doubt. Do you doubt that others can live in such uncertainties, that they find a certain comfort there, even if only the comfort of a bed of nails?

--"See, I just don't get this. Everyone DOES live in that state of uncertainty now. How could you possibly want to valorize such a thing? Are you trying to WILL your own unhappiness?"

I've never said anything about happiness, much less unhappiness. Perhaps it's the case that 'happiness' is always foreclosed, always placed in scare quotes, severely contingent, but on what one seldom knows: the drop of a leaf, that retrospectively heard passed word, shimmering lightly beneath the skin, never quite fully pronounced, slurred or stammered on the way into existence. Isn't that always the way of it? Pain is much more open ended, lending a certain patience to everything, either patience or death, there doesn't seem to be an in-between. Pain causes an excruciating waiting -- and isn't uncertainty a kind of waiting? We would like for it to be a fortuitous waiting, a pregnant waiting, finally giving birth to the end of waiting, a final event. That finality we call happiness. But isn't that finality, ultimately, a form of death, ... certainly death-in-life.
More than that one could not ask for.
And usually less than what we get.

And ultimately the only thing that is 'required' of us is that we die.
And to breath, or maybe gasp, in between alpha and omega.

10.17

Perhaps I'm one of those doomed, cursed beings I always read about: cursed with an intense internal existence that makes life seem like a trap; cursed by trying to bring that trap, however feebly and enervated, into view. Though perhaps there is something to be said for the fact that I also thereby bring it into existence, the work of my own continual fierce infernal incantations, continually rubbing that throbbing gland into new heights of penny ante despair.

10.19

Perhaps divinatory systems -- I Ching, tarot, horosccope -- work (and to me they often do seem to `work' in some fashion) in this way: A mosquito was buzzing around me and I tied to slap it a couple of times to no avail. I finally waiting, with my hand hovering above my chest, waiting for it to land so that I could smash it. Finally it landed on my HAND and I acted.

Just so, perhaps we go to the future in these systems, rather than the future being brought to us

10.21
DIS/CONNECTIONS
I watched the Frontline PBS program last night, `The Children of Rockdale', and had incredibly mixed feelings about it afterward (the story is of a large group of teenagers having group sex in the same county where the school shooting happened), a mix enhanced by the fact that I know one of the experts being queried at Emory, from when I was married. The Atlanta paper afterward of course carried interviews with `adults' about What It All Meant, etc.

Just like the lines of sexual interaction and contact they showed, it's an almost untangleable thicket. I mean, as if the adults THEMSELVES were a) not sexual creatures and could make value-free pronouncements about sexual conduct (the experts) and/or b) were cathected sexual beings, always everywhere determined by their own sexual hang-ups, phobias, expectations, etc. or c) that there is an actual turn-on aspect to the program, with these kids doing stuff that most adults only furtively fantasize about when they rent videos.

and of course the lessons I guess we're supposed to draws from all this is the complete decline of civilization as we know it, rather than as a `green fuse' that through the shadows grow, to bastardize Dylan Thomas. And not that I could condone, necessarily, the kids actions---but I can certainly understand it. I thought of the Bonobo chimps afterward: hypersexual creatures who use sex for greetings, for comfort, for distraction, for play, an almost constant form of interaction.

The terrible thing about an adult contemporary human is the incredible amount of non-contact and isolation many of us live in. (I'm thinking of the great poignancy of the film `American Beauty' again). Such things as this Rockdale incident can thus only be seen by a great majority of adults with an almost uncomprehending disbelief/disgust/fascination/subterranean desire.

Technology both instigates and soothes this---how feeble and sad the guy masturbating in front of a triple x video, an erection which the tech brings about and THEN culminates. Meanwhile, relations between the sexes seems to be getting more and more problematic. (yes, I'm doing a little projection here, but not entirely I think). It's easy to see why many people are undergoing a drastic withdrawal from the whole game -- well, I can only speak in terms of the males I know--which would include me to some degree no?. It often seems that the whole atmosphere of the socius is now sexually charged, no matter what the situation, almost as if sex were migrating out through the porous membrane of the skin, to the other side somehow, like a porn film which has been reformatted for some other genre yet it bleeds through in its effects; somehow, structurally, it continues to elicit sexual reactions, even as, let's say, butter is being sold---Marx's theological/phantasmagorical hijinxs of capital's fetishism has now become erectile tissue rather than some numinous quality---but then they may not be that far apart.

10.27

STICKY VOIDS
On the way back from the job
before the rehearsal before the gig,
violins scriddling away on the radio,
porcelain sky, the afternoon has an
unbearable, even horrible beauty briefly,
a quality borne of tensions
pulling open the sky, thinning it like some
sort of transcendent taffy,
past rememberance continually pulling from future,
opening constantly
opening into us HERE and now, then closing at every microsecond,
thin stretched canopy of life, reality becoming-porous: everything,
humans,
cars,
trees pouring into and out of that gaping hole
which is everyplace and noplace...

Reality itself, for a moment, a split moment, caving open,
gleaming freshly, strange as both a fresh cut
and the tension of a balloon being
blown
past its reasonable point of elasticity---yet still holding, becoming
translucent, then transparent --
but you know it's still there, under
tension, beautiful in its imminent opening,
then collapsing, then opening
..., converging simultaneously,
the cut itself and not the sides cleaving from it
ballooning into the
world for one hideous beautiful moment,
between the opening and the closing of the eye,
a blink full of worlds and
emptiness---
a privileged glimpse
of the thinned middle noplace angels
used to hide
when there still WERE angels
now just ringing hollow..

10.30
all-hallows eve...If this were a true journal, I would recount the business and the boundedness of the past week, its frustrations, its subsequent sedimentations into a kind of bass note of despair, the continual turning of small victories into just dog-eared pages of my personal history, a palimpsest of faded blueprints, yellowed newspaper clippings, trod underfoot partially obscured by heel prints ... how painful is the personal, yet inescapable---

I went to a digital arts conference this past week and saw three presentations. The first two by poets had a shifting-sand quality to them, chaotic collisions of text and electronics, of javascript and Proust, no definable person to be felt anywhere, rather: systems interacting, creating moiré patterns, interlacing, interfering, re-enforcing -- but no place, no person; affect becomes another variable to be tinkered with, morphed into an inexplicable rhythm, always attempting to move away from the personal, away from the testimonial, away from the eyewitness into the agglutinative retinal dispersions and gatherings at the back of the eye before it enters the brain maybe. In this mechanical modeling the pieces were the very image of `cutting edge art' ... that means, nowadays, art that belies any expressivity of the `human' (the closer to the machine, the more it becomes `bleeding edge'), which has in fact slipped closer to the line of flight represented by pure machinic functioning (or at least the contemporary phenomenological imagining of such). I think this has ever been the case whether in 1850 (maybe even in 30, 000 b.c. with entranced shamans blowing soot on their hand against the wall, in the depths of some uterine cave) : the desire to escape what it is to be a human, even inasmuch as we've never been sure what the human was, and that very attempt at a jail break helping to define new parameters of the human. The human is always in negotiation with the non-human and the site of that negotiation is always language and image in some uneasy mix.

The third presentation was a melancholic, childhood remembrance folded into considerations of media saturation and with a straight forward narrative thrust, trying to make sense of our media soup sieves by recourse to the personal (what a mutual friend calls `MFA fiction'), the very opposite of the choatic immersion of the first two. And there was a slight generational difference also.

but isn't this whole journal some instance of the latter, some attempt, however jumbled, to make sense of...something? when in fact there is no sense to be `made' only sense to be taken apart, a dispersion and chaos to be reveled/raveled in....How old hat this whole enterprise seems dear non-reader, some attempt to scrabble up a wall when other folks are bulldozing left and right, clearing bright and shiny and empty fields (apparently no feels though) which scintillate in their own bright and shiny emptiness....

10.31.99

I could write anything I want here: threats, wants, needs,
personal attacks, pacts with the devil, the size of my dick and
the length the cum travels, who I'm sleeping with, who I
hate, who I love, who I can never forget, a list from my secret bin of
resentments, or my most skintight fantasies -- names, dates,
places, bomb threats.....

and I feel it wouldn't matter a whit. Tucked into the flurry of words and sentences, the whole mass becomes largely invisible, could be a testimonial to the end of the world, a prehension of such, the second coming flowing into pixels and it wouldn't matter.

Liberatory in a way, like writing on the raw Khora itself, blossoming out into some nether region, like blood swirling turgidly, solidly, into water, the shape of the body itself, before it disperses...

How much more painful, chaotic, numbed, confused, empty, dispersed -- although perhaps along this same axis -- must be those lone souls who are now exploding periodically throughout the culture, like some overheated circuit breaker, the most visible being males. But surely there is an accompanying female syndrome/ex-/im-/plosion??! What is the shape of THAT?

I can only think of J. D. Peters recall of Emerson's three defining horrors that the nineteenth century has bequeathed to the twentieth: a God-forsaken universe, a self lost in its own labyrinth, and other people depleted of substantive being. In a way all things become possible in such an environment..and I do mean ALL things. Can there be anything more frightening under such conditions of extreme freedom? For some of us, anything, including enslavement and/or oblivion, are preferable...and there are always others to assist us in slavery and self-destruction.

11.1.99
"The readers' in 1843 might think [Fear and Trembling] a dialectical lyric about Abraham and Isaac, but she who had ears to hear the hidden meaning of the text was Regine Olsen. Kierkegaard spent his literary career explaining the supremely overdetermined event, in which he broke off the engagement with Regine, such that all readers of his pseudonymous works beside Regine are positioned as eavesdroppers."
J.D. Peters "Speaking Into The Air"

11.2.
I communicated again. or attempted to communicate. even after I had vowed not to. But it was avowedly one-way. I sometimes think that I can only live (I had just typoed that as `love'--same difference) at a certain level of pain, that all attempts at directness are doomed to reverse to their insuperable, insufferable opposite: a paralytic state concomitant with my current state of existence.
(---although I am given heart in having just read this: "It would be foolish to disparage communications that never leave our own circles as failures. [....] Dialogic ideology keeps us from seeing that expressive acts occurring over distances and without immediate assurance of reply can be desperate and daring acts of dignity." J.D. Peters )

11.4
I'm sitting in a coffee shop watching people come in, pass by....For some `style' seems to precede and preclude the person, making it seem like you're just dealing with a surface ensemble of elements --
but sometimes `person' itself seems to be the style, a vibration through the stylus, that precedes, precludes, practices....something, bearing earnestly into wax, vibrating some trace of something into something else, just a single wavy line cut through the hollow density of the world, humanity as a mass of tracers over a battlefield, or the invisible impacted simultaneities of all the `messages' passing through the electromagnetic spectrum, myriad crimps put on the edge of the quantum foldings and superpositions.

Under conditions of extreme, ontological shall we say, abandonment (if a parent were to leave a child on a street corner, would we consider that as freedom? The mistake is in thinking that humans ever `grow up' enough to be left on the street corner), under such conditions, the only possible hope for survival is to inflate the stylus as much as possible, to make the cut as deep as possible, to be as VISIBLE as possible....and the most visible thing this culture knows is celebrity, itself a kind of style 'explosion'. Unfortunately most people seem to only have access to the explosion part of the equation.

11.5
Not that I necessarily believe this (even from one who occasionally feels deeply homesick--I guess I believe in a permanently exilic condition)...but I do like the navigational imagery:
"The beauty of the country through which we past,
and the very pleasure of the motion, charm our hearts,
and turning these things which we ought to use into
objects of enjoyment, we become unwilling to hasten the end of our journey; and becoming engrossed in factious delight, our
thoughts are diverted from that home whose delights would
make us truly happy. Such is a picture of our condition
in this life of mortality."
St. Augustine

11.6
Would that I could take this as gospel...maybe `readings' help to fudge `fateful' equations however:

Week commencing Saturday, 6th November 1999

LEO
Weeks like this don't come along very often. We have to wait till the
planets are in the right alignment. You will soon gain two essential
advantages. The first is a clear mind. You can expect an amazing ability
to see the difference between the crucial and the irrelevant. If you can't
immediately see what a powerful, useful blessing this adds up to, it
must be some long while since you last enjoyed such clarity. It can be
employed, at any level of life, in order to get what you need. And your
second celestial asset? That's energy. Mars is about to give you the
strength to persevere till you achieve what you set out to achieve.

well, one clarity I have already is that my obsession with the idea of a female `partner' is at an end. I'm very tired of trying to push and shove my meager life around to accommodate just the IDEA -- not even anything close to an actuality mind you, but just the thought of POSSIBILITY -- of such. It may well be that we live only half-lives as singlets...but we certainly don't even live even THAT portion if we (I) remain mired in phantasmic notions of such. The reality of relationships is that they are hard going now even under the BEST of circumstances --i.e., sufficient money really -- much less under the worse. Why in god's name I've even pursued it to the extent I have recently is ...well, it's not feasible, that's what it is. My ascription of a `Golden Age' of female/sexual companionship, as both you and I intimately know, is largely illusion. It's true that we live (and die) by our illusions and that in some sense they are all we have but--it's sometimes necessary to choose some over others. It's sort of sad though that even illusions and fantasies have to undergo the same dreary Darwinian struggle for survival that traps the rest of life...

11.8

NEVER MIND
a wu wei autumn this year--

'wu wei' is a taoist phrase meaning literally 'no-mind', a kind of
by-passing of the normal faculties of the mind to get to a 'productive
emptiness'...everything seems properly ordained and in place and the mind is not interfering with that process...

winter here now: crystal clear days, leaves have changed, good many have dropped, only just beginning to pull the covers up over the ground, temperature around 74 degrees day and 50 at night, looks to remain that off and on through thanksgiving this year...

after a while it begins to make one restless though, the external environment not consonant with one's own internal sturm and drang. So there is a choice of sorts: lock in with the outside wu wei and let it percolate inside or stay with anxiety and misery and let it color everything.

In reality no choices are made--or the choices one makes don't seem very stable...or only stable within the confines of the same-old-same-old personality one has always known and loved/hated oneself for being. It doesn't really seem very feasible to leverage one's 'personality set' very far afield--that's why kids crawl on to go-rounds on the playground, get dizzy and lose themselves in wu wei, why there is psychoanalysis, drugs, rebirths of various kinds: the promise of a sortie, a casting of one's lot beyond oneself in moves that will be, if not redemptive and providential (and after all how often does that happen?) at least emptying.

We humans are often like some sort of sci-fi scenario where the creature gives birth and then leaves its aging, mis-haped body to enter its fresh wu wei-ed (instead of weighed down) spring-off, another chance to hope for the really BIG spring-off that religion (and now technology) always promises us -- just around the corner, around the bend to grandma's house--whose place has been taken over by the wolf of course. We're always trying to kill that godam wolf--but the problem is that at a certain point we're never really sure which is the comfortable grandma and which is the mean old wolf (the sad part being that part of the time we kill the grandma but we can never really kill the wolf)...the irony being that we always get eaten in the end by the wolf no matter what we do.

11.12

MORE EVIDENCE
The pivotal moment in the the new movie `The Bone Collector' comes shortly after a police detective enters a bookstore in search of clues to a string of gristly murders. At the site of these murders, evidence and staged clues intermingle. As the detective enters the store, the camera pans and zooms to a sign containing the sections which the store is divided into and then tightens in on the sections headings of both `True Crime' AND `Philosophy'. Serving to put the philosophically-minded on notice, the movie at that point takes on a different kind of clue hunting structure than it had before.

What are we to make of this? An accidental camera shot? A subtle hint about certain implications concerning the connection of philosphy's task (often conflated with the male task/tusk/tool/control) with that of a forensic specialist? or the connection of philosophy with/as murder...as might be resuscitated in a philosopher's Sadean bedroom?

Some more clues for us: The persistence of a raptor image in the film, in it's larger cousin of the eagle, a Hegelian stand-in for some sort of absolute knowledge, flying high above the crime scene (and in fact there is later on a murder on the street far below the main protagonist apartment, and a prodigious cinematic pullback from street to apartment, making explicit the connect between mouse-and-raptor, knowledge-and-clue, mind-and-body. And for the 'philosopher' ("I've read thousands of books!"
cries Denzel Washington's bodiless head to the object of his
desire)...every thing is a 'crime scene'.

more clues: the chief detective, Denzel Washington, has become paralyzed from almost the neck down, leaving only his panoptic head, surrounded by a plethora of prosthetic augmentations: cameras, computers, microscopes, an `intelligent', breath-activated bed. (A curious scene at the beginning of the movie flashes back to the site of his accident, where he is attempting to rescue another officer who---seems to look identical to Washington himself!)--certain female objections to androcentric, philosophic projects being that very disconnect from the body, a disconnect which tech reinforces and which philosophy formalizes.

And in another turn-around, the murderer is a clue interpreter himself, wrongly accused of evidence tampering (by OTHER evidence that a younger Washington has collected) and sent to prison for a number of years. Both males, protagonist and antagonist, are caught in a sort of paralytic loop (compulsive searching for clues in one case, leading to the loss of the body and compulsive ruminations of revenge as a result of being made into a prison `female' by the other), which is only broken by the intuitive powers of a female. This homosocial loop is enacted most vividly in the penultimate scene when the murderer confronts and attacks Washington; it ends with Washington only able `go for the jugular' literally with his teeth as the murder ineffectually humps Washington underneath him, trying to get away.

clue: the small scraps of paper, the clues from each of the crime scenes eventually are eventually resolved from fragments of cryptic marks which look like a foreign text, into a drawing .. of a woman -- and which the apprentice forensic detective (whose real name is appropriately enough `Angelina' -- swooping down from desire [o my god, those lips!] and whose movie name is just as appropriately, `Amelia' [aviatrix lost at sea] ) is the first to swoop down and identify the faded `text' -- preeminently the place where `philosophy' lives -- as it is puzzled into a woman's face

Hegel spoke of the appropriateness of the color gray for the philosopher, a mediated shade in-between black and white. How fitting then that Amelia, sent to the scene of another crime and underneath the city should report back in dismay to her talking head, the bodiless panoptic cop: "There's gray dust everywhere; it's all over my shoes."

I could go on (for example, Amelia's refusal to cut off the hands, under the direction via radio of the bodiless cop Washington, for `evidence' purposes of course, of her sister-victim)...but I won't; you'll have to ferret out the rest of the clues yrself.

Don't you agree that cultural artifacts--movies ESPECIALLY--are rarely what they seem? Or do you think they are ONLY what they seam?

11.13
A little over a month till the big `00. I wonder how many similar journals are being kept online? My vague hope was to spend it with a female `partner'; that's obviously not going to happen. But as I've perhaps mentioned before (will this thing never end??!?!), I've realized recently that my millennium ended in 1996 and that I spend that new year's with Lesley (eerily enough, just as they say now that the new millennium would have actually started around then because the birth of Christ has been pushed back), and also the year that the comet hit Jupiter. How well I remember the apocalypse.

1999

January	February	March	April	May	June
July	August	September	October		December

2000