smallexit

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A stereograph celebrating factory production of thread. Many bobbins of thread coil in a great sky-lit factory space, the many machines manned by a handful of people. Manned? Some are children. I activate the double-photograph, composer Rick Reed suggests the machine din. Your heart bleeding for the kids? The children will surely be rescued and by their bosses! 'Boys,' they will say, 'Have we got a war for you.’

Ken Jacobs writes on his Capitalism: Child Labor (via https://www.eai.org/titles/capitalism-child-labor)

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A dandy, throwing a trash bag to the side walk Pinches the shoulders of the jacket, and Continues

Brooklyn

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Lay down these words Before your mind like rocks.             placed solid, by hands In choice of place, set Before the body of the mind             in space and time: Solidity of bark, leaf, or wall             riprap of things: Cobble of milky way,             straying planets, These poems, people,             lost ponies with Dragging saddles—             and rocky sure-foot trails. The worlds like an endless             four-dimensional Game of Go.             ants and pebbles In the thin loam, each rock a word             a creek-washed stone Granite: ingrained             with torment of fire and weight Crystal and sediment linked hot             all change, in thoughts, As well as things.

Gary Snyder, “Riprap” from Riprap and Cold Mountain Poems

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If you are asking me what the individual can do right now, in a political sense, I'd have to say he can't do all that much. Speaking for myself, I am more concerned with the transformation of the individual, which to me is much more important than the so-called political revolution.

William S. Burroughs, With William Burroughs: A Report From The Bunker

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We have a new type of rule now. Not one-man rule, or rule of aristocracy or plutocracy, but of small groups elevated to positions of absolute power by random pressures, and subject to political and economic factors that leave little room for decision. They are representatives of abstract forces who have reached power through surrender of self. The iron-willed dictator is a thing of the past. There will be no more Stalins, no more Hitlers. The rulers of this most insecure of all worlds are rulers by accident, inept, frightened pilots at the controls of a vast machine they cannot understand, calling in experts to tell them which buttons to push.

William S. Burroughs, Interzone

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These “luminous new landscapes” were worlds beyond work, where drudgery’s dreary repetitiveness gave way to drifting explorations of strange terrains. Listened to now, these tracks [Tomorrow Never Knows by Beatles] describe the very conditions necessary for their own production, which is to say, access to a certain mode of time, time which allows a deep absorption.

Mark Fisher, in ‘Acid Communism’ in K-Punk

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Not a Zen

Zen and quietness are different beings. Majority of Japanese are atheists, or non-practicing Buddhists or Shintonists. When salary men commute to their office, they are not in the state of Zen, even if one is impressed by the serenity during the rush hours.

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You look up when you feel the need for elevation. And I look down because I am elevated. Who among you can laugh and be elevated at the same time? Whoever climbs the highest mountains laughs at all tragic plays and tragic seriousness.

Friedrich Neitzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

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Erich Auerbach points out in his excellent Dante: Poet of the Secular World, ‘possess a mystical beloved, they all have approximately the same very curious experience of love; to them all Amor bestows or withholds gifts that resemble an illumination more than sensual pleasure; all are subject to a kind of secret bond that determines their inner and perhaps also their outer lives.’

Walter Benjamin, ‘Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia’

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Joe Colley defines his work as the search for "the mystery of the obvious" (2004), for how composition may not produce an image, of itself, of the composer, of a project, of music, of the world or oneself, but rather give itself as a sound experience. He has called one of his albums Stop Listening (Colley 2000).

Theatre Noise: The Sound of Performance (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2011)

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“You are willingly mutated by intimate machines, abducted by audio into the populations of your bodies. Sound machines throw you onto the shores of the skin you’re in. The hypersensual cyborg experiences herself as a galaxy of audiotactile sensations. You are not censors but sensors, not aesthetes but kinaesthetes . You are sensationalists. You are the newest mutants incubated in wombspeakers. Your mother, your first sound. The bedroom, the party, the dancefloor, the rave: these are the labs where the 21st C nervous systems assemble themselves, the matrices of the Futurhythmachinic Discontinuum. The future is a much better guide to the present than the past.”

—

More Brilliant than the sun

operating system for the redesign of sonic reality

Kodwo Eshun

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...techno as a means to deconstruct and rebuild again. Set up an area of tension, loose it in the flow of grooves. Magnifying some detail out of proportion, regroup around that and slowly knit a texture. Expand.

Thomas Fehlman as quoted in http://thomasfehlmann.bandcamp.com/album/los-lagos

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Nous sommes pleins de choses qui nous jettent hors de nous-mêmes.

Jean Cocteau (Le Grand Ecart)

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Nature is unsentimental. Death is built in.

Carl Sagan, Shadows Of Forgotten Ancestors: A Search For Who We Are, 1992

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....still, one might claim that it is enough for photographers to be quiet. However, this is merely a dandyism or hopelessness for leading one to understand.

Koji Taki in ���Eyes and What are not Eyes” in ed. Koji Taki and Takuma Nakahira, First Abandon the World of Pseudo-Certainty, 1970. My own translation

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Winter solitude– in a world of one colour the sound of wind

Bashō, from The Essential Haiku: Versions of Bashō , Buson & Issa (ed. and trans. Robert Hass)

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