‘Over her more than four-decade career, New York based filmmaker, performer and writer Amy Greenfield has achieved widespread critical acclaim for her genre-bending films which cross boundaries of experimental film, video art and multimedia performance – from her feature film, Antigone/Rites Of Passion to her major new live multimedia work, Spirit In The Flesh. Exploring the dynamism of human movement and the resiliency of the spirit, Greenfield creates a new visual and kinetic language of cinema. An innovative exploration of an artist whom Cineaste called ‘the most important practitioner of experimental film-dance,’ — R.A. Haller

‘Amy Greenfield has been pushing the boundaries of dance and cinema since the early 1970s. Her work is known for its earthy rawness and proto-feminist point of view. In Greenfield’s 1974 work, Videotape for a Woman and Man, audiences may at first experience utter shock at seeing the two performers Greenfield and her male partner as being completely stark naked. This 33-minute film features the female and male performers in a series of progressive dance-like and often highly acrobatic body movements with pauses in the film that integrate vocal phrases in order to explain some of the emotions and motives that the film maker is intending to express to the audience. The nakedness of the performers ultimately expresses a sense of freedom in their complete exposure in order to communicate the essence of the raw emotions that a man and woman can experience towards one another in a relationship. In doing so, they clearly tell us that they have nothing to hide. Their emotions are real and unhindered because of their nakedness. The movements of these nude performers range from loving to violent to erotic and passionate as they tell their story through uninhibited movement.’ — Missy Briggs

‘In February YouTube censored Amy Greenfield’s films including segments from Club Midnight/Against Censorship. Greenfield was outraged at such censorship of art, placing it mistakenly in the category of “pornography”. The absence of any way to appeal directly to YouTube impelled Greenfield to contact the National Coalition Against Censorship. Supporting her work, and agreeing that the issue is very important for filmmakers, the NCAC, with the leading internet civil rights organization, Electronic Frontier Foundation, went up against the internet giant to help bring to light the issue of YouTube/Google’s censorship of nudity. With an outpouring of press and public support on the internet, You Tube, in an unprecedented and potentially ground-breaking decision, restored Greenfield’s films to their site, unrestricted, recognizing her use of nudity as art.’ — NCAC

 

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Stills

 

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Further

Amy Greenfield @ The Film-Makers’ Cooperative
Book: ‘Flesh into Light – The Films of Amy Greenfield’
Amy Greenfield @ IMDb
Amy Greenfield @ letterboxd
DVD: ‘Greenfield: Cinema of the Body’
Amy Greenfield reviews ‘The Tales of Hoffmann’
Amy Greenfield, a Critical Essay
Amy Greenfield’s “Dance for the Camera”
Amy Greenfield’s Finely Spun `Antigone’

 

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Extras

CENSORED BY YOUTUBE

Frameform | Rewind: Amy Greenfield

 

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Interview: Making Antigone/Rites of Passion

 

TONY PIPOLO: I thought it would be helpful to divide up the questions into categories. First, I’d like to know what attracted you to this project, and how you think the subject of Antigone bears upon these times. Then, perhaps we could talk about the form the film takes; since you are associated with dance and choreography, it seems relevant to consider how you managed to exploit these talents and place them at the service of this story. Lastly, how filmmaking techniques–especially the framing and editing of shots–affected and were affected by the approach you took. I’m sure they’ll be some overlapping, but let’s begin with the first one. When did the idea of doing Antigone occur to you? Were you always fascinated with Sophocles’ play?

AMY GREENFIELD: Yes. When I read it in college, of all the Greek tragedies, it was the one that most interested me. And when I got into film, I thought, when I do a long film eventually, it will be Antigone. But originally the play didn’t feel personal for me. I just thought, “I know how to do that. Something in me knows how to make that into a film.” And those were the feelings, again, when I said, I think it’s time.

The idea was a little more frightening than I thought, though. Not Antigone so much as a long feature film. But I wanted to make such a film and I felt that I could play Antigone. I had different projects going at the time. That was the time when I tried more practical things like proposing something for cable television with postmodern dance–something I didn’t want to really do, even. Those fell through, but an administrator at Ballet Theater at the time said, “If you can bring something new to Antigone, do that, don’t think of doing a ballet for television.”

Other people encouraged me, too: a wonderful professor of Classics at the University of Southern Illinois, Joan O’Brien, wrote an essay on Antigone and androgyny, which turned out to be one way into the character and a take on the text I’d never been taught, and which led to looking at the sexuality going on in it. She’d been a nun but “quit” (if that’s the right word) because of the Pope’s attitudes toward women. She loved my wild pagan female nude film dances. She felt Antigone/Rites of Passion should be that physical.

But it was when I started to do video rehearsals with Bertram Ross, taking his body and face as material for script, that the film really started. So the way into visualizing the words started with the physical. The opposite process from mainstream dramatic filmmaking.

Then it became clear that I had to find a dramatic structure for the film. I luckily ran into a weekend screenwriting workshop with Frank Daniel, then head of Columbia’s Film Department. That workshop enabled me to begin and go on and on to reconstruct the texts from my own point of view as cinema.

Now, I remember the thing that got me to drop everything else–well, almost everything else–and concentrate on this film was asking myself the question: “if I had only one year to live, what would I do?” The answer was to make this film–and it took five years to make.

TP: So, clearly, your reasons must have been very compelling.

AG: Yes, but I didn’t even think of the reasons.

TP: It strikes me from viewing the film that your reasons were far more personal, as opposed, let’s say, to primarily polemical. Over the last thirty or forty years, people who have revived and produced Antigone seem to approach it almost exclusively as a polemical piece with a special message for our times. One finds it in college anthologies, for example, along with essays by Thoreau and Gandhi on Civil Disobedience. Your film does not strike me as being driven by motives or interests of this kind.

AG: No, I was not driven by those motives at all. I don’t understand them if you’re going to do the drama, not talk about it. The play is taught in most high schools and colleges and made so boring because of such textbooks. My drive was to bring its really very passionate life to the screen, and let the ideas come through that passion. I think my motives were close to why an artist like Cocteau would translate a certain myth or tale into drama, ballet, cinema, because he felt it corresponding to something very essential in himself and transformation of self into a larger sphere. He actually did a version of Antigone which got to his feelings about Charlotte Corday.  Also, I think I was motivated by terror. At the time when I started to conceive of and make the film, I used to wake up every morning experiencing terror. I couldn’t control it. It seemed to have everything and nothing to do with my life. It was real but not attached to something specific. Making the film brought me through it. Greek Tragedy, like a horror film or thriller on a popular level, ultimately brings the audience through terror via the fullness, the seduction of art.

TP: My feeling about the choice of beginning the film with the scene between Oedipus and the two daughters is that it does, as you’ve indicated, deemphasize the straightforward political aspects of the play. Beginnings–and endings, of course–are so important. But it also clarifies the situation for an audience unfamiliar with the story of the trilogy, especially concerning the curse on the family. There is this strong psychological bond with the father and because of the curse on the family, Antigone has no choice but to pursue the path that she does. It is all clearly laid out for her, but not just in cultural and political terms. I was wondering what you thought about how this relates to the political dimension of the play and how the question–which is really a question posed by all of Greek tragedy–of determination and free will fits into this.

AG: Well, I have trouble with such all-encompassing phrases that have been around for centuries. If I’d approached the film from that point of view, it certainly never would have gotten made, and if it had somehow, no one would have wanted to look at it. I was involved with the practical agonizing day to day decisions of getting onto the screen the agonizing choices of the characters in a story that’s so great that part of its greatness is that it makes into truth what in a literal way is really unbelievable at almost every turn.

But let me think. This interview is making me become conscious of stuff that was in there. You’re right. The film starts with the voice of Antigone over a black screen saying, “The story of Antigone began before she was born.” Before she goes into the cave, she says, “My birth imprisons me.” The beginning narration ends with “Antigone chose to go with him (i.e., Oedipus), to lead him in the wilderness.” So there are two extremes for her. A path circumscribed horribly by her birth and gigantic choices no one else would make, and once they’re made, they lead her to a narrower and narrower sphere within which choice can be made.

It’s interesting–the imprisoned birth–Antigone is a character who never changes. Instead, her choices keep her more and more on the track of her own character, and change everyone around her more and more. Then, when she seems to have no choice left, “Antigone takes her death into her own hands.” Creon, so he won’t get blamed for actively executing her, puts her in a cave to starve. Instead of dying passively and slowly, she chooses fast suicide, and it is that suicide which topples Creon.

In cinematic terms, when there seems to be no choice left for her, when she’s locked in the cave, the camera becomes her in an extended point of view shot, and we see only the rock walls, as if there were no space left for her in the world. Therefore, we as audience, are her as she travels through the seemingly endless and claustrophobic and amorphous cave. Then, the camera comes to a dead end wall. We see her feet–she is climbing the wall. A choice. There’s no way out, but she’s found a way up. Then the camera goes wild and out of that frenzied camera movement we see her, like an African death mask, dead, but in a way alive still through the camera’s motion, and her voice: “Antigone takes her death in her own hands.” I actually was holding the rope up myself with one hand, though in the film it looks like she’s actually hanging. I designed the “death” shot. I was totally active. It was an active choice. Her will had to be at the strongest point in her life to do that. It’s a metaphor for taking control of one’s own death, really terrifying to me, but very much an issue in our society now. Her final act of will makes for a release of energy, an explosion of events–Haimon’s suicide, Creon’s madness, and finally Ismene’s heroism as witness. Creon, unlike Antigone, comes in at the point of most choice for himself as new ruler, and he chooses wrongly. Under a misguided kind of patriotism, he chooses to unbury the dead and execute for the necessary act of mourning. Like Antigone, he won’t give in, but her force of will is greater than his. A shot where he seems to have most power–when he pronounces Antigone’s death in a cave, is done as a mug shot–he’s a criminal right up against the wall looking into the camera. The camera humiliates and imprisons him just when it seems like he imprisons Antigone. That’s a twist in the free will vs. determinism game. And unlike a tragic hero, when he relents, it’s forced upon him. And while finally he is vulnerable and cries out, he has seen his mistake much, much too late. His change of heart in burying the dead and unburying the living and his realization of his passion and tenderness as father for his son, both come too late. He is mad, unfit to rule even himself, taken over, unable to choose what he now wants–death. Bertram Ross’ incredible reversal in the way he uses his body, from hard and straight to collapsing in on himself and soft, the seductiveness with which he plays Creon, makes the character fascinating, dimensional, very modern.

But it is only Ismene who, through Antigone’s death, becomes free of that curse. Her choice to stay alive in the play was seen as a cop-out. Ostensibly it is a choice for personal survival, but it’s also choosing to be powerless before unjust law. The film gives her a second chance by developing her character after Antigone’s death. With her choice to wrest power and complete the vow, this time she emerges with dignity and a spiritual balance and calm which give the sense that no matter what happens to her, she’s free of the family curse, though everyone she loves is dead. Her breathing is the ultimate necessity of life, and it’s life which enables choice.

TP: We’re talking about complex ideas that come through, yet there are so few words in the film. The ideas come through a brew of pictures and sounds.

AG: There is something fundamental that we haven’t yet talked about, not only about my own filmmaking, which is very physical and visual, but about cinema in general which stresses these qualities. The text on the page is uncinematic. It had to be taken apart and resynthesized as cinema. The solution was to find some action-through line, for Antigone and Oedipus, then Creon, and branching out to the other characters–taking that as the core. It became clearer and clearer that that had to be the core; you had to move forward all the time through action. I couldn’t have a chorus, not only because of money, but it would have made the film even more artificial. Instead, I used dance, motion, as an in-between area between real action, acting, and metaphor. Once I do that, of course, I’m going to show the two brothers fighting, and once I do that, they are characters who appear and who have weight, and so forth. Then it’s a matter of generosity to the characters–as well as to the actors–I say, “Wait a minute, I just can’t see Polyneices getting knocked off?” and then “Why is she [i.e., Antigone] so passionate about this act?” and so it leads to showing their passion together, when she makes the vow to bury him after Oedipus has cursed him to die, and that brings us back to the family and the curse. In the book, Antigones, by George Steiner, he keeps coming back to this inextricable bond within Sophocles’ language, and to the eros connected with that family.

TP: To put it mildly.

AG: Yes, so there’s always a movement, an impulse, an impulse behind the words. It’s wonderful to deal with that and once you get behind the text and you say, oh, look what’s there–that’s pretty wild. Antigone says of Polyneices’ body, “If I die, I’ll lie with him,” and you think, “Let’s try that desire while she’s alive.” Then, of course, the action takes the film out of the area of abstract ideas and into this primal area. If you take out all of the other material with messengers and so forth, and concentrate on these primal scenes, you discover the strong action of the drama, which is laden with significance.

TP: This does partly explain the fascination of your film, in which we are not distracted by all of the connective tissue experienced through choruses and messengers, and all we are left with are these core scenes. There is no commentary, and no thread but the one woven by the drive to get the primal across.

AG: Which is connected with death. You said that in one sense the film is about the process of mourning, and the counter movement of that is the eros which infuses the drama.

TP: Yes.

AG: It’s built into the action, the choreography. When the brothers fight in violent arm to arm combat, they die, two twins, in an embrace. And we see Antigone attempting to carry out her words, “When I die, I’ll lie with him,” when she kneels over Polyneices’ body and kisses his lips, collapses on him from the attempt to carry him, and turns this action into rolling his body, then lying under him. Then, toward the end of the film, when Haimon falls on Antigone as he dies, that’s real kinky romantic, and Creon over Haimon’s body, gathering him up–here Haimon and Creon are both barechested, so it’s flesh to flesh, both dirty and wet. The tragedy is that the contact should have been in life. I’m not saying “Eros equals death” at all!

TP: Even in these actions, though, there is the political level. Let’s get into that aspect a little. On a low budget, and with the style of the film, how did you get the feeling of the State? I think you do, but it must not have been easy.

AG: Well, the political implications are all offscreen in the Oedipus at Colonus section. Only the voices-off evoke the City and the political power struggles. But once Oedipus leaves, that’s when Antigone makes the decision, or is driven, to go back to the city because that’s where her brothers’ fated battle is going to take place, and she has made her vow to her brother. This places the drama within the city structure and, you are right, to deal with the concept of the state was very difficult. Now, I would be able to deal with scenes of masses or extras. But when I made it, luckily it was inconceivable because I didn’t have the money–I mean it gets down to being so tight that even to have one more person there … it gets so difficult. So the sense of “State” came through the location–the actual State buildings of New York in Albany, plus costume, acting, music, well-chosen words …

TP: But I think the film gains from that forced economy. At least for me it does. There is something pristine about it in the way Greek tragedy is pristine. All the excesses are kept at bay and you get down to the absolute gut feelings and confrontations.

AG: Good, that’s what I wanted.

 

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9 of Amy Greenfield’s 16 films

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Dirt (1971)
‘… has been used in women’s studies classes on rape. Its energy is the energy of protest and of rock music. A woman is dragged and dragged through dirt with increasing violence. As the violence increases, so does the beat and intensity of the harsh, eletronic sound. The audience can identify deeply with the woman’s movements and so experience the depth of this violence.–A. G. “She abandons her body entirely.”–Boston Sunday Herald. DIRT and TRANSPORT are counterparts and are ideally screened together.’ — A. G.

 

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Transport (1971)
‘TRANSPORT came out of many influences in the early 1970s: the dead of Vietnam; the poem by my poetry teacher Anne Sexton, “For God While Sleeping”; the post-modern dance experiments with trust, to give yourself totally while being lifted by another; and the airborne astronauts of moon exploration. In the film, a man, then a woman, are lifted from the ground and are carried through space. Most of the film is seen upside-down against the white sky. The man and woman never meet. Their relationship is made entirely through the film editing. They move between ground and sky, between death (dead weight), through gravity (conflict weight) toward space (floating space). Finally, they break out into space and are borne along as if flying through the white air.’ — A.G.

the entirety

 

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Dervish 2 (1972)
‘For twenty minutes we watch Greenfield, wrapped in a white sheet, simply spin. The ceaseless repetition makes us lose our sense of time and gives the dynamic movement an object-like permanence. And yet, the actual physicality of her body also seems to dissolve. Subtle superimpositions of alternate camera views create delicate image transparencies while the whippings of the sheet across the monitor screen emit luminous stroboscopic flickerings. Rhythmic ambient sounds of shuffling and breathing reinforce the hypnotic effects of optical repetition.’ –- Richerd Lorber

 

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Element (1973)
‘ELEMENT, like TIDES, raises issues of the active image of a woman’s body on film. The two films are counterparts and are ideally screened together. The woman’s body is covered, like a moving sculpture, entirely with black, wet, clay-like mud in an environment of this element. She falls into and rises out of this glistening substance, over and over, until she is seen against the sky and falls one last time, ending with her black body sliding along the mud glittering in the jewel-like sun. The whole film is a human cycle which is both birthlike and deathlike and summons up through visceral imagery a very primal area of female sensuality. “In the well-known ELEMENT, Greenfield rolls and seethes and plunges in a field of mud, her hair, her face, her naked body [are] not just slathered with mud but become a part of it ….’ –- Deborah Jowitt

the entirety

 

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Tides (1982)
‘The literary sources for TIDES came from Isadora Duncan’s “The Dance of the Future,” Maya Deren’s script for the unfilmed passages of Ritual In Transfigured Time, Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra. “TIDES is a cinema-dance dealing with the theme and image of woman and ocean. The entire film was shot with a high speed camera, creating action from two to twenty times slower than normal speed. Because of this extreme slow motion, the surge and flow of the woman’s nude body and the waves becomes intensely felt, continually moving cinematic imagery.’ — Film-makers Coop

the entirety

 

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Antigone/Rites of Passion (1990)
‘A feature film starring Bertram Ross, Janet Eilber and Amy Greenfield. Music: Glenn Branca, Diamanda Galas, Paul Lemos, Elliott Sharp and David Van Tieghem. An “emotionally charged feminist take” (The Village Voice) on the daughter of Oedipus. Amy Greenfield takes avant-garde and feminist filmmaking into a new sphere of storytelling. Dazzling, demanding, bold, triumphantly ambitious and successful …. Greenfield wisely decided to shoot her film as a silent, allowing her performers complete freedom of movement. … Greenfield and her cinematographers Hilary Harris (for the natural locations) and Judy Irola (for the architectural settings) keep the camera in perfect, expressive harmony with the performers. … Add to this spare, off-screen narration spoken by the various characters as they reveal their innermost thoughts. … Further add the film’s astonishing score, a great, richly varied hum and roar and shimmer. … Through the flawless fusion of all these elements we’re able to experience an ‘Antigone’ as if we had never seen it performed before, an ‘Antigone’ at once sensual and erotic, timeless and timely, for this film is charged with the tension of viewing Oedipus from his daughters’ point of view. … Inspired.’ –- Kevin Thomas, The Los Angeles Times

Watch the film VOD here

 

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Wildfire (2002)
‘Wildfire is digitally colorized into an intense raibow blaze, building from slow motion then layered, reversed, speeded to create a wildfire explosion of female energy. A beautiful film! A great film!’ — Bruce Baillie

Excerpt

 

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Club Midnight (2008)
‘CLUB MIDNIGHT is an evening of interconnected cutting-edge films, with cabaret stars Andrea Beeman; Bonnie Dunn; Francesca and Selene Savarie revealing themselves, body and soul, in a new nakedness, joined with spirituality and intelligence. The six films that make up CLUB MIDNIGHT, are challenging and exhilaratingly sensual, all inspired by the empowerment and expressiveness of erotic dance (to) the music of Philip Glass, Einsturzende Neubauten, and Lee Hazlewood, Dennis Hopper interpreting a poem by Poet Laureate Charles Simic (from which the film cycle takes its title), and (Amy Greenfield’s) inspired digital and analog manipulation . . . CLUB MIDNIGHT is a postmodern romp through a neo-feminist party.’ — letterboxd

Excerpt

 

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MUSEic Of The BODy (2009)
‘MUSEic Of The BODy, in many ways is not only a tribute to Charlotte Moorman and Nam June Paik both well known artists and musicians but also a pivotal experience for Greenfield. It was the first time she directed a large scale multi media stage event that would influence her own work for the next decade.

‘Her subjective camera zooms in and out at a dizzying pace on performer Suzanne Gregoire, who is completely nude in a pair of stilettos and a long string of extra large pearls. She is bound and tangled in the expansive string of pearls while she plays Nam June Paik’s interactive piano/video installation Pyramid- Interactive with her convoluted body. She pounds the piano in a desperate physical wail. The audience is given the ultimate impression of internal calamity pulled in a cerebral storm of transgressing emotions. Her image fills the mountain of screens, she hammers and tears at her pearls, her eyes make contact with the audience, her body shakes and quivers. The accompanying soundtrack facilitates and promotes this increasing transgression by mixing the rogue piano notes with the classic sounds of Beethoven’s piano sonata. Her head reaches back, the pearls tighten, she exhales, the piano fades, it is understood this dance continues on in an ethereal sphere now.’ — CTSart

Excerpt

 

 

*

p.s. Hey. ** Quentin S. Crisp, Hi. Well, thank you for entrusting this place. And for coming in. And for the added information and link, which I will now pass along. Everyone, Quentin S. Crisp, one of the Neo-Decadent authors, gives us some extra information and a gateway to a very intriguing sounding work. In his words, ‘I just wanted to give a shout out (as they say) to two artists, Joe Campbell and Oscar Oldershaw, who did the styling and took the photo of me (Quentin S. Crisp) in polkadot dress and shades. This is a link to one of their collaborative pieces (film) that drew words of praise from Apichatpong Weerasethakul (“I can watch this film over and over. I don’t understand it but it is just fascinating. The camera work invites us into the ritual, we are part of the alienation.”)’. Thanks again, and respect to you. ** Ferdinand, Hi. Well, there isn’t a whole lot else to do in my realm these days other than do the workhorse number. Luckily that’s my bread and butter. Mm, ‘Frisk’ was banned in Canada for a number of years. Otherwise, I can’t think of any instances of actual censorship, although I wouldn’t be surprised. ** David Ehrenstein, Hi. I’d forgotten all about that Marvin Lee incident until you mentioned LM. So, thanks. ** Tosh Berman, Hi, Tosh. Zac and I met one of the Neo-Decadents — Justin Isis — a few years back when we accidentally bumped into him in a pizza place in … Shibuya! Me too re: the missing, big, biggest time. ** Sypha, Hi. ‘Romance’? Hm, that’s … stretching it. ‘I Wished’ is 134 pages, so it’s roughly ‘Period’ or ‘God Jr.’ sized. Short but packed. ** John Newton, Hi, welcome. My pleasure re: the post. No, I’m not interested in writing a memoir. My upcoming novel is very personal and based in my autobiography, but it’s definitely a novel, not a memoir. That’s probably as close as I’ll ever get. Thanks for asking. Take care. ** Damian Murphy, Hadrian Flyte, Hi, thank you very much for entering and for answering John Newton’s question. I was rather curious myself. I’m pretty new to N-D, but I look forward greatly to getting to know your works ASAP. ** Shane Christmass, Hey, Shane. No, I haven’t read that book you linked to, didn’t know about it, but it definitely looks like a must-get. Thanks, man. ** _Black_Acrylic, Can’t keep a trusty pair of headphones down. Pudding and custard. Now those are good ideas. Not common food stuffs over here unless I’m missing something. Your story! Excited! Everyone, Maestro of multiple mediums and definitely prose Ben ‘_Black_Acrylic’ Robinson has a new short fiction piece up at the Terror House site with the irresistible title ‘Dead Cat Bounce’. Get your eyes, etc. on it here. ** wolf, *distant, lonely, inhuman sound in the distance*! Gotcha, but competence in art of any kind is pretty gross. And that it’s treated as a legitimising requirement of ‘good’ art by so many. Re: literature, the powers that be give competence fancy sounding names like ‘lapidary’ and ‘literary’, but they’re usually just talking about competence that’s acting hoity toity. I would say it’s one of art’s big, eternal enemies, but that’s me. Oops, about Hubert. Poor thing. Tough decision, yeah. My asshole neighbors, who live directly below me on the 3rd etage, are nuts. They’re an elderly hetero couple. For a long time, the male would bang on my door two or three times a week accusing us of using a jack-hammer in the middle of the night. (In the middle of the night, I’m always asleep and Yury is sometimes up watching TV quietly). I even let him come inside and look around to see that I don’t have a jack-hammer. It’s always something bizarre with them. Love, me. ** Dominik, Hi, D! Me too about the lockdown. They just locked down four French cities, luckily not including Paris, so … uh oh. How was your weekend or I guess including Monday? It’s true that that Styles guy kinda makes the bun work. Ha ha, I’d watch that horror movie. Who wouldn’t? Love hiring planes to skywrite Peter Sotos’s ‘Tick’ in its entirety in the sky in Tahoma font above every city, town, and village in the world, G. ** Bill, Hi, Bill. The new Gisele piece is just a promising early kernel of an idea at this point, but I’ll be sure to blab about it here when it coheres. Does Nick Antosca still writes books or has TV eaten his writing? I met him once at a reading. Super nice guy. ** Steve Erickson, Hi. Okey-doke … Everyone, Two new sonic constructions by the one, the only Steve Erickson. Let me let him tell you all about them. SE: ‘In the past few days, I’ve written two songs inspired by BLADE RUNNER and its soundtrack. The second one, “Of Course We Know,” began as a remix of the first, reusing some of the same sounds and melodies, but took on a life of its own. Here is the first, “Happy Android”.’ Wow, I’ll find that Takashi Miike film somewhere. Sounds nuts. ** Misanthrope, Another FWB of the Neo-Decadents, or maybe it’s vice versa. Sounds like a fun time you had last night. Annapolis is famous for something specific, but I can’t remember what. A university or something? Good news about your mom. Hope it goes really well today. ** Brian O’Connell, Good morning! ‘Beau Travail’ is terrific, yeah, I agree. One of her very best films, I reckon. Weekend + me: Mm, my editor sent me a pdf of the interior design of ‘I Wished’, and I went through it and okayed it. I spent most of yesterday at my friend/collaborator Gisele’s place talking about the next theater piece we’re going to do and discussing how best to film our piece ‘Jerk’, which we’re doing next month. I watched a documentary about the history of Black representation in Horror movies that was just clips and talking heads but was pretty interesting. And a lot of other forgettable things that, yes, I have forgotten. How and what was your painfully early class? And its aftermath? Happy next 24! ** Okay. I’m thinking that most of you reading this don’t know the films of Amy Greenfield due to how difficult it is to see or even read about experimental films in these blanded-out and corporation commandeered days. Count on DC’s to disrupt that crap whenever possible. So, get to start to know her films. That’s the idea anyway. See you tomorrow.

 

February 3rd marks the publication of NEO-DECADENCE: 12 MANIFESTOS. As with the earlier volumes DROWNING IN BEAUTY: THE NEO-DECADENT ANTHOLOGY and NEO-DECADENT COOKBOOK, this work continues the progress of Neo-Decadence, the only 21st century movement to address all arts and areas of everyday life.

“The early 21st Century: a gilded age of pious guilt, poison nostalgia, environmental collapse, unchecked pandemics, corporate franchises, workshopped creativity and personal brands. Standing against the Neo-Passéist tide, Neo-Decadence presents a total reformulation of everyday life. What is the vertical table? Why is a sex helmet indispensable for all assignations? What is the proper spirit of electronic gaming? Covering fashion, cooking, architecture, occultism, poetry, gardening, and other areas of concern to all young people, the present volume is the ONLY resource for those wishing to shrug off the cerements of late capitalist literature and art. If you’ve ever wanted to proudly commit commercial suicide while serving your own head on a plate as an offering to your inner daemon, consult this collection of manifestos—as much a personal style guide as it is a declaration of uncompromising aesthetic war.”

Now available for order:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/1645250636/

Or buy direct from Snuggly Books:
https://www.snugglybooks.co.uk/neo-decadence-12-manifestos/

Excerpts follow from each manifesto.

 

NEO-DECADENCE (I)

Brendan Connell

“Kublai Khan was a modern. Things fell apart a long time ago. We are already living in the ruins of civilisation. There’s nothing to celebrate. When you toast, make sure you smash your glasses together. This kind of writing should be the same. Harmony is overrated.”

“Neo-Decadent writers will honour the fragmented, the contorted, the unfinished, the unpublished. Realising there is no glory, no reward, no lavish suppers or dancing on tables. Living in obscure lanes and remote canyons, things will be written in unread languages or translated from the language of lizards and snakes, plagiarised from deep wells and signed with hands wet with the dew of rotting fruit.”

“There’s nothing wrong with writing a lousy book. Just make sure it’s really lousy. There is nothing worse than competence.”

 

NEO-DECADENCE (II)

Justin Isis

“No precedence is given to the Decadent writers of the 19th century, their modes or milieu. Neo-Decadence is more likely to cross 1990s video game dialogue with the structure of a 16th century picaresque to discuss a drug deal in present day Mongolia. Fealty and earnestness can only hold back progress. We do not have saints, and we consume our idols.”

“Writing can be neither sincere nor authentic; these are the cliches of the ranks of the dead. Style is a mute scream in symbols—that’s all.”

“Literature is not a guild system. Academies and workshops: a parade of inbred dogs with each generation more unfit than the last.”

 

WOMEN’S FASHION

Justin Isis

“Time and space died a long time ago, leaving behind fossilized remains ripe for excavation and creative reassembly. Fashion strata of the past must yield fanciful chimeras, with entire time periods sampled in light of each other, suggesting new relationships appropriate to our novel sensibilities (if necessary, grist garments may be renamed, the better to remove their tired cultural baggage. Clothes, like words, are filthy with associative detritus: to reinstate spontaneity demands some surgical measure of sartorial neologism). The outline of an Edwardian golfing costume may find itself accented with a head scarf and assorted plastic raver accessories, while a bridal train heavy with beads may be repurposed for use on the subway. Kimono-hijab hybrids in bright primary colors may be printed with the texts of entire poems and stories. A humble soutane, recolored a poisonous cobalt yellow and ornamented with metallic spikes and pauldrons, would present appropriate morning wear for a young woman heading to work, suggesting a faithful, predatory centipede lured by the light of the sun rising through polluted clouds; the evocations of youthful vigor, plasmic haze and indescribably beautiful envenomed fangs would all create a unified impression in the mind of an admiring observer.”

“Simplicity is the enemy of beauty, since fundamentally stupid and regressive types will always revert to minimalism, little realizing that even a nude figure itself is nothing but a mass of visual artifices, and the human body an additive assemblage with its useless adjuncts and vestigial blind alleys, steeped in archaism and ceaselessly recapitulating obsolete pomp. A woman with her wisdom teeth and appendix intact has no need to scoff at frameless glasses or a bathing suit concealed beneath another bathing suit, much less a mask of bone or a live plant for a necklace.”

 

MEN’S FASHION

Gaurav Monga

Justin Isis

“We have nothing but contempt for the quaint revivalist who favors the fancy dress of the 18th or 19th century, including all spiritual descendants of that syphilitic dullard Beau Brummell. Similarly, we have no concern with masculinity defined as the mere absence of conventionally feminine traits—neither in the regressive sense of affirming it, nor in the naively reactionary sense of protesting it. Rather than macerate male style in a welter of agonized self-contradiction, we prize stylistic experiments incorporating the expansion of its true sentiments and tendencies: the priest-astronaut’s tenderness, the barking accountant’s ferocity, the chemist-poet’s hyena-like persistence.”

“The notion of any age being beyond parody is itself ripe for parody. For fashion, parody functions as a disinfectant, and if employed properly, it produces novel beauty through defamiliarization. Neo-Decadence, when considered by passéists and the ill-informed, might sound like a contradiction: how can there be new decay, fresh declines? This becomes clearer when it is realized that our clothes embody the decadence not just of the storied past or insistent present, but of various parallel paths in time. At the crossroads, where the accelerated Empire meets the ruins of remote antiquity, we are setting up looms, studios, 3D printers, molecular assemblers; the peasant threading a bone needle works alongside the sartorial artist-scientist of the future who knits discardable masterpieces from the raw materials of space. As the future declines into the present, Neo-Decadence is born, and the Neo-Decadent Man stands askance, clad in thrift shop items from sideways in time: a wardrobe of resurrected trends and impossible hybrids; the clothes of canceled histories.”

“The Neo-Decadent Man will draw little inspiration from those ultimate passéists, plants and animals. How pitiful are the birds, who have never thought to invent plastic surgery. Parrots chatter like businessmen, secure in their naive vulgarity, while swans wander the grass like drunken louts, and egrets congregate colorlessly like Uniqlo customers. The same spirit that would rehabilitate the facial contours of a dove is the spirit we will prize in our Neo-Decadent aesthetic consultants.”

 

COOKING

Brendan Connell

Justin Isis

“In past ages, the primary purpose of food was to fortify the body and to bring the spirit in closer contact with the gods. Today, however, through the decayed state of the social structure, its primary purpose, among all who are not starving, is to entertain and to declaim one’s STATUS and to display a flaccid costume of COMMUNITY. The Neo-Decadents, instead of rejecting this sorry state, embrace it, shouting loudly from the cafés and rooftops to the crowded boulevards, summoning both the curious and the confounded.”

“Strictly considered, the horizontal table still indecently displayed in our homes is a relic of the 20th century, ill-suited to our current existence and spiritually reeking of a hospital ward in which any dribbling convalescent is welcome to bother us. Approaching the table, we start by lowering ourselves, submitting to chairs, which lock us in place (properly speaking, one defecates while seated or squatting, but one does not eat in this position, much less concern oneself with the psychic effluents of other consumers). Tedious mouths appear in space, and we pick and prod at bits of meat and pieces of plants—conveniently sectioned and segregated, drizzled with dressings—while fielding all manner of fatuous impositions and maudlin reminiscences, the fortification of our flesh constantly interrupted by secondhand opinions, unsupportable politics and intolerable solicitations. Our spirits become flattened and distended as we chew, and our minds film over with a scum of sentiment. The whole thing usually ends with resigned indulgence in cheap wine, cocaine of dubious purity, desserts that are little more than defrosted clots of refined sugar, and whatever other palliatives are on hand. Televisions glower behind us, waiting like lampreys to attach their monitor-mouths to our postprandial weakness.”

“There is nothing more revolting than to see wine drunk out of goblets or glasses.

Brisk wines should be served in tazzini, and drunk with a counter-point of gravity, in the manner of Abyssinian priests.”

 

MUSIC

Ramón Alanís

“The verse-chorus form: an archaic relic as despicable as the three-arc story structure. Existing between the simplicity of minimalism and the complex intricacies of a modernist concert work, our music structures will be culled from the inscrutable logic of dreams, weather patterns in foreign regions, a series of scents we pass on the street, the architecture of foreign temples, the folds in the clothes of our beloved… Repetition legitimises, but discontinuance can reinforce too.”

“Our music will not be created with an intimate gathering, street-busking, a club, a theater or music hall, let alone stadiums or sports arenas in mind. If we intend to reach new heights, we must compose as if our music is going to be performed in the most bizarre and exquisite contexts: at brothels in ruins, over forest fires, at executions, on forlorn roads, at sky burials, at a congress of demiurges, at an agalmatophilic orgy…”

“The Neo-Passéist tends to “reinvigorate” styles of yore by imbuing them with modernity (electro swing, punk cabaret, synthwave, psychobilly, Postmodern Jukebox and their many imitators, etc.) If one must look into the past for ideas or influences, it shall be done not out of nostalgia but with the contemptible sordidness of a graverobber or the investigative rigeur of a pathologist.”

 

ARCHITECTURE

Damian Murphy

Gaurav Monga

LC von Hessen

“Opportunities to place a weapon in the hand of fate are manifold. Spyholes can be strategically installed to encourage the proliferation of dangerous knowledge, floors tilted to an imperceptible degree to cause an ambience of vertigo, the occasional door should lock from the outside just as a single window on an upper story should be impossible to close. All of these techniques are secondary to the subtler aspects of the craft—perplexing inconsistencies of light and shadow, a deliberate confusion of boundaries, the persistent feeling that a space is larger on the inside than its exterior would suggest, and the displacement of physicality such that the inhabitants feel out of sync with their environment. Luxuriant comfort should be intermingled with an unshakable sense of unease to give rise to an incredible range of sensations that make our current interiors seem bland. Crime, being central to the human experience, must not be neglected in the structures we inhabit. If the modern home has robbed us of a portion of our humanity, we must take it back by force.”

“The modern cityscape has fitfully smashed its cathedrals into a cluster of soulless stripped bone shards jutting from the barren earth, all embellishment shorn off and swept away like butchers’ and barbers’ leavings. Entire walls made of windows remain coldly uncovered, that anyone might stare from below or across into one’s doings: an aesthetic of passive surveillance. The Neo-Decadent Architect must resurrect the damask and velvet curtain, the glimmer of lamplight through a discreetly-glimpsed keyhole, the lush occult maximalism of the cloak-and-dagger.”

“The aesthetic of shiny, loud banality that characterizes the 21st century must be cast off like dead skin, twisted into arcane knots, and publicly set alight. In particular, the ultracapitalist sense of interior design that gears itself towards hypothetical future real estate sales potentially decades down the line, towards generic figures parasitically projecting their own banal ideals into one’s own living space, has reached its nadir in the vogue for hyperminimalism: the padded cell of upwardly-mobile wealth in shades of taupe and beige dictated by one’s local Homeowners’ Association.”

 

IMMATERIALISM

Quentin S. Crisp

“We have become used to the convergence of the human and the automaton. Many Internet bots are more articulate than many humans simply because of the decay of thought and expression in the latter. Therefore, there now exist many humans who would not pass the Turing Test. This is ironic in itself, but there is a further irony. As the numbers of such people increase they must surely approach a tipping point after which their increase becomes their decrease. That is, they will increase and decrease at one and the same time. This paradox is possible because, since the judgement as to who passes the Turing Test will rely more and more on others like themselves, they will begin to pass the test again in greater numbers.”

“What we call ‘fantasy’ is not the only artistic tool against materialism. The opposite tool, too, can be used—what has been called ‘naturalism’. Karl Jaspers writes: “anyone who philosophizes strives for scientific knowledge, for it is the only way to achieve genuine nonknowledge, it is as though the most magnificent insights could be achieved only through man’s quest for the limit at which cognition runs aground.” In other words, exhaust the phenomena and you will be presented with the remainder—the beyond, freedom, the spirit. So in art, chip away everything but the phenomena and by contrast that within which the phenomena are suspended will become clearer and clearer.”

“The spooky is the gateway to the numinous. There is a borderland of the spooky where clocks and watches go haywire. There are other manifestations, but these are too numerous to list. At some point, the passage into the Underworld is always necessary. You sign a waiver at the entrance. You fall. You buy a one-way ticket on the ghost train, unsure of your return. “Abandon control, all ye who enter here.””

 

OCCULTISM

Damian Murphy

“Our holy books will be legion and of staggering variety: instruction booklets for console games that never reached the market, infomercials for sketchy investments recorded onto Betamax cassettes, wallpaper motifs culled from 1960s Belgian catalogs, and blueprints drafted by architects whose ambitions eclipsed their means. In these ephemeral relics can be found the gates to hidden palaces of initiatory splendor. One needs only be so clever as to find the means of ingress.”

“Lascivious cyphers in hexadecimal Kabbalah will be scrawled in the margins of the apocrypha; we’ll craft expansion modules for electronic toys that elucidate our maxims in the language of the birds; our initials will be carved in luminiferous aether and every manner of arcana will be attributed to the letters, then we’ll permute them, weigh them, transpose them, and combine them to form an alphabet of artifice and triviality. We’ll pepper our canticles with preposterous lies and blatant contradictions. Only when the Akashic Record has been thoroughly falsified may our axioms be read between the lines.”

“The likes of broken down amusement parks and Soviet-era video arcades are especially pliable to Neo-Decadent ends. The skeletal remains of a mold-consumed roller coaster are a veritable chapel of the Mysteries. The enterprising necromancer might ply their trade in the evacuated playgrounds of Pripyat, while the theurgically-inclined can pursue apotheosis in the ruined bordellos of the Golden Triangle.”

 

ELECTRONIC GAMING

Arturo Calderon

Hadrian Flyte

Colby Smith

“As officially-sanctioned online platforms will not satisfy the soul-consuming need for ludic experiences in the post-“pay-to-win” world, the Neo-Decadents will have to immerse themselves in virus-infested emulator download sites, where handheld consoles such as the Wonderswan and the Neo Geo Pocket Color can show us glimpses of a cancelled-too-soon kaleidoscopic twenty-first century entertainment experience soon to be replaced by insipid and mind-numbing mobile phone games with more advertisements than Nathan Road in Hong Kong at the turn of the century.”

“Electronic games must get rid of goals, time-wasting soul-numbing trophies that reward gamers for sticking to obsolete parameters which do not let them explore every inch of the virtual worlds to which they have access. Brand new concepts and outside-the-box approaches to gameplay must not only be encouraged but demanded from every developer and designer. An offspring of LSD Simulator and Yume Nikki without the unpleasant feeling of dread after every step. A GTA-inspired sandbox game without the gangster lifestyle escapism, just a vast area where you can roam free, from hospitals to school, from canyons to outer space and all the points in between. Burning Gothic cathedrals where a magical girl can attain Nirvana with the help of a César Vallejo-quoting non-playable character. The centre of the Big Bang itself from the perspective of a newborn black hole. The console as a Japanese-developed, Chinese-manufactured, American-imported TARDIS that can be a golden key for our inner doors of perception, a mind-altering drug for straight-edgers, or just a glorified paperweight that will eventually download the newest version of a boring and dull franchise perpetuating itself through time. A Neo-Decadent knows how to choose wisely.”

“As a total abandonment of the industry-imposed, controlled-movement methods inside the digital oneiric architecture of electronic gaming, most people have developed their own way of avoiding the tedious task of simply going from point A to B and get rid of the almost coitus interruptus conclusions from what must be a more kaleidoscopic experience. The same way memorizing and studying close-to-your-heart verses from a long-form Modernist poem can lead to the revelation of savoury secrets hidden between lines, spending long insomnia-ridden nights can reveal wormholes waiting for you behind portraits in a polygonal Mushroom Kingdom, or that the combination of blue-and-orange portals can guide you through retro-futuristic edge lands while running away from an egomaniacal AI in less time than necessary to decide which would be the best outfit for hitting the arcades. Breaking the unbreakable and seeing the invisible should be spiritual dogmas for the Neo-Decadent Gamer. A third-eye opening approach to a 48-hour-long RPG where instead of facing an eldritch abomination in an existential duel with the fate of entire galaxies at stake, you decide to go on a pleasant side quest in order to grow radishes and cabbages, the freshest and most delicious vegetables that those 32-bit High Fantasy worlds have ever seen. As fast as a Bugatti Chiron Super Sport 300 or as slow as a three-toed sloth, there is no goal to stick to except for the absolute pursuit of jouissance.”

 

INTERPERSONAL RELATIONSHIPS

Justin Isis

“Friends and lovers, parents and children, husbands and wives, husbands and husbands, wives and wives, employers and employees, teachers and students, masters and servants: we have witnessed them all, and all of them bore us. Almost all artforms have seen increased specialization, increased renovation of generic conventions over time—except interpersonal relationships. Technology soars ahead, but our repertoire of human connections remains curiously, almost medievally limited. We satisfy ourselves with surface agitations, trivial variations. Much has been made of the recent generation-wide transition away from monogamy and stifling domestic and familial bonds, but conceptually, little has changed. Minor reconfigurations are taken for revolutions, while the dull heart of convention thuds away, rarely varying its rhythm.”

“Most people acquire enemies haphazardly—if they acquire them at all. Petty antipathies result in grudges, which are often barely sustained past the initial infatuation or bloom of negative passion. With the abolition of public duels, we have lost not only the necessity of taking our convictions and actions seriously (lest there be immediate mortal consequences), but any real conception of enmity itself. As a result, we muddle about, secretly trying to defeat ourselves, or else fixate on perceived foes who are usually little more than fantasy figures (televised phantoms of politicians and celebrities). Fad philosophies of mindfulness and non-attachment starve our honest antagonism to a miserable, childish spite.

Ideal enmity, consisting of the imposition of strict limits and the long-lasting maintenance of concern for another person, is one of the strongest interpersonal relationships. Enemies should be assigned to each other at birth and should sustain the relationship for several decades at the minimum (a formal exchange of enmity rings may be completed in young adulthood to signify the union). Severe penalties, such as the amputation of a toe or finger, should be imposed for breaking enmity. To permanently opt out of the relationship, a severance ceremony should be staged, in which the party seeking to leave should admit their personal failings.

Without necessarily exceeding the bounds of the law, platonic enemies should be expected to discourage each other in all things, which will, of course, require regular monitoring of each other’s activities. News of misfortune must be greeted with triumph.”

 

ENGLISH POETRY

Jeremy Reed

“Ballard’s fiction as an indication of sub-scenes with an insider’s code to placing tomorrow before today, occupies no categorizable genre, except the eponymous term Ballardian. His novels explore the collapse of the distinction between vision and madness, most often in the socially acceptable as carriers of the potentially emergent psychopath. His visionary subversion of cultural forms in fiction arguably finds its interface in synthetic biology that attempts to redesign organisms for useful purposes by engineering them to have new abilities. Ballard re-treated fiction, having briefly trained in medicine, as a biomedical module that could incorporate near-future technologies, in the same way that synthetic biology seeks to create new biological parts, devices and systems, or to redesign systems already present in nature. Genetic engineering in the modification of an organism’s genome through biotechnology could appropriately be assigned a Neo-Decadent context within science, little different in its textual applications to how Huysmans, the author of the seminally decadent Against Nature (1884), plays with altered states through the introduction of synaesthesia. The two occupy a similar resonance, separate in time, but ultimately not so different in their design to re-edit the body’s capacity to experience the new real through enhanced cellular discourse.”

“Do we view Neo-Decadence then, as a technocultural bacteriology, an inherited sensibility individualised into its expansion, or as a subjective phenomenon launched in opposition to the ethical and moral restrictions imposed by society’s scientific methodologies and modelling practices?

To me, it’s about the individual or type being sucked forward into ultimate novelty by the forces of imagination that shape the new real into its appropriately expansive psychic postcode. Both in my own practice and in my reading, writing is only outstanding to me through the quality and originality of its imagery; as stripped of the image it remains nothing but words and ideas, like a non-alcoholic drink. And the image is a right-brain involuntary experience, the right hemisphere predominating in perceptual, holistic, manipulo-spatial and gestalt formations. Intensified visual imagery is not only seminal to Neo-Decadent writing as neural information, but also in its appeal to all the senses as the unit of behaviour or experience imagined. And this is what has always distinguished Decadent and Neo-Decadent writing from Baudelaire to Gibson, the vehicle of kinetic imagery as the equivalent of timeframes that are unforgettably filmic. I simply can’t read in the absence of imagery; strings of words don’t interest me. The image isn’t an accessory, it’s the heartbeat of compelling poetry or fiction—it’s the impromptu gestalt that makes it all happen.”

 

AMERICAN POETRY

Paul Cunningham

“When I read James Pate’s Flowers Among the Carrion: Essays on the Gothic in Contemporary Poetry, I found myself thinking of vast, monstrous night as a hyperobject in the same way Timothy Morton has approached global climate change as a hyperobject. If night is a metaphor for the unknown in the Gothic, then I can understand why Gothicism keeps springing up in contemporary poetry. It feels like an appropriate response to the Anthropocene, to global climate change. Metaphorically, Decadence embraces night—inevitable death. But Decadence also feels like a warming. Warming like the earth itself. Burning up like Walter Pater’s “gem-like flame” or Gustave Moreau’s sublime painting of Salome: “[…] glowing coals, as violet as jets of gas, as blue as burning alcohol, as white as the rays of a star. The horrific head blazes, still bleeding, leaving clots of dark purple on the ends of the beard and hair” (À rebours).

The light or gem-like flame of Decadence is not the same thing as the contrasting “daylight” (optimistic, good-humored U.S. poetry) Pate mentions in Flowers Among the Carrion. Decadence contains a fleeting, blood-stained light—fueled by sickness and oppression, society’s wars and violence. It is the last momentum ents of light just before nightfall.

Whether I think of myself as a Graveyard Poet leaning into Night, a Gothicized Decadent, or a zombie-Romantic, there’s a lot of influences at work in my poetry and I see all of those things as valuable to how I approach the Anthropocene.”

“Given Bataille’s emphasis on hidden and dirty root systems, the etymology of the word “obscene” is important. Coming from the Latin (obscēnus), if something has been labeled ob-scene, this means one of society’s many repressive state apparatuses has decided a particular image should be ob-structed from the view of spectators. The ob-scene is what’s not seen.

The image of a field of flowers in a poem alone isn’t Decadent simply because it is an image containing many flowers. There has to be too many of them. An obscene number. One must consider them a nuisance. A threat to Taste. Threateningly kitschy. Too much.

If the obscenity of flowers poses a threat to tasteful or overtly masculine art, then that is precisely what makes flowers a valuable tool for New Decadent art.”

 

NATURE

Sailor Stephens

“A modern dandy would do well to draw energy from growth, decay, chaos. In the age of Instagram, Naturalism is dead. Pure artifice is the default.

In contrast to the drab mediocrity of Dollskill & “dad trainers” & YouTube makeup tutorials, modern Nature has a fresh aesthetic. Forget the dreary old woman of the past, the New Nature is all grand gestures & pathetic fallacy.

A dead rabbit in its furs & red jewels lying in a Tesco carpark. A ruined office block with trees exploding through the walls, heavy with rotting apples.”

“Go moonbathe in archive McQueen then cast banishing rituals on your landlord.”

 

AGAINST NEO-PASSÉISM

Justin Isis

Damian Murphy

Gaurav Monga

Quentin S. Crisp

LC von Hessen

“The Neo-Passéist type is a recognizable fixture of the current psychosocial landscape. There are, among others, meliorative Neo-Passéists, nihilist Neo-Passéists, spiritual Neo-Passéists and literary/artistic Neo-Passéists. All are creatures of glaring internal contradictions, and while contradictions are useful for producing interest when ground together intentionally (as this manifesto itself does, being the work of multiple authors with differing views), the unwitting Neo-Passéist is a mere vector or vehicle for ambient market forces and their associated manners, unaware of how ridiculous they appear. The absolutely sincere, guilty, anxious and agonized cast is characteristic of most current art.

Neo-Passéism is the unexamined artistic logic of capitalist realism.”

“Capitalism, having appropriated all available physical markets, has moved on to conquering time. Its success can be measured by the extent to which we are trapped in numerous overlapping “era markets” running on commodified nostalgia. The cycle has accelerated, so that while a fallow period of ten to twenty years once preceded each sequence of revivals and remakes, the profitable gravity is now irresistible, and the 1980s—dragged back from the dead at the start of the millennium—show no sign of ending. This “capitalist time hole” has produced an eternal present, with no possibility of escape from its event horizon. Hauntology remains only a shadowy awareness of cancelled futures, and the deterioration of art results as “creatives” are expected to engage with recognizable “content” to expand vast corporate franchises. The production mechanics of this “intellectual property” then become the governing principles of creation. The emotions of Neo-Passéists overflow into these tired vessels, and the final result is a sort of constipated myth cycle, the promise of various dithering apocalypses that never fully arrive. With this new feudalism of film franchises, fiction series from corporate publishing houses, and repetitive gallery shows displaying the artists of the past (all of it presided over by the academic guilds), we have reached an entirely medieval age.”

“Genres have replaced proper stylistic movements. This has resulted in endless tedium; therefore we proclaim market-driven, intentional genre writing to be another symptom of Neo-Passéism. The inherent value of genre, once subversive, has become its own orthodoxy. Against it stands the clerical call for “high art” and a return to “Tradition”. Both these positions are untenable, and so the blasphemy of disdaining genre must be committed, while at the same time the pompous reactionary esteem for liberal humanist social novels and the like must be deflated like a gaseous balloon. We will simply ransack everyday life as it pleases us!!! There is nothing to be said about “the human” that is not readily apparent to a child. At the same time we are BORED with all genres, corporate spectacles, straitjackets of profitable rules (the mere recombination of tropes does not constitute innovation or interest). Away with the tedium of crime, horror, fantasy and the rest. Away, too, with “transgression”—the tamest and most predictable of them all. To avoid stagnation, we will ensure that all of our tropes cancel themselves out. We will combine tawdry eroticism with statistical anecdotes, and antinatalist parables with romantic Young Adult adventures. We will exalt violently diverse artistic personalities, Post-Naturalist prose styles, “bad writing” whenever necessary. Pieties and epiphanies will be ridiculed and cancelled.”

“The immense freedom permitted by the Internet and other advancing technologies calls for a truly crosscultural, altermodern artistic movement. Not limiting ourselves to English, we will establish Spanish, Japanese, Urdu, Arabic, Chinese, Russian, and other Neo-Decadent literatures. All writers must now be translators, and monolingual types will be regarded under suspicion of provincialism. Demographics and frontiers must be constantly fractured, and artistic concerns rotated into new contexts. To relieve boredom, Neo-Decadent factions will be established on every continent and, ideally, in every country, always with the aim of undermining the pompous, tendentious, sincere, academic, intellectual, stultifying, risible and outdated impersonators of writers and artists who in most cases comprise the publishing industries and art scenes. Fashion, music, writing, art, cooking, sexuality and all other areas of everyday life will be dismantled and reformulated whenever boredom threatens to constrain us.”

 

 

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p.s. Hey. This weekend the blog is being taken over by the Neo-Decadents so they can introduce you to a new big book containing their Neo-Decadent manifestos regarding writing and, well, the whole world. If you don’t know the viewpoint and works of these reinventing literary titans on a mission, here’s your chance. It’s fascinating stuff. Please spend the local portion of your weekend getting familiar, and, if you like, responding in your vaunted fashions. Big thanks to the Neo-Decadents for entrusting this blog with their daring-do. ** David Ehrenstein, Hi. Ah, that sounds like a most pleasant birthday, good. When I was in 6th grade, my parents had a friend named Marvin Lee who was a professional magician. Lee Marvin was very famous at the time. I got this goofy idea to have a party and invite my friends and tell them Marvin Lee would be performing at the party — my parents asked him, and he agreed to — gambling that they would think I meant Lee Marvin and attend in hordes. And it worked: a ton of kids showed up. And then Marvin Lee, who looked absolutely nothing like Lee Marvin,  performed his magic act, and the kids were very pissed off that he wasn’t Lee Marvin and booed him, even though his magic act was pretty good. And everyone — the kids, my parents, Marvin Lee — were very mad at me afterwards, and I learned an important lesson. There’s very good art criticism, but it’s true that you almost never find it in mainstream media, rather in art magazines. Basically, the same as with film, music, books and the like. ** Sheree Rose, Sheree! Soothing your soul, especially at 5 am, is a massive accomplishment, so I am seriously blushing over here. Big love, me. ** Ferdinand, Well, you’re most welcome. Great about the post. Whenever you’re ready. I don’t drink alcohol almost ever, but I know from my complaining friends that there are buying restrictions here too. My weekend? Gisele Vienne has started early work on a new piece that she wants me to write the text for, and, on Sunday morning, I’m going to watch some try-out rehearsals for the first time so I can start getting my head into what she wants. Otherwise, hoping to hear back from the person doing the budget for Zac’s and my new film, working on some writing, blah blah. You? ** Misanthrope, Me too! What were the odds? There couldn’t be a bigger nerd than the person who makes this blog, I reckon. I think nerdiness is often another word for ‘more intelligent’? Oh, man, I sure hope for the very, very best with your mom. That’s really unnerving. Is she feeling better? David sometimes sounds like one of those quirky, minor teenaged characters in horror movies who always end up getting slaughtered. ** Dominik, Hi, Dom!! Awesome, so happy you liked it! Exciting about the SCAB contributor/author’s book! And, yeah, I of course hope things do pick up otherwise. Over here with our 6 pm curfew, an 8 pm curfew almost sounds heavenly, ha ha. So hoping you don’t get locked down again. Us too. It’s a constant threat. Zac has my draft of the possible script-turned-fiction thing, and he’s away and not very communicative, so I’m waiting for his opinion and input so we can move forward or write it off as a failure. I think he’s still healthy. I’m waiting to get news from him. Ha ha, that engagement ring. Love looking at himself in the mirror and deciding, ‘You know? Maybe my man bun is not as cool and sexy as I’ve been thinking’, G. Great weekend! ** James Champagne, Hi. I made the insertion, thank you for running interference. Great luck finishing off the inventory without excess brain and body impact. ** _Black_Acrylic, Hi, Ben. Did you get to watch Leeds? Dare I ask if they held up their part of the fan-heroes bargain? Oh, I suspect that being downshifted from great coffee to weak shit has everything to do with the concentration downsizing. High hopes that your weekend will have some unanticipated sparkle and blissfulness. ** T, Hi, ha ha, happy to delete the word ‘uni’ from my vocabulary until further notice. My weekend plans are sketchily laid out in my directive to Ferdinand an inch or two north of here. Enjoy your relatively safe friend. That sounds so nice. It is undervalued, isn’t it? Everybody announces but too few pronounce. Or something. Lovely Japanese shirt, needless to say. Honestly, I just gathered as many pronouncements as I thought would be too many in an interesting way, lined them up, and then counted them, so 166 was just boringly factual. I do intend to find every possible instance of the pronounceable in my weekend. How did you know? I hope yours is full of mind boggling Japanese t-shirt slogan-like incidents. ** Bzzt, Hey, Q. Bumping it was fun. It’s a cool piece to boot. We’re getting more and more spring-like here by the hour. It’s kind of sad. Although the warmth is kind of a guilty pleasure. You were a Tumblr guy? I was just a Tumblr robber. I’m okay with Richard Brautigan’s stuff but not a passionate fan or anything. Yes, I just saw that signature in my searching and thought it was funny. Basically, everything I found and used was a comedy decision. I’m fighting off feeling excited to make the film until our producers feel confident enough that the funds can be raised give us the green light, but, that said, I guess I’m excited. No, wait, anxious and impatient. Well, the earliest we would shoot the film is in October, and I won’t be surprised if it ends up being more like early next year, so it’s too early to know how cautious we’ll have to be. We’ll do what needs to be done. You might as well apply for grants, yeah. After being turned down for every writing grant in the world for years and years, I quit even trying. There’s always at least one person every committee who says, ‘No way am I delegating money to that sicko Dennis Cooper’, and there’s no way around that. I hope you get to the beach ASAP. Even this weekend? Have a great one in any case. ** Steve Erickson, Hi. Everyone, Here is Mr. Erickson’s review of the film ‘Supernova’. The ‘Baise moi’ freak out over here seems very weird even over here. I vaguely recall ‘Superfly’ being a lot of fun? But what a great soundtrack no matter what! ** Okay. Surrender your whatevers to the Neo-Decadents, you guys. See you on Monday.