‘Paul Laffoley was born into an Irish Catholic family in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1940. He spoke his first word, “Constantinople,” at six months, then remained silent until the age of four (having been diagnosed as slightly autistic), when he began to draw and paint. In his senior year at Brown University, he was given eight electric-shock treatments. He was dismissed from the Harvard Graduate School of Design, but managed to apprentice with the sculptor Mirko Baseldella, before going to New York to apprentice with the visionary architect Frederick Kiesler. In 1968 he moved into an eighteen- by thirty-foot utility room to found a one-man “think tank” and creative unit called the Boston Visionary Cell.
‘Laffoley supports himself with a job at the Boston Museum of Science, returning to the BVC not only to eat and sleep but to work on multimedia renderings of his visions of alternative futures and complex realities.
‘During a routine CAT-scan of his head in 1992, a miniature metallic implant, 3/8 of an inch long, was discovered in the occipital lobe of his brain, near the pineal gland. Local M.U.F.O.N. investigators declared it to be an alien nanotechnological laboratory. He has come to believe that the “implant” is extraterrestrial in origin and is the main motivation behind his ideas and theories.
‘As an architect, Laffoley worked for 18 months on design for the World Trade Center Tower II. As a painter, his work is usually classified as visionary art or outsider art. Most of Laffoley’s pieces are painted on large canvases and combine words and imagery to depict a spiritual architecture of explanation, tackling concepts like dimensionality, time travel through hacking relativity, connecting conceptual threads shared by philosophers through the millennia, and theories about the cosmic origins of mankind.’ — Paul Laffoley Official Website
Further
Paul Laffoley Official Website
Laffoley’s Odyssey: Short Films
Paul Laffoley @ myspace
Paul Laffoley posters & explanations
Paul Laffoley: Chasing Napoleon
Paul Laffoley on HP Lovecraft and the nature of evil
Paul Laffoley @ DATAISNATURE
Video: Infinity Factor: Paul Laffoley
Media
Lafolley’s Odyssey (6:09)
Paul Laffoley discusses ‘The Black White Hole’ (3:59)
Paul Laffoley slide show (9:57)
In the spotlight
The Parturient Blessed Morality of Physiological Dimensionality: Aleph-Null Number (2004)
The artist explains:
Bernard Riemann [ 1826-1866 ] student of Carl Friedrich Gauss [ 1777-1855 ] developed what we currently call dimensionality. Since dimensionality in the generic sense means the range over which, or to the degree to which any entification manifests itself, it often became further defined as a series contextual propositions. In other words it is a language which Ludwig Wittgenstein [1889-1951] considered a weltanschuung or worldview, an idea that was eventually fleshed out by Benjamin Lee Whorf. But these ideas have kept dimensionality well within the scope of practical science in which one paradigm becomes either parasitic to or subsumptive of all other paradigms.
The person who moved dimensionality away from the iron grip of traditional mathematics and back to the Ancient Greek concept of Fate, was Georg Cantor [1845-1918], who posing as a mathematician [ a scientist who abhors the concept of infinity in its abstract and concrete manifestations], sought the realm of actual Absolute Infinity – the Aleph-Null Number. This was his search for the living presence of the number of elements in the set of all integers which is the smallest transfinite cardinal number, which goes beyond or surpasses any finite number, group or magnitude.
What Cantor was doing was following the learning process of The Kabbalah, which is a search for God from a base of total materialistic skepticism. One of Cantor’s followers, Kurt Gödel [1909-1963] actually attempted to devise a mathematical proof of the existence of God.
This all leads to the idea that consciousness is embedded within the nature of dimensionality, and that consciousness can not be defined totally as we experience it in our fourth dimensional realm of Time-Solvoid by projecting our definition of consciousness, learned from experience, onto other more comprehensive and less comprehensive realms.
Consciousness presents itself, therefore, as a family of forms – an octave of in
telligence many aspects of which can not be accessed by our human intelligence. But the fact that analogy-cum-metaphor is the operation of the imagination means, even if the transfer of the mind is never complete, that aliveness and deadness are terms relative to a dimensional realm.
Beyond the human realm of Time-Solvoid, the existence and nature of consciousness is often designated as God , gods, demigods, Demons divas, Angels ,souls, heroes , etc. While accepted as part of nature, these entities are rarely understood.
Below or less comprehensive than the human realm, consciousness in the form of ghosts, apparitions , shadows or hallucinations are just as distant from human consciousness as members of the so-called divine realm. But the real difference is that most humans feel obviously and naturally superior to these entities. This feeling is often translated into propositions which state that these beings are without any kind of consciousness, and that the attribution of consciousness to them , is what gave rise to the existence of superstition prior to the rise of experimental science. A science that tried, on the one hand, to discover their true nature, and on the other hand, to dismiss their existence as flim-flam.
The pre-scientific Ancient Egyptian Civilization accepted shadows as having consciousness. Of the nine parts of the Egyptian personality, two were about the shadow. The Khaibit (the shadow of the physical body) which never leaves the carcass, and The Ka (the doppelganger) the shadow of the soul that moves freely about the Earth and the stars are interpreted as phenomena such as lucid dreaming or the out-of-the-body-experience in terms of human perception.
While both forms of the shadow are ultimately the same, the dynamic and static forms demonstrate the form of Life-Death of the Shadow.
In today’s world-view, very few people believe that shadows possess a form of consciousness, let alone believe that a human can communicate with one. To most people the shadow is simply the result of solid objects in space blocking the rays of a light source and that is it.
The association of light with consciousness has a history lost in time. But closer to our time James Clerk Maxwell [1831-1879] discovered in 1856 the relation between light and electricity which led eventually to the theory of the electromagnetic spectrum which developed in the early 1930’s. From about 1875 on, the Occult vision of dimensionality, akin to the Pythagorean musical scale of infinite extent, was introduced and supported by Maxwell’s discovery.
Degrees of consciousness, from almost blinding light to almost total darkness, provide the metaphor for Good to Evil, The Divine to The Demonic, Life to Death, all as degrees of embodiment. These are the aspects of the entire electromagnetic spectrum, which include what we call visible light –a very small portion of the spectrum. Most of the spectrum is undetectable by our unaided senses, but nevertheless, it contains octaves of energy which separate themselves into individual dimensions.
Today so-called “physical light” is a metaphor the position of human consciousness within the total dimensional system for two reasons:
(1) “Physical light” always has its origin in the Past, whether or not that origin is a star or a candle;
(2) The “brilliance” that we associate with light exists in Nature only in the minds of intelligent conscious life-forms, and is not inherent in the non-conscious aspects of Nature. The photons which deliver energy to waiting retinae do not “carry” light. If it was the case that they do, the entire Universe would be “lit up” all of the time in an isotropic and homogeneous manner, and there would be no “darkness” in the Sky.
The symbol for the velocity light has been in our contemporary world the letter “C” meaning 299,796 + or – 4 km./ sec. in a vacuum near the Earth , or in the open air. But now astrophysicists are discovering there is a type of space which can not be monitored by any aspects of the electromagnetic spectrum. This is the space where an old star goes when it explodes and dies. This space is distinct from the space of a Black Hole, only in the sense that the Black Hole space is an infinitesimal point of that , space infinite in extent, which acts as the background energy plenum of the Universe.
On Earth these same astrophysicists have discovered a way of slowing down the speed of light to 17 mph by changes of media. They expect very soon to have light to travel at 4 mph. Then everyone will be able to interact directly with light, even the blind , because the energy of the electromagnetic spectrum travels in the human brain at 700 mph.
According to Philip Gibbs in an article entitled: “The Symbol For The Speed Of Light ? “, he states : “…, it is possible that its use persisted because “C” could stand for “celeritas” and had therefore become a conventional symbol for speed. We can not tell for sure how Drude, Lorentz, Planck or Einstein thought about their notation, so there can be no definitive answer for what it stood for then. The only logical answer is that when you use the symbol “C”, it stands for whatever possibility you prefer “.
While there are many physicists who propose an identification between light and consciousness by means of formulae that rival the simplicity and power of Einstein’s famous E = Mc². I prefer, therefore, to use “C’ to stand for consciousness.
The Day I Met Paul Laffoley
by Jason Louv
Shortly after returning to the States, I was visiting my college girlfriend and her family in Boston. Our relationship hadn’t exactly stood the test of a year long distance—whereas I had left Santa Cruz, California as a stoner literature student into The Smiths, veganism and the occult, I had returned as some kind of Psychedelic Warlord Avatar. My eyes were hollowed out by a year of nonstop chaos ritual and months spent drifting among the Untouchables and dead bodies in the East, and I was holding a book contract, a mandate from Genesis P-Orridge to enlighten the young, and a slowly escalating case of paranoid psychosis.
In such a situation, I did the only reasonable thing: Go shopping, or, rather, follow my college girlfriend around while she did her shopping, all the while wondering what the f*** had happened to me.
It was on this fateful consumer outing that I thankfully became SOOOOOO bored waiting for the girlfriend to finish at H&M in downtown Boston that I suddenly had the impulse to leave the store and buy a $3 hotdog from a cart vendor on the other side of the street.
No sooner had I bought said hotdog and turned back towards H&M did Paul Laffoley cross the road.
My brain reeled for a moment before I leapt into action and approached.
“Excuse me, I don’t want to bother you, but are you Paul Laffoley?”
“Why, yes! Yes I am!” he said, staring up at me through round coke-bottle glasses, apparently shocked that somebody had recognized him.
He proceeded to excitedly drag my girlfriend and I to his studio, a tiny one-room flat he had dubbed the Boston Visionary Cell, which was only a block away. The area was absolutely packed with books, from floor to ceiling, covering every available bit of wall space, with his paintings leaned against them, and architectural diagrams rolled into scrolls everywhere.
Paul proceeded to download cosmic information at us for the next four hours. I wish to god that I had a tape of everything that he said, because it went by so fast that I could only process maybe one percent of what he was saying. He ranged across his architecture career, his hero Antoni Gaudi, the occult and ten thousand other topics. Laffoley showed us his plan for the new version of the World Trade Center (which he had submitted to the city, but which had been turned down!) that would be built to look like one of Gaudi’s original sketches for the first WTC. I mean literally like a sketch, too, complete with steel girders in place to represent the graph paper that Gaudi had drawn his original version on. At the top of this new WTC would be a ball with cedar trees growing out of it at all angles, like a chaostar; Cedars, Paul explained, were traditionally associated with death, and would absorb and transmute the “thanatopic” energy left over from 9/11.
He proceeded from this remarkable display to telling us how he had recently had a leg removed. While in the hospital after the amputation, he had experienced “astral mountain lions” coming to take the astral double of the severed leg, presumably to eat. In their honor, and as a wry turn-about, he had commissioned an artificial leg made from a mountain lion’s leg and foot, which he said he would use on occasion. While I was working hard to process this, he offered to read our palms (Really? I thought)—my life line, he said, was remarkably long, though my girlfriend’s was short.
“That’s OK,” he said with a goofy grin. “We can just punch that up with a razor…”
We both laughed nervously.
Paul also answered my questions about magick, in ways that I’m still trying to understand. I asked him if I could correspond with him on the subject, and he agreed—which I never followed through on, to my own great loss. He was also kind enough to provide the cover for my first book, Generation Hex, which is a detail from his 1978 painting The Metatron.
That day, I felt we had met a being from a completely different dimension, a friendly alien who had come into our reality to evolve our understanding of the universe we live in, and to simply break our false categorical distinctions between science, spirituality, architecture and literally everything else.
Works
‘Mind Physics: The Burning of Samsara’ (1967)
‘Homage to the Black Star of Perfection’ (1965)
GAUDEAMUS IGITUR HEAVENWARD TO OUTER SPACE: THE FUTURE (2001)
The Living Klein Bottle House of Time (1976)
Magical Man (1969)
Life And Death Of Elvis Presley (1988)
‘Geochronmechane: The Time Machine from the Earth’ (1990)
‘THE QUEST FOR THE VISION OF THE JUST WORLD’ (1976)
‘The Solitron’ (1998)
‘Pickman’s Mephitic Models’ (2004)
‘The Living Klein Bottle House of Time’ (1978)
‘Alchemy: The Telenomic Process of the Universe’ (1973)
‘The Number Dream’ (1968)
‘Dimensionality’ (1992)
‘The Future: Architecture Will Become Plant-Forms’ (1974)
‘Geochronmechane: The Time Machine from The Earth’ (2006)
‘The Kali-Yuga: The End of the Universe at 424826 A.D.’ (1965)
‘Homage to Kiesler’ (1968)
‘The Fetal Dream of Life Into Death’ (2001-2)
‘The Visionary Point’ (1970)
‘The Skull of Plotinus’ (2001)
‘Mel’s Hole’ (2006 – 2008)
‘Dante’s Inferno’ (2000)
‘The Renovatio Mundi’ (1977)
‘True Liberation’ (1967)
‘The Alchemy of Breathing’ (1992)
‘The Fourth Living Creature’ (1975)
‘The Sexuality of Robots’ (2009)
‘The Flower of Evil’ (1971)
ALICE PLEASANCE LIDDELL (1968)
RIP Paul Laffoley (1940 – 2015)
*
p.s. RIP Tom Robbins, Walter Robinson. ** jay, Hi! I saw some of the first season of ‘White Lotus’ when I was visiting LA and quite liked it, and I saw a few episodes from the second season and thought the show had run out of gas. But I don’t know, and I don’t know recent TV much at all. You’re in Paris! Wow. Let me know if you want to meet up for a coffee or anything. Recommendations: I always recommend The Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature in the Marais, which is possibly my favorite thing in Paris. The 10th arr., especially After8 Books, nearby Rue du Faubourg-Saint-Denis, my favorite street in Paris, and the area around the canal. Butte Chaumont if you like parks. I could go on. Anyway, would be happy to see you while you’re here but only if that rings a bell. Have big fun. Apologies for the moist, chilly skies. ** Chris Kelso, We storyboard our films. It helps a lot, even if you end up diverging from them on set. I’ll check those YouTubers and the Seabrook book. Very intriguing. And I’ll go check my email, thanks! ** James, Hi. I’ve had a few friends who were teenaged actors. One of them grew up to be really famous and respected, and the rest kind of faded out and who knows. Visconti does the best sudden zooms. Mulhouse seems to be out of print, which is so ridiculous. Typewriters had their charms, but they were mostly a laborious hassle. I do not miss Liquid Paper, let’s just put it that way. A good American biscuit is fantastic. Like a holy unsugared marriage between a scone and a croissant. Biscuits and grits, yum. Thanks for inputting my stuff into your eyeballs and hopefully deeper. ** Steeqhen, Hey is universal, hey is nice. Wow, you sound internally intense, that’s cool, I’m envious. I think celebrity pop is kind of interesting because of the flyaway branding component, but I prefer the perfectly constructed pop song where it feels like the songwriter must have done an intensive study of what a great pop song requires formally and then replicated but personalised their findings. I hope you got the needed draft done and that it sufficiently dazzled its power receiver today. And I remain highly honored. Ace on the upping of your ‘Nosferatu’ take. Everyone, Steeqhen has put his thoughts about Eggers’ ‘Nosferatu’ into words, and they’re titled ‘The Frustration of Egger’s Nosferatu’, and why don’t we all symbolically convene over there and read it together, eh? ** Steve, At the moment my broken tooth is behaving itself, and I’m hoping to avoid a dentist visit, but we’ll see. I hope you got an appointment or you’re feeling surprisingly better or both ideally. I like your song. The Lynch aspect is just the right combo of subtle and inescapable. Everyone, Steve has reviewed Nobuhiko Obayashi’s LONELY HEART for Screen Slate here. ** _Black_Acrylic, Yep, and she fit right into the the 60s teen rebel drug exploitation genre too. ** Uday, Me too. Zac and I are just waiting for the signal and scrambling to add the final touches. The Mimsy moniker has been totally lost, I think, right? Nina Simone is such a genius. A few years back, I came across a video of her singing that banal, terrible song ‘Feelings’, and while I was watching it I thought it was greatest thing I had ever seen in my life. And it probably was. That’s a million (billion?) dollar question you’re asking, and I can’t think of any essays, but there must be solid attempts out there. Great, I’ll go look at my email and check and write back to you. Thank you so much! ** Misanthrope, Night people seem to live fully productive lives. I don’t know how, though. You and Alex will obviously sort out how to be together enough, but that workplace requirement is so thoughtless and moronic, as I don’t need to tell you. It seems like no one at the top is even using their brains these days. Did you get cheesy crust? The only selling point for me with Pizza Hut is cheesy crust, but it’s a goodie. ** Lucas, My broken tooth seems to be just sort of settling down into a relatively quiet life in my mouth so far, but I’m poking it with my tongue occasionally to make sure it’s happy. Awesome about the Xiu Xiu show. Wow, Jamie did ‘Blacks’?! He told me once he would never play that song live again. That’s wild. Obviously cool if your pal can come to Paris with you, Fingers, you know, crossed. ** HaRpEr, Oh, right, archive footage. I think you mentioned that before, and I spaced. That’s such a nice and true Bresson quote. You didn’t sound remotely arrogant, you sounded very pleasingly locked into the work. I would say … let me think … ‘Un Femme Douce’ is my sixth favorite Bresson film. I haven’t watched it since it was restored, and I really want to. I love Celine, or I mean his work. His personal prickishness is no doubt a real problem if he himself has to be the point, but that prickishness fuelled the literary greatness, and I’m not that interested in the whole branding thing. ** Darby☏, Hi, D. Thanks for hitting pause long enough to feed here and me. I’m so sorry about the thing with your friend and the friending difficulties. I won’t be glib and say you’re just too exciting for them, but I did think that. Art fairs, yes, that sounds like a plan. Whimsy is very underrated and too superficially studied, I think. I think you can just say ‘academic’ in that circumstance. Writing quandaries, yes, high five. I’m working on a new film script and those dilemmas are frontal lobe for me at the moment too. Jefferson Airplane rule. Well, until ‘Bark’. Gosh, I have no memory of what kind of stereo system I had. Strange. No memory at all. Maybe someone gave it to me or something. What do you play your stuff on? ** Tyler Ookami, Urgh, okay, ixnay on ‘Companion’. People I know who are into A24 seem to think the director is hot shit, but everyone else I know kind of matches with you. I remember ‘Dig’ being plenty long as it was. I reviewed it when it came out, and I wasn’t all that sold for reasons I don’t remember. I think I remember thinking the film was trying to set BJM as the geniuses and DW as the more trad wannabes or something, and I didn’t think they were all that differentiable quality-wise. Or something. I heard that about Kendrick’s self (?) censorship. I find American football extremely boring, and I don’t really care about the advertisements competition, so … Happy Monday. ** Right. Today my gallery space fills up with the systematic stylings of the artist Paul Laffoley, and that’s your show for today. See you tomorrow.
Now available in North America 
Hi!!
Apologies for the brief absence. I was feeling so burned out that I needed to step away from the internet and people for a bit.
Paul Laffoley’s work is fascinating – just like his mind, based on everything above. Thank you so much for the introduction!
Noted – love won’t torture you with reggae goodies in the future, haha!
The name Sebadoh always makes me think of a death metal band, and for the first few seconds, it’s always so confusing to listen to them, even though I know what to expect. I learned about them through one of your gigs. And I love what you do, Don’t you know that you’re toxic?, Od.
I remember when I first went to art college and we were all struggling to write our artist’s statements. Paul Laffoley’s text above puts our efforts to shame!
Thanks to my friend and DJ colleague Scott, I have discovered a new musical obsession. Vwave is rare Vietnamese New Wave made in California in the 1980s. Unearthed and edited by Dan Nguyen (Demonslayer), none of this is available on vinyl but there is an example of it here. A short documentary is also here. Give me a chance to do some research and I may even do a post for this blog.
Dennis, Yeah, this whole return to office thing is moronic. They were hoping for 5 to 10% to resign with the buyout offer. It’s only been 3% so far and almost all of those are people about to retire anyway. I expect mass layoffs later this year.
Alex and I will work it out, yeah.
I was thinking about this last night, and I’ve read so much stuff about the highest functioning people waking up at 4 a.m. and getting shit done. Seems it’s a thing. Hmm.
We didn’t get Pizza Hut. We got Chinese food instead, and it was glorious.
I seem to get a lot of synchronicity, and sometimes it comes up in your post’s comments. Like: “All the Devils Are Here.” A phrase I know very well; I’ve taught The Tempest maybe 20 times. But recently, it keeps popping up–Chris Kelso mentioned David Seabrook’s book, which I noted once when it came up when I was looking up stuff about Margate. (I love Margate.) (I get a lot of stuff on Kindle and read in bed.) Then about 20 commentator types have found it irresistible as a title for pieces on the depradations of the regime here. (Sometimes I think they’re literal devils. It’s more than a little uncanny how DJT fits the prophecies of the antichrist. This is why I can’t do drugs. I’m about two bong hits away from Paul Laffoley style paranoia.)
And then Nina Simone. Maybe ten days ago we saw Patti LuPone do a memoir-through song show–I’m never sure how much you’re even aware of Broadway divas, though she’s an actor, too, and has a really interesting feisty public persona. She’s the person who saw someone texting while she was on stage, stopped the show, stepped down, and grabbed the person’s phone. Anyway, she had surprises, including singing “Lilac Wine,” which I associate with both Nina and Simone and Tim Buckley (who must, I dunno, I haven’t checked, have done it in homage to her?). So that set me off listening to a lot of Nina Simone this past week, and then she comes up in the blog. So I went to the version of “Feelings” that you mentioned, and yes, it’s incredible, pure Simone, the purest. What an ineffable genius. You know, she was one of the first things Tim Dlugos and I bonded over. Then I came across this weird fact I don’t think I knew, that maybe you do: “lilac wine, sweet and heady,” comes from a Ronald Firbank novel. I’d be hard pressed to think of another song that does.
I mentioned that I was asked for poems for 1.Queer Pride book 2. state of America kind of lefty political poetry antho. They both got back to me within an hour, so either I’m pretty hot stuff or they’re desperate. Unlike the other stuff I’ve had released in the last couple years, these may actually see print and not only digital publication. I’d like to thank all the little people who made this possible, and also the big people, like you.
Working on a Winsor McCay presentation for a June conference. Maybe I did a McCay Day for the old blog? He’s always amazing.
Wow, what an odd coincidence (or perhaps synchronicity) . . . last night my family and I were talking about what age it was that we (by which I mean my brothers and I) had begun speaking our first words. Then I remembered the artist Paul Laffoley (who I had been really interested in when I was in my twenties . . . he was hip with the whole Disinformation occult scene), and how he had spoken his first word at a really young age, before falling silent for some years. At first I was having trouble remembering the word, and then it came to me: “Constantinople.” And now I see this Day pop up on my feed and sure enough, I was right.
Oo, pretty colourful pictures, goodie. Constantinople is an absolutely smashing first word. Electric shock treatments are not so fortunate. As for the possibly alien technology in his brain, uh, I’m sceptical. The thing at the centre of Aleph-Null Number is yuckily organic-looking. GCSE German didn’t teach me weltanschuung, unfortunately. Quite the philosophical mumbojumbo on display, here. I am reminded of posts on /x/. Yeesh, this does a headache no favours. I’ll take The Smiths but I could live without marijuana and veganism. A ball with cedar trees growing out of it at all angles at the top of the WTC sounds cool. I have no idea what this art is ‘getting at’ or what it ‘means’ but I’m mildly diverted by it nonetheless. These are some complicated ass diagrams. Impressive to compose them. The sexuality of robots is a topic I’m interested in. Very visual stuff.
Hi hello. I know no teenage actors save for some drama students my age who aren’t *that* devoted to their craft. If witnessing one’s peers fade can bum one out it’s probably not much better for the people themselves who are ‘fading.’ A friend and I were discussing fame this morning. He wasn’t opposed to it, whilst I didn’t see much of the appeal.
My cinematography knowledge is limited, to say the least. Dolly zooms look cool, I can say. There are some funny zooms in Wes Anderson films. Still haven’t seen Visconti, which is a little odd considering Death in Venice is the kind of film a younger me would have thought he *had* to watch. I’ve only read it.
Does dampen the spirits when any good book goes out of print. I might own a few, possibly. Farina’s Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me, maybe? Or Mandiargues’ Englishman in his Chateau. Between my entire family we probably own some very old books that aren’t in print. But ideally every good book would exist forever. Alas, capitalism, or something.
Life is chock-full of laborious hassles, hm. Sound-wise typewriters have a real appeal. I’ve never got to or had to use liquid paper. Literal liquid paper would be fun and impractical.
Never had grits, and scones beat out croissants in my eyes. I’m more likely to be won over by a food if there’s sugar in it, immature youth that I am.
No problemo, thanks for writing your stuff. I will henceforth think twice before entering a windmill and continue to be grateful for being relatively far removed from the potential of a school shooting of any kind, save for that one time a guy brought a gun to my secondary school the year before I started going there, though nothing came of that, fortunately. Must. Email. And drink tea. Got my mock papers back for history – A*, yay. I’m going to start One Hundred Years of Solitude tonight, and hope I like it more than Love in the Time of Cholera. Back on the GBV train, with Mag Earwhig! and Do The Collapse. See you Tschussday!
Hey Dennis. Yeah hey works well,
Mondays are always my rest days, so today, bar a meeting (plus another meeting i forgot about), I’ve tried to just rest. Played some games and read. Though my roommate was smelling gas or something downstairs and so did I, so I guess I can’t rest. In my room rn but im heading out to meet my friend in a bit, but feeling a bit petulant because i just wanted to rest and not have to worry about if im slowly inhaling gas…
I am feeling internally intense, good way to name that feeling. That intensity has subsided a bit but I feel like it’s coming back around soon. For now, my brain is foggy and muddled, from gas inhalation or exhaustion or both.
The Swedes are great at that type of pop, ABBA, Max Martin, Robyn. I’ve been listening to a lot of Kendrick and SZA after that Superbowl show, though I didnt really watch it as I’m not American and don’t care whatsoever about American Football. I find it a bit funny how American Football feels like this begrudgingly important sport; I know people who consume it here in Ireland, some even play it, but the sport and leagues are centralized to that one specific country.
Hey, D. I really liked Anora and really disliked Emilia Perez, but I had fun watching both. Emilia is a mess, they don’t finish any point and the songs are awful, but it’s very TikTok -esque… it hyperstimulates the audience with many things happening at once so we don’t get bored. It’s similar to ‘Everything Everywhere All at Once’ in that aspect. I can’t really think of any positive points… the costumes are nice I guess… the colours too. Some colleagues of mine thought the movie was racist to the Latinos, specially Mexicans, but I didn’t see it. Something that I said that they thought it was dreadful was that I don’t think that art need to have any responsibility. You can be tasteless, and that’s a negative point, but I would never say that you “shouldn’t” do something because it’s “irresponsible”…. Irresponsible to what?! What do you think?
Today I listened to some albums I never listened before: Purple Rain by Prince, choke enough by Oklou, and ArtPop by Lady Gaga. Do you like any of them? I don’t really love Gaga but I liked this one and I think that her debut is wonderful. Do you like Kate Bush? I don’t think I ever asked you that, but she’s one of my favourites.
Today my teacher talked about an artist called Gordon Matta-Clark and his work called ‘Blow Out’, ever heard of him? He blowed some windows out in the Bronx to criticise the gentrification or something, I still have to read what she sent us. But we were talking about how art and gentrification walk together, she said that at that time (70s) SoHo was a very poor area, and then the artists came in and made it their own, so it got gentrified. I was wondering if you’ve lived in New York at that time, and if you have anything to say about the art scene or gentrification. Anything would be nice!
This kind of batshit mystic is always really frustrating to me because I just instinctively know there’s tons of things they’re halfway right about but maybe don’t have the scholarship or good judgement to sort them out from the stuff that is just nonsense. This guy reminds me a lot of Terry A. Davis, a conspiracy theorist who was trying to program a computer to talk to God. He’s something of a hero on the fringe right these days because he was legitimately extremely racist, but the art he created is fantastic:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O2-T3f-5dAU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3VSDjTkOxHE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ulPV4yW_JI8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZXn4njGgfkE
Speaking of fringe right conspiracy stuff, do you remember the Pizzagate thing? Has anyone pointed out the parallels with The Marbled Swarm? Like the father character is essentially who those people think John Podesta is in real life.
Companion’s director doesn’t even have a Wikipedia page and it seems his only previous experience is as a staff writer on sitcoms. Which I guess makes it surprising that it’s competently directed but not surprising that the characters talk like that.
Yeah, the narrative is that Anton from BJM is a tortured genius who should be a superstar but can’t lay off the smack and the Dandies are cornball pop stars but business geniuses. I only know the Dandy Warhols from their 2000s radio hits and BJM as a footnote in the Psychic TV universe. I guess I’d pick the Dandy Warhols because I love the song Not If You Were the Last Junkie on Earth and its music video. BJM are whiny and sluggish and don’t have anything that works at karaoke.
Yeah, the ads on the Super Bowl are so insanely terrible. They just find two notable actors and put them together in a situation which is supposed to be inherently funny. Catherine O’hara and Willem Dafoe playing pickleball, Mathew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson meeting at the airport and that’s it, just two people that people of my parents’ generation would recognize and we’re just supposed to be amused by their meeting?
Thanks. I’m writing songs for a new album. Even without lyrics, I’m trying to make music that reflects my anger at the political climate, but it’s hard to do so without either tumbling into unlistenable noise or writing something that sounds too cheerful.
Lafolley has a great eye for color. His paintings look strangely glossy considering their subjects, almost as though they were machine-made.
The doctor diagnosed a return of my respiratory infection. He prescribed another round of antibiotics. Feeling like I’ve had a bad cold for almost all of this year so far has been extremely draining, so I hope the meds finally clear this up soon.
In particular, I hope I have the energy to see all 3 & 1/2 hours of PUBLIC HOUSING Wednesday evening!
I also enjoy Oklou’s new album – in fact, I’m listening to it now. The production is full of subtle touches that really enhance it. She was a student of baroque music, and the classical influence turn up in her version of electronic pop. She’d be a great opening act on an FKA Twigs tour.
Yeah, ‘Blacks’ was great!! Here’s a tiny clip of it that my friend recorded (with him turning the camera in my face at the end lol) https://imgur.com/a/h1plfnV
Wish I had anything else exciting to report, but I’m just resting from my weekend since I was barely ever home. And I really have to start to take school seriously and stuff. Hopefully I’ll get the hang of it soon enough so I can direct my mental energy elsewhere, I’m optimistic about that
Hi Dennis,
How are you doing? Great post. I’d never heard of Laffoley before but now I really want to see these works in their presumably very big original format. I would also not say no to an enormous coffee-table book of them. He has one of those minds that perceives the world as bursting with meaning, which I find frightening and fascinating, and sometimes funny. What’s his appeal to you?
This evening I saw Jeanne Dielman at the BFI. It was phenomenal. When I came out of it I felt like my vision and hearing had been changed. It’s been a while since a film affected me so strongly on the level of perception. Probably since I saw my first James Benning a little over a year ago.
Story editing continues. I have more to do than I anticipated, but it’s satisfying work. It’s not gonna be my greatest, but I feel an intense desire to finish something right now. So I’ve accepted certain limits and am just going to make it as good as I can within them.
When you’re doing first drafts, is there ever a tendency or feature that regularly shows up in the writing that you have to take out later? Just asking because I feel like I struggle with false sentimentality. And it’s weird because I hate it in other people’s work. I wonder why I do it? Possibly because I get frustrated at how hard it is to get “real” emotion into writing so I take a shortcut? That was me thinking out loud in writing… I’m going to reflect on it.
Bye,
Moi x
Hi! I don’t think I’ve ever heard of Paul Laffoley. A really wonderful post to stroll through (as always). Oh, that Alice Liddell one is very curious, the Elvis ones too. They hit on a certain quality of something I really like seeing in art, I’m not sure how to put it – a kind of an innocent but intelligent look at culture. The same reason why I probably like, for example, this Gary Hume disc of Michael Jackson:
https://static.independent.co.uk/s3fs-public/thumbnails/image/2018/06/28/17/028-michael-jackson-by-gary-hume.jpg
And Greer Lankton’s dolls as well.
Yeah, unfortunately ‘Une Femme Douce’ is a hard film to track down. I watched it on ok.ru which is the best, but it was kind of low quality. Watchable from a laptop but probably not anything bigger. There are higher res versions on there but they either don’t have English subtitles or are dubbed over in – I think, Russian.
I watched the Jobriath doc. Yeah, you’re right, it’s not a particularly great doc but it was good to get the lowdown, and I loved the clips from The Midnight Special. I’m sort of fascinated by the Chelsea hotel, the Warhol/Morrissey film, the Nico album, the Eileen Myles book, everything. There’s a BBC ARENA doc from the 70s about it which I’ve been meaning to see. I do like a lot of those old ARENA films. I’m kind of obsessed with ‘Cracked Actor’, and I have this book about it which is pretty beautiful.
Jobriath had the coolest room ever, he lived at the top of the building in a loft room and had his bed hanging from the ceiling.
I’m actually very happy with how my little short is going. I’ve got it in the form that will be how it enters the interwebs, I just have to tinker with a few things, sound, namely. In my opinion this is the most difficult part. I’ve had to wade through a lot of shit on all the free sound effect websites. I like things that sound hollow and dead. Not flashy but at the same time not completely ‘real’.
I actually had a ‘Blow Up’ experience while editing, or perhaps more of a ‘Blow Out’ experience. I turned up the audio on a clip filmed outside, and there’s a woman singing in the background, really loudly, and I have completely no recollection of it. It might just be from someone’s radio or something. There are also really loud church bells in the background, which I really like the effect of. Anyway, I can now relax a bit and just tinker with it. Back to writing.