before i forget, my grandmother also said this "i got paid for house work, with a home, furnture, spending money.."

that made her sound like she was taken care of, so i asked if she felt subjacated, and she said no, he was never home."

she also blames feminism on rising divorces, and thinks the nuclear family is the most stable...so grain of salt time, but it lead me to think was her marriage, the one that lasted 46 yrs, a mercancy arrangement, where both knew the cost ?

cowtown

I saw a statue of the buddha, with sunken skeletal features, veins crawling over canoe keel ribs, gaunt arms and gaunter legs, and I thot , he took himself to the edge, denied the physical, and then came back the self same way, to somewhere in the middle…is this what i need to do w. celibacy, is this what the church needs to do w. celibacy—i got so caught up in assuming the match b/w buddha & christ was the anihalltion of self, maybe it is temperance, balance and restraint. what next ?

the same place i found the buddha, i saw a disappointing show of the bog people---mysterious souls left persved in the peat bogs of Ireland, Denmark, Norway and Holland, there were some of the corpses there, and some tools, but also a collection of ritual jewelry/pots/adzes/etc that was deeply moving, but the light was so dim, and the display cases for some of the best work prevented a full view…that & they quoted heany’s bog poems but did not sell the volume.

To go along with the was wolfgang bleekers photos of moors, which had a decent colour sense, and some startling compostion, but by the most part, were overly romantic, and almost too cinematic.

The art gallery of calgary had a show of paintings done with acrylics, and clothes line, the gallery attendant described some of it as strong, and some of it as laboured. I was more excited by the eames plywood chairs then the work (which I found too concerned with material & theory, and nont nearly concerned w. form, so we had another show of b&w grids/rondos.

A bookstore cross stephen avenue had a book of censored comic art, including some v. well drawn boy pinups by p craig russell, almostl cadmusian in its details.

(saw some v. good public art, Yoruba murals on the side of a south African resturant, a horse made of farm implements, ekens glossy/blurry/glam/fuck you funny trophy cibrachromes as trophy art in the husky oil lobby/22 blackbirds carved, numbered and placed on a pole, etc.)

terse, wasp fight w. gramma about money, gave me my bday cheque early,

dependent on bryan’s car too much, found that out today, need to change it.

tris mccoll deconstructs holiday favourites

bought a book this xmas, called queer pulp, a coffee table excuse to note the underground history of girl on girl action--i should have looked here, which has the immortal cover "satan was a lesbian"

queer day

I find John Currin to be reactionary, hateful, and not even a very good painter, but those who love art have declared him the next big thing.

David Cohen fucks with the hype, and also tells the world that yale thinks he is as good as botecelli.

mefi

Mozambique may execute detainees summairly.
if the human rights leauge is to be trusted

all africa

marin county feels yr pain.

submitted a handful of haiku to flanuer--those new fangled haiku that unrealte to 575

digital camera for xmas, good for shooty, does this work, in a way that brians isnt.
dinner party w. brians uncle mike. among others (incl. jeff) we talked about god, among other things.

Franz Gehry is ego unchecked, refusing to acknowledge the beauty and diversity of human scale building, replacing it with garish spectacle. He is ruining deco, italianate renaissance revival, and other syles that make New York wonderful.

He did that with the King Alfred Center in Bristol which ignored the idea of pavillion and carnival, the Disney concert hall in Los Angeles, which made a rich persons cathedral on top of immigrant poverty, and the EMP in Seattle, which hoggishly took up almost 3/4s of a central public park.

I do not know why he is lauded in the manner he is.

Comment on this
on Satan's Laundramat who has original photos.

winter pastorals, alberta

magpie loosens
snow on
heavy pine boughs

nuthatches swerve
landing on
bare poplar branches

crow gleams
irridescent
black night/black feathers

the damage that jack white can do is not only to ones ear drums.

before i forget, had a 3 minute black out at rachels ca 9 pm, two days ago

and almost 24 chicago area priests have called the vaticans gay position "vile and toxic", reminding us that the church is not the vatican, that many north americans and europeans are now in open revolt against the vatican on issues of sex and gender, and that if the next pope is as conserative on these issues as the last one, we may see schisms.

as for me and my house, i agree with the chicago 24

One of the strageties for winning the cold war was bleeding, basically out spending russia until it fell into economic collpase (cf Reagon and SSDS), it worked so well, and chinese might be trying it on america

queer and pacifist events cut from montages of events at the lincon memorial, thot crimes progress.

Breaking down the red/blue state lines, these ten regions still mantain some of the elitist class discourse that surrounds red/blue, but reflects the complexity found in the demograpgics, also attempts to explain race, which is a factor over looked (and not only b&w but asian/hispanic, etc)

Ballard offered CBE Ballard tells queen to fuck off.

huge gallery of african photography, done by africans. interesting on aesthic and anthropological grounds.

last night i had a three minute blank out, and today i slept thru most of it. im sick and scared

gorgeous paloethic art is found in southern germany, including the oldest anthropomorphic work in history...i wonder if we can call them totems, if the work had a ritual function outside its obv. aesthic care ?

making light

Jury's
choosing death sentences are becoming less and less common.

i hope it means that americans have come to the realazation that death is a cruelty.
(it doesnt mean that prisons are any better)

talking left

Americans phyiscally and emotionally abuse prisoners in their care, spec. arab immigrants detained post 9/11.

queer reading of LOTR, still overrought and over rated though.

queer day

Maoist record reviews, they hate pop so you dont have to.

mefi

speaking of accountability, Arnie declares state of emergency so that he can push his cuts on a public with out the body of the legasture even discussing it.

This is what you get for using elections as grabs as opposed to forums, and this is what you get for electing a bully.

talk left

Diebold has admitted that their machines went untested in 17 counties in California for the last two elections.

Fair and Free Elections are being ursurped by machines, and ursurped for political g ains. Enough to make one a luddite.

making light

The gold Room, an atlanta strip club is now being used as a church, something about this moves me--making the profane sacred or something like that---the giant whirl pool in a champers glass is being used as a baptismal font.

fark

robbed last nite, glad i dont work tomorrow.
got mostly smokes, happened quickly, too quickly to remember much details

i have been having gaps in my memory, sessions of two or three minutes when i blank out and do not respond to stimuli, this has been happening for months, i just went to a neurlogist, and he wants to do eegs, cat scans, etc + he has put me on meds that i cannot afford and may cause my thinking to become sluggish. i have been working on a couple of book projects, and some freelance stuff. i cannot afford to be sluggish, nothing scares me more then my mind going

maybe i was unfair to hill, is it not our job as christians to discomfort the comfortable and to call out the hypocisy(sp) of those in power ? Was she not working in the tradition of Christ in the Temple or Christ telling the rich man about the eye of the needle ?

What better place to tell the emporer of his nudity, then his own palace.

Rumsfiled will be trying Sadaam, and he claims not in a show trial. crossing fingers.

Jesus hates it when you smoke

America puts a bounty on Taylors head, UK mercanies say hey thats a good idea

the reason why the world court at the hauge exists is to deal with this sort of thing, i mean i know the us eschews treaties and likes unilateral deicsions, but come on.

France, in its attempts to march towards secuarism and avoid its muslim influx and catholic roots, has banned religous articles from class rooms.

i think its a singualarry (sp) bad idea, and diveristy should be encouraged.

bbc

As much as I have problems with the Church, there is a time and a place for this sort of thing, doing so at the vatican mid performance would be a bad time and place

ilx

One of the first criticisms of gehry inside architectual circles, Johnathon Clancey thinks they represent "the attack of the blog"

First Nations baskets, with their subtle and permating abstractions, moving between meaning and form, are like sand paintings or quilts, the beginning of a new, american art.

a huge exhibit at the musuem of the american indian, in dc shows hundreds of varriations and implications, and also extensive how tos.

check it out
mefi

bryan and i are fighting, and this time it looks more serious then before, the clenched jaws and half sentences indiating we are serious

danielle came home and we collapse into old wonderful patterns, the only one i retained from high school, there must be something there.

she liked romaine brooks, i knew she would, its odd how much my taste has changed since and how much things have changed.

duncans show is up at fab, wall paintings, things propped up, things on floors, elegant complex wonderfully played out, nostalgic formalism, but he never calls himself a formalist.

and the show downstairs, seeping pigment thru white sheets, like if helen frankenthaler did right of the first night, and clumsy random paintings,which bored... and an installtion peice with honey and troughed canvas's that looked medical.

purple ink and red chalk make me as happy as mechanical penguins.

I want to be more like Judith Butler than like Michel Foucault.
Madonna

She wants a PhD from Oxbridge in queer theory, womens studies and gender studies, does she even have high school ?

i am glad that they captured sadaam, i look forward to when order and democracy enter iraq, i am unsure that outside forces will cease resistence. i am unsure that the violence will let up, i am cynical that the americans will improve the sitution.

Top 5 Poetry Books of the year are all collections of cannonical writers. This makes me sad, that one of the nations leading papers thinks that poems are so moribund that only what was produced is worth looking at.

Homeland Sec. Head Tom Ridge wants to make illegals, legals...mostly to keep track of them, but even so, this might be an indication that things arent all bad.

a good summary of my aesthic feelings and practices, done by the fine folks at freaky trigger, in fact i think it is the manifesto i agree with most, with its refusal to view hi as better then lo, and its refusal to capitualte to history.

ilx

will martin make us yearn for the days when creiten tried to be even a bit progressive ?

queer day

look you didnt like the badger cam, and i was sad--but i hope this is better...its a camera that measures contential drift!

saint johns dream last night, first time in years.
might have been the cold, might have been something else.

thot of gateway before bed, and in group yesterday. i do not know what is my fault, what is aspies, what is the editors and what is no one.

Which Historical Lunatic Are You?
From the fecund loins of Rum and Monkey.

i wanted ludwig, thank josh

William Trost Richards

i did a google search, but liking him is just a little bit shameful

warhol
suicide
1962

an acessiable, well written, clever and difficult history of the turner prize lavishly illustrated, with many hyperlinks.

worth a glance

Sexuality is ethically correct when it is done by two adults who consent, and are capable of consent, being on the same power base. The problem with this is when someone consents to be cannibalized.

its a t shirt

via ship of fools

Hindus and Muslim's kill each other, BBC reports

when the inbred daughters of anglo upper classes tell the colonies to clean up their messes and work hard towards democracy do they not notice the irony ?

all africa

Encylopedia of Bawdy Song. all yr favourites
publoshed as broadsides and spoken in low whispers, these provide a new history of sexual and gender mores, and indicate what was thought about a number of things.

making light

streaming video of badgers

BADGERS

via fark

Stark, sleek and modern the building at 10 Columbia Circle has acted as a modernist setinal against the arcadia of central park. They are retrofitting it to make it prettier. This upsets me

Grayson Perry won the Turner.
I dont know what i think, aside from YEAH POTTERY.



Chris/Ryan/I were talking about video art, and how much we saw ar galleries and how little moved us, how dull or desperate or boring or retrograde it seemed. Carter might agree.

He's also a Transvestite, and his claire personae dresses in wonderous and strange dresses with embrodeiry that matches the themes of the pots and resembles victorian dolls gone conceptual.

Petronius wrote his Satyricon in 66 AD, just as the glorious Roman Empire was crumbling, where the ideas of order, state control and public virtues were set aside replaced with a late decadence marked by chaos and debauchery. He was in the court of Nero, who rewarded literary success in so far that it did not exceed his own talents. The text of the Satyricon is one that has much to say about the nature of the republic at that time, telling us in a sly way that verges on transparent. It was written with the court in mind, episodic and intended to be preformed. The most obvious of these satires, and the one where much critical thought lies is the Dinner Party sequence, which shows the worst of Rome with a burlesque glee. This is the text that claimed Petronius, and he died soon after, in a dinner party where he slit his wrists and bound them tightly. Every time the guests failed to entertain him, he would loosen the bounds a little. This would be a good metaphor for Petronius in general and this work in general, a deadly serious satire.
Frederico Fellini adapted Satyricon to film between 1968 and 1969, finally releasing it in 1970. He thought that he was dying and he had a nervous breakdown in the middle of filming. This film was also the first he made after he had gained world wide fame and was acclimatizing to the spectacles that world wide fame could bring. When talking about this film, he claimed that he wanted to be in the spirit of the source text, rather then make any claims on literal truth. (Burke, 166). Part of that spirit could be the times. 1968 was an auspicious year in world history, with everything in flux, and the roles of power unsure. The adaptation to the spirit of the work instead of the text meant that he considered what happened in his own frame work, making the text as alive as the times.
Taking these two works together gives us context to talk about many of the issues that grounded Petronius in 66 and Fellini 1300 years later. In analyzing these works, the lenses I find most helpful are class and social breed, the documentary form in fictions and the nature of satire as a political and moral excercise. These texts allow a thorough examination of these lenses, talking about the larger contexts and purposes of the play and the film.
Starting with Class in Petronius is to understand how Nero played the upper classes against the lower. He was a Patrician, with the blood of emperors but did not act that way at all. He was a hero to the common man, because in the crudest sense, he kept them fed and entertained. The whole point of the spectacles that he put on was to make the lowest of the citizenry happy. In John Bishop's Nero the Man and his Legend, he describes how effective this
strategy could be:
"A considerable part of the people of Rome welcomed Nero...
and was frankly skeptical of the allegedly straight laced
properity of the Romans of an older generation." (119)
The problem then, was that Nero was too close to the common citzenry, and did not behave in a way expected of an emperor. This would also be the case in his "slumming", where he dressed himself as a slave, attended brothels and drinking places and looted stores with drunken thugs. This and a tendency to reward himself for acts of literary prowess (for example giving himself all of the laurels in the first Neronia, a poetry contest he founded and named after himself) isolated those in the senate. Being a poet at all, according to Bishop was "on the whole an object not of pride but of disgust" (114)
By even welcoming the pornography of Petronius into court, he brought the ideas of the street into rooms that had never seen them. This was not the clean and rigidly structured language of rhetoric but something else entirely. JP Sullivan explains it well in his Literature and Politics In the Age of Nero, saying that although "No literary minded emperor fails to include a considerable number of his friends among his courtiers", he "cared less about personal insults then most" and "libelous poems were a feature of court life" (154)
Fellini was slightly different when it came to class, not exactly in the court of the greatest power in the world, but respected and admired none the less. This was a time when art film was key, where movies with subtitles were watched with great interest, where immediate transportation and more disposable income made air travel common among the upper and lower classes, and where radical politics were combined with sexual freedom, especially among the very rich.
Fellini was especially rewarded for this, making a life style out of Le Dolce Vitae in 1960, and making a star out of Anita Ekberg in 1963's 8 1/2. The movies were shown on most american screens, colleges had film nights where these two films were shown, and the orgy scenes and attractive, almost superfluous nudity of the works would be a portent to the open marriages that seemed a trend in the 1970s.
Fellini saw this kind of sexual decadence in the mid 60s, before his production of the Satyricon, in the infamous New York Disco Electric Circus, he described it thusly:
"its dance floors were aswirl with multicoloured lights, there
were tropical fish, the floors were carpeted with nude bodies
and there were these enormous holes in the wall that had four
five, six pairs of feet, male and female, black and white protruded."
(quoted in Burke's Fellinis Films from Post War to Post Modern,172)
this sort of orgastic sexuality, with its openness to new avenues of discourse, lead many to abandoned other conventions, be it the family or the state. There was a reversal of order coming for Petronius and the Roman Empire as it was assumed the same case would be for the western democracies under Fellini.
Therefore a sense of reversal can be found in both Satyricons. In The dinner party scene in the original text Trimalchio is a country bumpkin playing at the rituals of the very rich, something that could not happen in really life. But if you reverse those scenes, and have an emperor playing at being poor, treating himself to common whores and cheap beer it would not lose it's satiric qualities. Petronius then preforms a double reversal, the more common one of the fool becoming a king and then a subtextual one, where in a shadow place the king becomes the fool. The shadow is dark however, because this was already occurring.
In Fellini it is much less clear. However there are two things that could mark this film as a reversal. The first is the production design and the second are the actors. In the production design of this film is deeply colourful and over the top, almost reaching camp porportions. The swirling colours, the odd camera angles, and the painterly aspects of the sets, all look like they belong in 1968 and not 66, by making aesthetic quotes of common themes in the design of that period, he is claiming a contemporary place for a modern text.
The second reversal is one of cast. One of the alternate titles for the film was the degenerates ,and Fellini's cast is filled with attractive and sexualized youngsters, with an older Nero voyeuristically looking on, trying to recapture the potency of youth. The actors that he chose were mostly untested, with credentials in exploitation or B Films. For example, Martin Finder, who played Encolpio's previous two credits were for 1962's The Year of the Sex Olympics and 1961's The Bone Grinder. This flip from low art to high art works as a reversal as radical as Tremalichio assuming power over the Dinner Party.
These reversals work in a very specific way, as textual signifiers that things have changed, the old order has been surplanted and a new order will reign, sometimes for the length of a performance and sometimes for much longer. The Satyricon of Petronius was intended to be a larger social critique, one which historian Emily Gowers discusses in The Loaded Table:Representations of Food in Roman Culture.


Petronius's dinner party is the smug wallowing
of an aristocrat, who wipes bodily fluids and
the product of a parasitic culture off on to the freed
men beneath him. (31)

This view of Petronius is in line with Roman Satire, which began traditions that still hold today. The require a reversal of values, with the gluttony of the Dinner Party being a mockery of Roman Values of temperance and restraint. With the conduct of a lower man towards those with higher status a reversal of strict status lines and honour between those lines, if this honour is lost then order is lost and chaos ensues.
Neros ignoring of these codes, and ignoring of the Patricians in general, is more decadent then the sexual and religious breaks. But a glutton is not a good solider, he does not deny pleasure for the sake of the republic, he puts himself above the larger whole. Rome required allegiance to an ideal about place, and of the symbols of that place. It was collective. On the opposite end, Neros infatuation with young boys for longer then teaching periods was viewed as perverse. To have a wife, was to have children, and with luck boys. To have boys was to carry on citizenship.
In the first scenes of the dinner party (15;26-28), the lack of procreative energy was shown, first in he playing ball with boys, a silly game where all were equal. There was no attempt at teaching and no indication that these boys were sons. In fact it seemed like all of the people in those scenes were the same age. Second was the mention of two eunuchs, who's lack of testicles make them servile, domestic and weak. The only men that have appeared in the text so far are the old, the infirm and the very young. There are no good examples of Roman virility.

If Petronius is a satire of Roman values, then Fellini could be considered a satire of his time, especially the year 1968, which had a huge variety of events that related to how the world saw itself. This was the year where students chose violent protest in Germany (The Badher Mienhoff Gang), France (The Situationists led general strikes in May) and America (Chicago Democratic National Convention, in August). In Two major American liberal leaders were assassinated (Martin Luther King Jr and Robert Kennedy). The colonial war that the americans inherited from the French has major setbacks (The Tet Offensive.) and the Vatican called the first council of Bishops since the Council of Trent.
Although Fellini claimed that the only reason why he did this movie was money, his politically aware stance and his new found fame put him in the middle of many of these fights. As an Italian, the Catholic Church was a state church, and these councils were tearing apart
many of the faithful in Italy. As a leftist he had to chose between a more radical anarcho-communist shift, found in the actions in Paris, Berlin and Chicago, and a Ghandian approach which seemed to be lost in the deaths of the two men who most prominently led it, and he had to decide who his art served. This was the time of his greatest public success, and there was a need for him to give the world an opinion about where exactly he stood.
The Satyricon is full of wholes, through censorship and neglect from Christian scholars, huge holes have appeared in the text. It is fractured and so any text that is adapted from it will become fractured. But Burke quotes Fellini about this text, and he makes the accidental lucane deliberate:
"The missing parts, that is, the blanks between
one episode and the next...that buisness of
fragments really fascinated me" (167)
the satire of Fellini then is a satire of the world at large, it is what happens when the world falls apart and to mock it must also be to document it.
That documentary energy is something that marks both Fellini and Nero. Part of it is that to get the tone and content of what you are satirizing right means a close reading of the texts nuances. The authour needs to know not only what the text says directly, but what it says indirectly and what goes unsaid because of audience assumptions. Both Satyricons do both well.
To document is not to record, these are not intended to be direct transcriptions of the time, but symbolic recreations of what is happening in the world at large. Although both Petronius and Fellini did that sort of reportage. Petronius, as his last act, was to record all of Nero's sexual perversions and who they were fulfilled with. Fellini did something much less exciting in the documentary Ginger and Fred, which was a visual essay on gender and sex roles using the dancers as example.
There were facts in the works though. Using Michael Grave's biography as example, he tells us that Nero "was not a great eater or an exceptional drinker" but that the "appurtences of his meals were tremendously luxurious" (195), and then spends the rest of the page telling us exactly how wasteful Nero was. Among them were the facts that he never wore the same robe twice , his cups came from Persia and were said to posses a delicate scent and he used an emerald as an eye glass to watch gladiators. Compare this with Tromachio's silver chamber pots (15,26); the linen towels and the robes of finest wool (15, 28), the description of the household altar in 15,30 and the description of the dining clothes being of genuine Tyriaian purple a little later in that section.
The documentary energy in Fellini is one of authenticity of emotion and experience.
Mentioning the chaos of the world is to underestimate exactly what was happening. Not only was he part of a world that respected "art films". He was also part of an academic circle that was calling for inner knowledge as guideline towards behaviour (the surrealists), for the persons biography to be as legitimate as history (the neo realists), the reclaiming of spectacle as a subversive tool (Guy Debord), the conflation of high and low (The New Wave), the loosening of bourgeois sensibilities of marriage and sex (Free Love), the calling for the overthrow of the government and for the lack of order (Weather Underground, Black Panthers, Bader Mienhoff). Everything was falling apart around him, both aesthetically and physically. The creation of a narrative that moved away from a leads to b leads to z, was a way to reflect the reality of that circumstance. His choice of Satyricon matched all of what was surrounding him, and amplified it into art.
Remember though, that neither of these were really revolutionaries, and in many ways these documents were meant for very specific audiences. Both authours of these texts were not radicals, calling for the blood of kings and presidents. Petronius was an elite, who made entertainments for the court and when dishonour came to him, he followed with a proper Roman stoic suicide. Fellini made art films for those who watched them, even the radicals from that time often came from upper class families. He made films of the decadent rich, sometimes to mock them, sometimes because he wanted to be them, but he did not buy into the whole package like some of his companions. He wa nothing like Goddard, who decided Maoist film made sense, and from the mid 60s to the late 70s created impenetrable agitprop for the next revolution.
This also explains the other role of satire, namely a nostalgic looking back at what once was. Petronius and Fellini can afford to be nostalgic, they can imagine the past as some glorious golden age because they do not have to toil the fields or work in the grocery store. Brecht's maxim "first bread, then ethics" applies here, if your thoughts during the day surround where to eat or where to sleep, then the problems with the nature of the system are secondary. But both of these authours lived in extreme times, and that extremism radiated from the sources of power as much as it did from the edges."
There are problems that occurs from this point, and they are expanded by EJB Charelswhite in Latin Satire: The Structure of Persuasion: "Nero's day was one of clearly articulated extremes; both Horace's inquires and Juvenals pathos orientated discourses , would find no audience there." (154), he later goes on to say that there is a lack of moralism in Petronius's work, and that makes him an entertainer and not a satirist. Petronius identifies the problems of the emperor's, catalogues the excesses and notes the more absurd elements of life with Nero, but in many ways his work seems taxonomic, even his last act was an act of taxonomy. In Chareslwhite's view the only way you can be a moralist is to have easily absorbed lessons at the end of every chapter, and if it gets extreme enough, those morals cannot be understood so they barely count. However there is a barely disguised disgust to the work of Petronius, somewhere between a disbelief and a sadness for the old republic. The cataloguing is an almost neutral way of pointing to a moral of temperance.
Fellini is a bit more difficult to unpack, being caught between two forces, namely Hollywood and the European Art Tradition. They both have been said to preserve the same values, namely the struggle between individual freedoms and collective need. The Americans resolve this through the fraternity of westerns and the comraderie of war films, and the romantic comedies where women learn to be married. The rise of the European film added an anti hero who refused to bend. What is Breathless but an ideologically correct rereading of The Treasures of the Serria Madre ? Fellini's problem was a distrust of both methods, and his films then are a narrow negotiation between the individual and the collective, in Satyricon, the fracturing occurs when the collective will becomes too skewed, too perverse, too cruel or just not functional. It is not a satire then and not really the taxonomy of Petronius, but something new.






That newness is one that makes reading of Petronius through Fellini useful. We cannot know what Petronius truly intended, and to write about him is to write with the knowledge of the ravages of time in the front of your mind. When you say that there is no real allegory or moral in the text, the reader has to say, but there may be, and a monk who was careless or censorious could have clipped it out. Fellini is different, it is a whole text intended to be fractionary and fragmentary. It may not lie to us, but it does not tell the truth either. Gaps placed in a work are still gaps, especially if the person who cut it refuses to tell the viewer the context or content that may or may not be there. Both of these caveats make the work difficult to write about, and requires a wider net.
I wrote this essay assuming that Fellini was keyed into 1968, because everyone else was. I assumed that the fragments of the work were fragments a larger fragmentation of society because my reading told me that was a reasonable extrapolation. Fellini is not Passolini, in that he was not loyal to reflecting textual accuracy on screen. This was among his few adaptations and he split it apart to see what was inside. A biographical reading would assume that the fracturing was about his nervous breakdown. A textual reading would point out the gaps in the source text. Both of these are valid, but I think they underestimate the complexity of his vision.
The Satyricon is about Nero. The Satyricon is about the world corrupt and on verge of destruction, the Satyricon is an entertainment and pornography, and a classic work of Roman Satire, and a reflection of a courtiers idle. It is a work that is as slippery as a live salmon,
grasp it and it will wriggle out of your hand, but that is the joy of the work, it teaches flexibility.

Sucide Bombing is a meme that has spread hard and fast in the last few months, the most recent attack featured Chechans and a train "between the towns of Mineralniye Vody and Kislovodsk." Tactically Sucide bombing is wise, there are a few casulties, but yr issue gets front play on the news papers. The long range moral, social and political consquences have not been adressed, though.

The Maciejowski Bible a lush, gothic illustrative text, from ca 1250 and paris. One of the most heartrending in its beauty.

the geometry of The Tower of Babel, and what it tells us about cathederal building, The Bloody violence in The Rescuing of Lot is like something out of Chanson Roland, The hanging of the King of Hai remarks on executions public spectacle..etc, etc

good blog entry on where exactly pound fits among the other poets, with a bent towards french symbolists

Youve seen this everywhere, but there is something esp. cruel about making a childs mother obscene, and immoral.

via uffish, mefi

Michael Tarintino was one of those rare currators who viewed a work in its whole context, and did not diffentrate between the high and low, his show on Hitchcock (called Nortious) featured sculpture, painting, drawing, installation and print making but also props, posters, and other items related to the films production. In Enclosed and Enchanted he took the english garden and reintroduced it to nature.

Anqays, brilliant and kind man, has died at 55

Small group of fundies tries to make history teacher Gary Cole avoid teaching about non christian civilations.

He views this as ridiculous, and sues.

via fark.

Henry Kissenger, the dark knight of the American Empire, bringing peace at the edge of an icbm, told Navy Adm. César Augusto Guzzetti of Argentina that he "would like them to suceed" in a rather ugly dirty war ca. 1970.

What did Suceed mean ? the "disappearence" of 30, 000 citizens (that word has always chilled me, because it is so ambigous, we can assume death but never prove it. )

we can add this to war crimes he has been accused of in east timor, laos, camdoia, vietnam, chile, and bangladesh

body and soul

1.7 million children in Uganda are AIDS Orphans mefi

The US Central Intelligence Agency has acknowledged it "lacked specific information" about alleged Iraqi weapons of mass destruction when it compiled an intelligence estimate last year that served to justify the US-led invasion of Iraq

i think that we have killed thousands of guessing directed by certain economics, we are in orwells world of preptual war butressed with double speak.
via yahoo.

Ayn Rand Dating Service The world is absurd.

mefi

A good article on the use of anti semetic dialectic in discourse surrounding isreal is found here

ITs international AIDS day,

in the words of mother jones:
pray for the dead and fight like hell for the living.