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Tuesday, July 1, 2008


The desert is the wellspring of revelation, genetically and physiologically alien, sensorily austere, aesthetically abstract, historically inimical. Its forms are boldly suggestive. The mind is beset by light and space, the kinesthetic novelty of aridity, high temperature, and wind. The desert sky is encircling, majestic, with nary a trace of probable smile. In other habitats, the rim of sky above the horizon may be broken or obscured; here, together with the overhead portion, it is infinitely vaster than that of rolling countryside or forest lands. In an unobstructed sky the clouds appear larger, sometimes grandly reflecting Earth's curvature on their concave underbellies. From the perspective of a solitary gaping cloud, the angularity of desert landforms surely imparts a nucleopatriphobic architecture.

To the desert go the prophets and hermits; through deserts roam pilgrims and exiles, billionaires and geniuses. Here the leaders of all great religions have sought the spiritual pulse of retreat—not to escape, rather to confirm life in its purest essence.

—Peter Schlepf, Man on Land: The Aesthetics of Nature


Schloss Neuhardenberg

On the horizon viewed from Schloss Neuhardenberg's discreet watchtower looms exemplary prequiem subject Ernst Jünger's coiffure: LINK.

 

Thursday, June 12, 2008

Lake Zürich
Lake Zürich


I have received much love from my parents.
Through my work I show my gratefulness to them.
—Sheela Birnstiel

In Spring 2008, awarded Switzerland's Eiger Stiftung scholarship (LINK), David Woodard served as Writer in Residence at Schloss Wiesenburg, a 12th Century castle nestled in the frosty GDR-tinged hinterlands between Bach's Leipzig and Eno's Berlin: LINK. His Summer 2008 exhibition at Cabaret Voltaire, Zürich, co-curated by CV Director Adrian Notz, includes elegant and heartfelt contributions from Ma Anand Sheela and Christian Kracht: LINK. A report on the post-mortem thought processes of Ernst Jünger appears in Bunter Staub. Ernst Jünger im Gegenlicht (2008, Matthes & Seitz), a handsome anthology edited by Alexander Pschera and also featuring an essay by bigwig philologist Eckhart Nickel, published on the occasion of the 10th anniversary of Jünger's passing: LINK. Max Planck neuroscientist Jonas Obleser questions Woodard about Jünger, and includes a brief excerpt, on his smashing WallOfTime.Net website (LINK)—which borrows its name from Jünger's 1959 work of speculative futurism, At the Wall of Time. In the luxurious ashen confines of Solution 9: The Great Pyramid (2008, Sternberg Press) is a candid report on the conception and composition of "A Cornerstone Cringle": LINK.

 

Tuesday, February 12, 2008

David Woodard with bigwig Swiss graphic designer Chris Eggli and bigwig German graphic designer Tom Ising (Photo Christian Kracht)


Friday, February 8, 2008

Bigwig quillsman Ingo Niermann with wife / bigwig artist Antje Majewski (2008)

 

MD72 is a prison cell for couples in Heaven who are too lovely and kind to close their eyes just yet. Outside the window, at the periphery of the Circles of Time, stands a Wall of Time absorbing the gravity of eternity—a time grave: LINK.

 

Puerto Rican-American artist Luis Rafael Berríos-Negrón has created a series of seven post-mortem puzzles, ventiocho de diciembre del dos mil siete, each a collage assembled on a collected poster by the bigwig Cuban-American artist Félix González-Torres, involving images clipped from publications printed the day after Ms. Benazir Bhutto was neutralized. "The Guardian Freitag/Viernes 28.12.2007" (right), on display beginning today for a 3-day (and possibly longer) exhibition at Nice & Fit Gallery, in Berlin, is framed, almost interestingly, by a faux Persian rug: LINK.



Tuesday, February 5, 2008

Our great teacher Maharishi Mahesh Yogi has crossed the Great Divide today, leaving behind his earthly vehicle.



Thursday, January 31, 2008

Hauptstrasse 155, Berlin

 

Momus examines David Bowie's old apartment, which has become something of a hub for corrective oral surgery: LINK.



Wednesday, January 23, 2008

K. Kraus: Ohne Titel (Spiegellampe), 2006
 
Sr. Cristián Reymond L. & Sr. Carlos Cruz P.


In Kreuzberg, bigwig artist Cerith Wyn Evans is exhibiting a humongous chandelier that silently recites the entirety of Siegfried Marx's Astrophotography: Stages of Photographic Development, causing the wary evening stroller along Mehringdamm to fear it might be an elderly woman silently auto-conducting her Morse Code prequiem:
LINK.


Sunday, January 6, 2008

(Photos 2007 Katje Brinckmann)

The wooden layers of table we had glued together did not yield the hidden image of a fawn, nor a lifting of the forehead, only a subconscious counting of cigarettes in the ashtray. Emptiness of view to the left, the accompaniment of sparkling water to the right. Courting the unconscious, one's lips remain quiet. At a party a song plays to which all dance—all is one. The song reaches its end, and the Iron Curtain is stuck open: LINK.

The current issue of glossy Art Exis, published in Paris for collectors of Russian art, perseverates on Art Basel Miami Beach: LINK.

 

Thursday, November 29, 2007

Paraguay (Photo 2007 Heidi Hattestein)
 
She scrimped and saved, and photojournalist Heidi Hattestein's visit to Paraguay, including a sidestep to lakeside Hotel del Lago in the Asunción suburb of San Bernardino, where Bernhard Förster crossed the Great Divide and David Woodard happened to be brunching, has almost yielded a work of beauty—"Her ble ikke den amerikanske drømmen til," in the December issue of the Norwegian magazine Vagabond. Meticulously groomed and coiffed, appearing almost coquettish in bright red pants, gold sandals, and a Versace overblouse with silkscreened Nastassja Kinski and Jesse James Hollywood images, this gracious doyenne of frequent Sunday morning brunches filled exquisite vases with fresh calla lilies plucked from the lakeshore whilst kielbasa, lox and bagels, omelettes, latkes and apricot brandy beckoned colonial bluebloods: PDF.

 

Monday, Ides of October, 2007

Men and Groceries, Leningrad

 
The eldest son of the dandy who almost blew up Hitler pens his German gossip column from the open porch of a bucolic Juniper Hills timeshare. For details, contact Applied Wholesale Mortgage and/or their Los Angeles real estate partner Premier Los Angeles County Homes: LINK.
 

Novelist Convalescing Post-Surgery, Munich (Photo 2007 Duane)

 

Monday, October 1, 2007

Freud's Dreams Museum, Leningrad (Photo 2007 Oleg Artjushkov)

 

The Dreamachine exhibition at Freud's Dreams Museum, in the childhood home of Lou Salomé (LINK), yielded record attendance for the East-European psychoanalytic axisexceeded in vastness of bodycount only by David Woodard's Sunday evening lecture, which examined the role of tree worship in the history of religion and the concomitant role of flickering sunlight in the development of the primitive human brain (Oct. 2: LINK / Oct. 1: PDF / Sept. 28: LINK / Sept. 26: LINK / Sept. 23: LINK / Sept. 22: VID). The Dreamachine on display was lent to Freud's Dreams Museum by the distinguished German collector Alexander Schröder. Within the contraption's motorized lampbase, one of artist Martina Schumacher's Circle Mirror Pictures (LINK), handsomely rendered in miniature, served dreamers proletarian (JPG), tribal (JPG) and normal (JPG), at 88 rpm.

In the courtyard a commie angel with handicam, through a series of well-chiseled facial expressions and reasonable if prefab questions (e.g., "Is it possible for a machine to induce creativity?"), induced Woodard's mind to wander—typical. Fortunately, a subsequent indoctrination was also shot and snippets spliced into the comely young man's accommodating vignette: VID.

 

Saturday, Ides of September, 2007

 
Click pic for Opera, or here for Eckhart Nickel: LINK. As Momus delivers a keynote address at the Athens Biennale commencement, April Elizabeth Lamm, in her diary, yields a well-turned winking waiter analogy: LINK. The Abbey of Thelema, which was examined closely in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung last year (PDF), has registered a gangasrotogati knee-jerk in Süddeutsche Zeitung this week. At his sold-out Literary Fest Berlin appearance tonight, for which he was paid an unprecedented sum, Christian Kracht began with a reading of "Cefalù oder der Geist der Goldenen Dämmerung," the timbre of his voice a fireside harmonium.
 

Surrounded by yellow light, engulfed by the night,
For us no pledge remains more certain than this
No bond guides you that strangles less than this

Where darkness guards the sacred radiance.

And this radiance was intended for you,
That—seduced by madness
early on bruised your hand
Till—confused in its orbit—your reason departed
That path's dream was set aflame for you...

And pavements awakened hover beneath us,
That were left animated by the depth of that light
And all souls with us through the night.

—Alfred Schuler, "Traumpfad"
(TRANSLATION: MARKUS WOLFF)

Introducing young Jesse James Hollywood: LINK.

 

Thursday, August 23, 2007

Many have done excellently, but you exceed them all.—Anon.

 

Sunday, July 29, 2007

Deep is the hatred that burns in base hearts in the presence of beauty.—E. Jünger
 
A cabal of Bochum University philologists is presenting a two-week symposium that examines German comedy trends and their totalitarian implications.
 
 
ASK THE JHTC
 

DEAR JHTC,

I found twin atheist Cub Scouts ruining a theme park in my dad's closet. I didn't ever think that the Boy Scouts should be held accountable to state laws prohibiting fraternization with a bevy of enigmatic sirens situated in a factory to receive scouting beads symbolizing their progress toward earning a badge, completion of which involves religious requirements. Now I feel the boys were announcing they did not believe in God and would not say the word “God” during recitation of the Cub Scout Promise. There are millions of Boy Scouts who have “regular contact with ex-offenders, parolees and probationers” at the theme park. I know what we have. We have the only legally ordained rough trade in Juniper Hills. Why not capitalize on this on a municipal level?

 

DEARKinky,”

Many perfectly normal, physically robust Boy Scouts benefit from private reflections on Cub Scouts as a means of bolstering civic pride or ameliorating familial relations — or at least triggering an atomic catharsis of nucleopatriphobic anxieties and freeze-locking, thanatotic armor — and we do not think that you need to do anything other than vow never to invade your father's privacy again.

 


Momus has recorded a lovely cover—“Thatness and Thereness”:
MP3. It's an oddity in the perpetual unfoldment of New Romanticismor should we say Bamboo Music? Whom was Ryuichi Sakamoto channelling when he created such a lovely chord sequence, Debussy? He is obviously classically trainedfew pop musicians would twist the melody so elegantly, so sensually against the chords. On the other hand he enters more interesting areastibrally, with the arrangementand this points to the likelihood that, as a composer versed in classical form and design, Sakamoto has experienced an atomic catharsis of nucleopatriphobic anxieties and freeze-locking, thanatotic armor.

 

Saturday, June 23, 2007

Divide and rule, a sound motto. Unite and lead, a better one.Goethe
Unite and lead, a sound motto. Dominate and devour, a better one.—Woodard

Hans Blüher scholar Martin Lichtmesz has published “Nietzsche und Wagner im Dschungel”, his interview with David Woodard and Christian Kracht, in Zwielicht (Summer, '07): GERMAN PDF.

Woodard’s definitive essay on the life and work of American painter Joe Coleman (ENGLISH PDF / GERMAN PDF) appears in the lavishly illustrated catalog accompanying the geek icon’s most complete retrospective to date (“Internal Digging”, Kunst-Werke, Berlin, May 27 – August 12, 2007), issued by Walther König: LINK.

 

Sunday, April 29, 2007

It can been seen where David Bowie found one of his important early 1980s facial expressions, and also where David Sylvian finds justification for the distance between his upper lip and his nose, by clicking the “Takemitsu contra Shakuhachi” link hiding somewhere or other within a probably nonexistent link that at one time or another certainly existed here: LINK.

 

Sunday, April 1, 2007

"I Wished I Was a Pigeon," a pamphlet about Raoul Loveday distributed by a Cefalù wine merchant, is examined in the photo-essay "Cefalù oder der Geist der Goldenen Dämmerung" (Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung): GERMAN PDF.

"Wood Devil" concerns the role of trees in the history of religion: ENGLISH PDF / GERMAN PDF.


Los Angeles
Sells an ego


Monday, September 11, 2006


No famous man is without filial devotion,
no great man without loyalty.
Kim Jong-Il

Nueva Germania
Uneven I am a rag


Within Momus' account of the fabulous Berlin
launch for Total Recall: Kim Jong-Il's North Korea, for which Juniper Hills provided the audio-visual component, is a link to his awesome-arse story "7 Lies About Holger Hiller," originally translated into German and published in Der Freund, appearing now in English for the first time: LINK.

 

   
 


Sunday, September 3, 2006

God is a witness that cannot be sworn.Samuel Beckett, Watt
 
J. Rentilly's July article about the Dreamachine features previously unpublished stills: PDF.
 
becoming a bitch
 
Die totale Erinnerung: Kim Jong Ils Nordkorea (LINK), in German only, becomes available today: LINK.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Monday, August 28, 2006

A cherished aspect to Nueva Germania has been the original spellings displayed on street signs. After observing us charmed by this perhaps one too many times, the Municipalidad decided to slowly retire old signs and replace them with correctly spelled ones—oh well. Ceferino Zena Duarte, in his final year as Mayor, has kindly gifted JuniperHills.Net with a set of rust-edged Elizabeth Nigtz Chen and Bernhard Forster signs.

Walter Portillo, Secretario Municipalidad, Nueva Germania (Photo 2006 David Woodard)

 

Federico Neumann—a local deity owing to his visionary genius for Yerba Mate cultivation and curing and grandfather to ENYM's own Walter Neumann—has finally been christened a street name: LINK.

 

Thursday, June 1, 2006

Kenneth Anger's Whitney installation was voted Best of the Biennale. "Pleased To Meet You" opened at Künstlerhaus Bremen , Germany , and this summer opens in Lucca , Italy —93 miles south of D'Annunzio's Il Vittoriale, near Lake Garda . David Woodard has agreed to contribute an essay to the catalog: LINK.

China has firewalled JuniperHills.Netdue obviously to the Ides of January report.

Music-lover Olga Rutterschmidt and her close friend Helen Golay, prominent Juniper Hills landowners, have been getting their pictures in the paper.

 


Thursday, May 18, 2006

Juniper Hills resident Henning Kober has completed a whirlwind tour of Naumberg, Weimar and Röcken, his prose meditation on the chance meeting of Elisabeth's Own and the Nietzsche-Archiv appearing in Die Tageszeitung (in German): LINK.


Sunday, March 12, 2006

Nueva Germania experts Christian Kracht and Christian von Borries join David Woodard on March 19 to provide insight, at Wissenschaftsakademie Berlin : LINK. [Süddeutsche Zeitung's March 21 review of the standing room-only lecture: LINK]


Sunday, Ides of January, 2006

China is behind the Commies getting elected in Bolivia and Venezuala—and is in the process of taking over South America . Having only caught a glimpse of their master plan map, it appears they're not bothering with Paraguay or Uruguay . Also, the Dear Leader is at present partying with whoever the leader of China is. It was in Heinlein's I Will Fear No Evil—about the Trans-Sexual Brain Transplant—that in the near future China would be the avant garde country and the only place if you require, say, a Trans-Sexual Brain Transplant. Wayne McGuire had something to say about the China situation as well.

The domestic lives of Hollywood, DiCaprio and Pitt—not to mention Spears and Stone—are granted proper coverage in Paraguay 's respected Diario Popular: LINK.




Sunday, January 1, 2006

New Year's Day: Hans Heft, Yaguarón, Paraguay (Photo 2006 David Woodard)

 


Sunday, December 25, 2005

In case you were imagining that Jesse James Hollywood had demurred from outmonstering the monster and was thus quietly devoured—for example by roving dread Yamanes of Tierra del Fuego—imagine again: LINK.



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jh history | map (PDF) | nueva germania | yerba maté |