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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
On the horizon viewed from Schloss Neuhardenberg's discreet watchtower looms exemplary prequiem subject Ernst Jünger's coiffure: LINK.
Thursday, June 12, 2008
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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)
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Friday, February 8, 2008
Bigwig quillsman Ingo Niermann
with wife / bigwig artist Antje
Majewski (2008) |
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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.
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Thursday, January 31, 2008
Hauptstrasse 155, Berlin
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Momus examines
David Bowie's old apartment, which has become something of
a hub for corrective oral surgery: LINK. |
Wednesday, January 23, 2008
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K.
Kraus: Ohne Titel (Spiegellampe), 2006 |
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Sr.
Cristián Reymond L. & Sr. Carlos
Cruz P. |
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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.
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Sunday, January 6, 2008
(Photos 2007 Katje Brinckmann)
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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
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Paraguay (Photo 2007 Heidi
Hattestein) |
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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
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Men and Groceries, Leningrad |
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| 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.
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Novelist Convalescing Post-Surgery,
Munich (Photo 2007 Duane)
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Freud's Dreams Museum, Leningrad
(Photo 2007 Oleg Artjushkov)
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The Dreamachine exhibition at
Freud's Dreams Museum, in the childhood home of Lou Salomé
(LINK),
yielded record attendance for the East-European psychoanalytic
axis—exceeded 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
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| 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.
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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
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Deep
is the hatred that burns in base hearts in the presence of
beauty.—E.
Jünger
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Bochum
University
philologists is
presenting a two-week symposium that examines German comedy
trends and their totalitarian implications.
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ASK THE JHTC |
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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?
DEAR “Kinky,”
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. |
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Momus has recorded a
lovely cover—“Thatness and Thereness”: MP3.
It's an oddity in
the perpetual unfoldment of New Romanticism—or should we say Bamboo Music?
Whom was Ryuichi Sakamoto channelling
when he created such a lovely chord sequence, Debussy? He is obviously classically
trained—few pop musicians would
twist the melody so elegantly, so sensually against the chords.
On the other hand he enters more interesting areas—tibrally, with the arrangement—and 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.
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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.
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