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Illucieon

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SEPTEMBER 1, 1939
by W.H. Auden

I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night.

Accurate scholarship can
Unearth the whole offence
From Luther until now
That has driven a culture mad,
Find what occurred at Linz,
What huge imago made
A psychopathic god:
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.

Exiled Thucydides knew
All that a speech can say
About Democracy,
And what dictators do,
The elderly rubbish they talk
To an apathetic grave;
Analysed all in his book,
The enlightenment driven away,
The habit-forming pain,
Mismanagement and grief:
We must suffer them all again.

Into this neutral air
Where blind skyscrapers use
Their full height to proclaim
The strength of Collective Man,
Each language pours its vain
Competitive excuse:
But who can live for long
In an euphoric dream;
Out of the mirror they stare,
Imperialism's face
And the international wrong.

Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play,
All the conventions conspire
To make this fort assume
The furniture of home;
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.

The windiest militant trash
Important Persons shout
Is not so crude as our wish:
What mad Nijinsky wrote
About Diaghilev
Is true of the normal heart;
For the error bred in the bone
Of each woman and each man
Craves what it cannot have,
Not universal love
But to be loved alone.

From the conservative dark
Into the ethical life
The dense commuters come,
Repeating their morning vow;
'I will be true to the wife,
I'll concentrate more on my work,'
And helpless governors wake
To resume their compulsory game:
Who can release them now,
Who can reach the dead,
Who can speak for the dumb?

All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.

Defenseless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.
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So I'm moving to Istanbul.

PS. Guys, I finally got my blog going!  Want to read some really unpopular opinions that will probably offend/bore you in some way? Got you covered. www.blog.coyoteandtheupgrader.…
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Possibly relevant things that have transpired since the last post of this sadly neglected account:

-quit my job
-gave away all my possessions
-crossed the Golden Gate bridge
-climbed an active volcano
-survived a tsunami
-swam with manta rays
-broke previous record for number of consecutive days unemployed
-moved to New Zealand
-reached new levels of spatial disorientation with the reversed seasons/weather patterns/directions/left driving cars
-learned to use 'keen', 'reckon', 'togs', 'jandals', 'rubbish', 'metal', 'tua tua', 'kumara', 'manchester', 'capsicum', 'mozzies', 'dole' and 'chilly bin' appropriately in everyday conversation
-lived with strangers in exchange for manual labour with mixed results
-joined anarchist collective
-broke previous record for number of days unemployed while actively looking for work
-read a shitload of books
-actually started writing again
-actually started drawing again
-actively advanced death spiral towards inevitable beat/anarchist/cardboard-box dwelling existence

In conclusion:

Maybe there will actually be something to see here soon? I know I say that a lot.  Thanks for continuing to give me the benefit of the doubt if you're actually still watching.  Alternatively, if you are particularly interested in the current North American political morass, Alberta tar sands debate, anarchist thought, critical art theory and other similarly unpopular opinions, note me and I'll add you to my list for updates on facebook where I actually write things.  I am promised that my partner is building me the epic fort knox/iphone64/sharkswithlaserbeams version of a blog at the moment, so stay tuned for that excitement. Laser beams!!      

Meanwhile, have some trippy Swedish music: www.youtube.com/watch?v=wcv3v6…
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"As a teacher and writer, I'm not interested in just producing books, and I'm not interested in just reproducing class after class of people who will get out, become successful and take their obedient places in the slots that society has prepared for them. What most of us must be involved in-whether we teach or write, direct films, make films, play music, act, whatever we do- has to not only make people feel good and inspired and at one with other people around them, but also has to educate a new generation to do this very modest thing: Change the world."
                              -Howard Zinn, 'Artists in Times of War'


To anyone still watching this page for the art, I apologize, it has been a while. I have been doing much more reading and thinking and writing lately than art making.  Watching some more great documentaries (note me if you are interested for some great titles). This focused break from break neck creation has clarified quite a bit for me, and I think it is what I need to be doing right now.

What I regret not doing more of these days is real activism- actively attempting to change things. If I miss making art it is almost solely in this context- because I feel that is the way I best express such ideas (undeveloped or stunted though they may be).  I think creation is a versatile and fluid thing that is almost impossible to remove from someone who must create, and as such, I'm not really missing the 'creative' side of art making and seem to be finding it elsewhere. My partner in crime here pointed out to me that this makes me less an artist who attempts to make revolutionary art and more a revolutionary whose tool just happens to be art, but could really be anything, which I thought was interesting.  I have always considered myself a passable artist but a very poor revolutionary.         

Still trying unsuccessfully to fill up our communal house with like minded folks. It turns out, in the heartland of oil country, there are no like minded folks that want to move in. Well, there are no like minded folks without cats anyway. Is it like a rule if you are still single and living on your own after age 21 that you must get a cat (or alternatively a small yappy dog)? Seriously. Plus side...spare room up for couch surfing?

We just put in the vegetable garden last weekend...spring is the greatest. Looking forward to being able to garden this summer again. :) Anyway, that's all for now, I'm sure there will be more ramblings later.
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...and want to learn how to do other stuff good too. :)

Still don't have a job.  I'm sure everybody else saw this coming. Well, to be honest I did too, but the problem with being overly principled (fussy?) is not that you don't see the bus coming before it hits you, but that you just find it impossible to step out of the way.  I will say one thing for unemployment though, it allows you a lot of time for reading.  I think if all they taught children in schools was to become literate, that would be more than enough.  Literacy and the ability to question are really all you need to become a decent and informed human being, and they certainly don't teach you to question things in any educational institution I've ever been to.  Anyways, my love of the library and all its residents is restored.

I wrote an article for a local weekly paper a few weeks ago in my quest for a job (or $65, as it turned out), which kind of left me sour on the whole editing process, ie. "we have to cut arts to make room for ad space this week, so we're cutting the article from 700 to 350 words".  But anyway, the process was one worth going through.  I interviewed a local artist who had a show opening that week and the article was a preview of his show.  Now, this artist is a highly motivated and very talented guy, who I also know personally, and his show was on a subject I am very interested in; the tar sands in Northern Alberta, so if there was ever an ideal viewer to write a review for the work it would probably be me. And I did write a favorable review, what of it actually got into the paper.  But it wasn't really the review I wanted to write.  The work was formally great, obviously complex both in thought process and execution, deep, a whole lot of flattering adjectives. It was.  The problem with it is the same problem that I have seen over and over again, including in my own work, and have begun to believe is nearly endemic to artists practicing in academia.  It didn't say anything. The objective was not to say anything.  The prime motivation behind the work was a personal experience with one of the most destructive and controversial projects on the planet and one of the goals was "not to create a forceful standpoint for the viewer".

I don't understand this mentality amongst artists that it is somehow "unfair to the viewer" to present them with a strong opinion.   The artist had his own strong opinions about the tar sands but intentionally focused on creating an 'experience' for the viewer that could 'possibly be true' rather than take a stance on the issue.  This constant worshiping at the altar of subtlety, introspection and 'visual poetry' bothers me.  I think all are valuable tools and certainly all are a big part of visual art, but don't just stop there. Present your own conclusions.  When you see atrocity occurring in front of you it warrants a response and the correct response is shock, outrage, horror, sadness, whatever.  Not quiet reflection, not subtle emotional cues supposedly leading to some vague universal idea.          

I have certainly fallen in to this trap. Formalism is seductive, strong opinions are often unpopular.  It is easy to get lost in the wholly cerebral world of your own introspective thoughts, especially when it seems like that's all the professors (and the art world) wants to talk about.  Making art about these nebulous ideas like 'memory', 'art itself', 'time' or whatever is interesting, definitely, but I can't help but see it as just mental masturbation when you see what goes on in the world and devote your voice instead to such topics.  I am especially critical when you choose a subject that is specific, and current, and does warrant discourse, and take it somewhere purposely intangible.   Artists are in an especially powerful position in that we are fluent in a language every person understands at some level.  This means we need to say something worth hearing.        
        
Am I being too hard on people? Maybe. I've spent a lot of time devouring Chomsky, Klein and Roy lately which is probably not helpful to my already cynical nature. But, I've been thinking about this pretty much since I started in art school and wrestling with it in my own stuff. Anyway, you can't really say such things in 300 words and I kind of doubt it would get printed if you could, so there it is. If you actually read all of that, thanks, I appreciate it. :)
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