Moonlight Rhizome
2025
Flower Moon: starts April [], 2025 - ends May 26, 2025, 11:04 pm, w/ rising of the New Buck Moon (Full Flower Moon 25.5-12) (source: Old Farmer's Almanac website)
- Mircea Certarescu, Solenoid (cite The Untranslated blog's review + long video essay review/analysis on YouTube I watched recently)
- Agnes Martin: overall career as an Artist, focusing on the With My Back to the World painting series and documentary (and the phrase itself: "with my back to the world")... a particular focus on Martin's idea of "going below the line" (discussed in the documentary)
- Jason Mohaghegh on "Techniques of Evil" (Acid Horizon episode)... Kafka as an "evil" writer; evil as "1/3 God, 1/3 human, 1/3 animal"...
- Cy Twombly, and John Waters on Cy Twombly, and "outsider" artists more generally: Dan Olson's "I Don't Know James Rolfe" (asking the question: what makes someone an "outsider"...? who gets to be in the artworld, and who stays out (or, likewise, with the Olson video: who gets to be a "filmmaker", and who just stays a YouTuber?)? despite the fact that the same things are happening on both sides of the border, ultimately... compare Twombly w/ eg Adolf Wolfli... and eg Hilma af Klint adds another religious/occult dimension to this...)
- Vi Hart, "Twelve Tones": "new shapes, new shapes, new shapes!"
- Related to above... Benjamin's "Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction"... I'm thinking, also, about John Green's repetitive autograph signing and Sharpie circle drawings inspired by Hiroyuki Doi... the comfort of repetition, and its direct linkages to capitalist production processes and etc
- For the video: do a series of drawings, one after the other, shot in a simple Bresson-style, or like how Rivette shoots painting in La Belle Noiseuse: just watching action take place
- Artists at and/or influenced by Black Mountain College: Twombly is one; John Cage would be an important one for me... Rauschenberg...
- Terry Zwigoff's Crumb (related to above: borders between art and porn, outsiders/underground and insiders...)
- The politics and praxis of erotica: "desiring-production"
- Umberto Eco: The Name of the Rose, Foucault's Pendulum, The Open Work
- Lynch: Twin Peaks (with an emphasis on The Return and Fire Walk with Me); the "LA trilogy" of Lost Highway, Mulholland Drive, INLAND EMPIRE; The Straight Story ("my most experimental film"); perhaps also Eraserhead, The Elephant Man, Wild at Heart... (even Dune)...
- Themes, symbols, etc: "electricity" (Hegel's concept of "force" from PoS applies); cars + roads + speed, especially as related to identity; transformation, possession, American dreams and nightmares...
- Cronenberg's Crash (similar themes as above); also, Cronenberg's The Shrouds (watched at Keystone Art Cinema); perhaps also Videodrome, The Fly, more from his career... his vision of "the new flesh"...
- May also want to dig into the source material in Ballard's Crash (Zadie Smith on Crash: paraphrasing, "everything uses everything"...)
- Hegel's Phenomenology, especially focusing on "Force and the Understanding", as well as the reading for the upcoming Acid Horizon seminar
- Edward Yang: Yi Yi (thinking about the "time-image" in relation to this film... the very profound, somewhat enigmatic way life is suspended in this "space of time" in the film (not sure I'm capturing it, maybe getting ahead of myself: for now, I just want to feel the film very directly and in an open way)), and maybe more of his films (not hard to complete his filmography: only 7 features); maybe, also, more "Taiwanese New Wave": Tsai Ming-liang and Hou Hsiao-hsien
- Interesting... from the Terrorizers (Yang film) Wikipedia: "Terrorizers is a part of the New Taiwan Cinema.[1] "Famously characterized by Marxist scholar Fredric Jameson as the postmodern film,[2][3] the film was likened by Yang himself to a puzzle where the pleasure lies in rearranging a multitude of relationships between characters, spaces, and genres.""
- "Daily life allows only weak sensory-motor connections to
survive, and replaces the action-image by pure optical and sound
images, opsigns and sonsigns. In Ozu, there is no universal line
which connects moments of decision, and links the dead to the
living, as in Mizoguchi; nor is there any breathing space or
encompasser to contain a profound question, as in Kurosawa.
Ozu's spaces are raised to the state of any-space-whatevers,
whether by disconnection, or vacuity (here again Ozu may be
considered one of the first inventors)." Deleuze, Cinema 2, pp. 15-16... I like this description a lot, and the same applies to Yang, I think
- Misericordia (watched at Kan-Kan w/ Dad on Mother's Day)
- The Beast (watched on Criterion Channel)
- Welles' The Trial (watched w/ parents on Criterion Channel)... more from his filmography?
- Deleuze's Cinema 2: The Time-Image
- Geek Love (?) - for "weird fiction" book club at Morgenstern's in Bloomington, IN
- Foucault's "Friendship as a Way of Life" for the Acid Horizon "friendship" reading group
- Laruelle: the Machinic Unconscious Happy Hour podcast and reading group as my introduction (Taylor Adkins mostly, given his translation work); concepts of "non-philosophy"/"non-standard philosophy" (and, relatedly, "non-photography"), the "One" and "vision-in-One", in major works; work with quantum physics in Non-standard philosophy
- Orbital patterns: eg, Kepler ("harmony of the spheres")... connections to medieval alchemy more generally...
- Ryan Ruby's Context Collapse
- Emily Dickinson: her life and work as an Artist, Visionary, hermetically sealed in her room
- More on this txt doc
Buck Moon: June [], 2025 - July [], 2025