Schlock, at its finest, is where bad taste becomes great art. Schlock is music that subjugates all other values to brute emotional impact; it aims to overwhelm, to body-slam the senses, to deliver catharsis like a linebacker delivers a clothesline tackle. The qualities traditionally prized by music critics and other listeners of discerning taste — sophistication, subtlety, wit, irony, originality, “experimentation” — have no place in schlock. Schlock is extravagant, grandiose, sentimental, with an unshakable faith in the crudest melodrama, the biggest statements, the most timeworn tropes and most overwrought gestures

Jody Rosen

neighbours

it had profound homnophobia

but in ways that were almost closeted

and an anger against women

sort of like women are furniture, or ruin yr adoloscent fun

so the only way to fix that is to spend time with men

which flirts with queerness in a way

that allows for one to pretend for pleasure

and then be punished when the pleasure goes too far

angry, ugly, vicisous movie

profoundly distrubed queer writers are praising it

John Rolfe's book of vintage drawings of logos and signs is kind of a graveyard of pre-tatcher nationalism and is a beautiful example of the haunting of capital in ordinary material culture.

cold war  satelites tell us about ancient mid east historical sites

vintage photos of the 70s  computer labs

The Chronicle of Higher Educaiton tells of how oral history nd other archival work into the troubles in ireland have provided legal consquences, including murder charges against former Sein Fein members who are now part of parliment.

NFB streams the entire Introducing Leonard Cohen, from 1965.


i have watched this man work thru his mug collection on camera for 8 minutes like 10 times, its incredibly southing.

15 unproduced hitchcock flims

more informaiton about jpii and his covering up of the sex abuse crisis

cops still think they have everyones best interest in mind, shocked when agit prop campaigns backfire.

on the problems perserving residental and vernacular modernism, a dallas case study.

Chris Molophany on the charts  is one of the most delightful, tight work on what it music means now, this is his emp talk. and him in conversation with s/fj about how to fix the r and b charts


Elvis Costello in Nashville, a mid 80s bbc doc.

Didion interview  thanks to the believer

as opposed to most abandoned  site porn, Warren Kirks photos of suburban Melbourne, are small intimate, and profoundly respectufl.

Fantastic Obit  for Billy Frank Jr, one of the first legal agitators for native fishing rights, here in Salmon in sattle.

long interview with Thelma Schoonmaker.

From Lynne Cohen's Late work in Venice as an RIP 

five points

a) ongoing western magical tradition and occult socities working in favour of that instinct (Rosy Cross' document Chemical Wedding...from 1616, and the idea of a chemical merriage as an active symbol of this)
b) traditions from the 16th century onward (eg Enochian magic was easily synthesised with other magical elements of the order because it was originally derrived from these same elements...icluding cabala, heremticism, astrology, alchemy and natural magic) being synthetic, so movements like Order of the Golden Dawn became kind of metasyntethtic. (for example, Westcott, one of the founders of the ORder of the Golden DAwn, talked about Securalism, Cabalsitic, Hermetic, Alechemial and Roschian practice) (or the order of the golden dawn a combo of heremticism, neoplat, cabala, demonic/natural)  (see also the translations of the Agrippa ) also perhaps the intersections of pagan and cabalistic texts, not nessc. as christian, but including something else The canon OGD talught to initaites, for example: "before the admission to the Zectau grade, the neophye must learn the names and achlemical symbols and the four elemnets, the names of astrological symbols, and elements atruibuited to them, of the twelve zodiac signs, the names charactersand (ritual purpose) of the 22nd letters of the herbrew alphaet, the ten serphaie, etc) (33) Also the cabalistic replaces of words n xian prayers, use of hindu language in words like aum, also (and this might be a bit more Blavastsqkesque, nthough mentioned in less chapter, the inclusion of yoga) Also all the egyption borrowing--Freeamsonry esp. (see Assman) The possiblity of Masonry as Polythesitc or Pagan.
c) occasionaly more open (see Blavastky or Kingsfold's rship to women, or how common it was in lower and upper classes) See McacEnzie's Royal MAsonic Cycopledia of 1877, which while perhaps a bit debunked as a masonic text, was considered more than useful in how it discussed other groups) Dysons critique of Bretts MAgus
d) spats (about ritual, women, leadership, who they are absorbing) (see the differences in how theophists practiced ritual much less than the hermetists) (westcott less of a ritualist) free vs speculative masons RoX refusal of spiritualism
e) loose boundries (inventon of tradition, inclusion of fiction (see Buwler-Lytton), the cabala/pagan shit) also possiblity of collective


questions
urania
sufferage
h rider haggard
masonry and catholiism
working class
FRazer
crowley and purposeful obsfucation




random thots
caballa makes magic approite (24)


four rituals of the golden danwn
a) official rituals
b) the equavelent of cathchesis ot progress thru levels
c) Mcgregopr, et al's creative work (founder)
d) "extranous exampels of the members activeities (27)

nullifcation of the nesscessity of a second text

Donnie Darko, Bully, Gummo, Mysterious Skin, Blair Witch, Election, Jaw Breaker, Y Tu Mama Tambien, Apt Pupil, Hedwig, Spring Breakers, Funny Games, Happiness, The Rules of Attraction, American Psycho, Boys Don’t Cry, Velvet Goldmine, Fight Club, Bad Santa, Scream, The Ice Storm, Boogie Nights, Igby Goes Down, Rushmore, Die Mommy Die, Last Days of Disco, AI, Lost Highway, 28 Days Later, Pan’s Labyrinth, District 9, Capturing the Friedmans

In his letter to Alig, just now after prision, James St James writes a list of movies he has to say. This is the new cult canon kids. i want to write more about this, but i cannot think of a movie i would subtract to tis list, and only a few i would add. 

twelve things i am thinking about post emp:

a) ccm, mumford, larry norman, xian hipness (thanks Jewly Hight and Josh Langhoff) (thinking maybe a 33.3 on Amy Grant---ever since Rae Spoon I have thot an enourmous amount of Amy Grant as a pop music gateway drug)
b) the mutability of class (thanks well everyone)
c) reutning western to country and western, and who exactly is working class anymore (Thanks Ann Powers, Alfred Soto Tom Smucker)
d) the intersections of rezhop and noretona country (thanks Josh Langhoff and the entire regional panel)
e) Faure's Requiem (Thank Carl Wilson) and whether religious xtc is a useful critical category in pop)
f) What50s style sophistication means as an aesthetic and paedological category (Thanks Barry Shank)
g) The radical potential(s) of pleasure (well everyone)
h) How digital media functions versus analog media vis a vis preservation (ThanksAndy Zax)
h) bro country Jody Rosen, Thomas Inskeep Alfred, Ann, Carl, Josh, and well anyone)
i) How I don't understand straight negotions of adultery (the song Me and Mrs Jones)
j) intersectionality as an aesthetic of overlapping filigrees (Me'Shell at the keynote)
k) boarding schools and failures to form masculinity Dub Dob Dee

also seattle is a paradise of ciders, i had cider like three times a day--a smoked cider, a chery cider, a pear cider, dry ciders, sweet ciders, oh thank you jesus

op ten things i saw at the Seattle art museum

1) Al Held's Last Series from 1964-1966, maybe two dozen, small and medium size paintings, with bright house painted colours, over paintings, awkard shapes, attempting to soften hard edge, and harden lyricism, with its size, and its slight attiude of instiability or formal offness, prefigures heliman and silliman.
2) Remington Bronzes (they swerve and swagger)
3) dozens of objects of messian, and of chinese white ware, the chinese white ware made to look like messian, the messian made to look like work from china, 18th century global trade routes, and the role of the exotic in counissuership, placed together in an incredibly cloer gesture
4) This medium sized persian painting, of interlocking rooms, with a figure in each room, the spaces are at oblique angles, and a dual line of black and gold between them, negotiates the schematics of how to map place in a rigious composition.
5) Noland's Relic from 1969. a painting maybe a meter by two meters, tiny by noland's standars, the top 30 cm and the bottom 30 cms stripes, in jewel tones--gold, cobalt, hot pink, orange, citron, and the middle a dusty apricot. the control of pictoral space seems new. also, in the top 30 cm a line of dunnish brown that i thought was natural canvas, but was actually painted, in an inside baseball guesture of intimate trompe d'oilel.
6) Frankenthaler Hold, 1974. most of this canvas is empty, a large scrabbled line near the middle, and a floatinng rectangle, shading an interior sqaure. underneath all of this, is a unsteady curve. The colours are weird and sort of ugly, but the true genius of Frankenthaler is how to layer paint thru a set of negotions between the oblique and the transparent..this is a paticualrlly good example of this.
7) a coast salish cedar blanket which was just a grid, within a larger grid.
8) two haida skull masks.
9) The white scarf of Leon Delafosse in their only Sergent on view.
10) that much of their (large) african masks were displayed in ritual garments.

three things i liked at the seattle sculpture park
a) tony smith's stinger--large, but lying low on the ground, nestled in a grove, it has this weird, monolithic energy, in a kitsch sf sense, managing to be unnerving and v. much of its time and place.
b) sol lewitts large wall drawings
c) a nevelson that was of welded steal, not the usual assembelege

hooray, hooray, the first of may
outdoor fucking begins today