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 I saw the types of people who became president of the Harvard Law Review. Sometimes, very late at night, the whole lot would pass by, in and out of whitewashed little Gannet House, on skinny pale legs permanently damaged by a year of subciting — Hieronymous Bosch figurines amputated by Odd Nerdrum. They were not the type of people who knew how to throw a punch. Continue reading Obama meets Odd  Just found out that “more attention to breasts builds long-term bonds through a cocktail of ancient neuropeptides.” And this after years of being told “I’m up here,” after conforming to the weird cultural taboo that said looking at the ocular regions was morally superior to looking at mammary regions. It has always seemed a weird religious leftover to judge the face as more “me” than other body parts — stunted leftovers from Neoplatonism via the Scholastics and Descartes (basically everyone who twisted philosophy in the service of religion) and all the other mind-body dualists. Sure, the face deserves some attention — it has a higher sensory density than most other body parts. But so do the hands and genitals. Continue reading Ode to ogling  So far I’ve found three downsides to atheism besides the obvious, if cynical, problems with being on the losing end of Pascal’s wager: 1. Nobody to talk to during sex.   I’ve counted 14 colonies of ants attacking simultaneously. Tens of thousands have died, but they keep coming. Continue reading Ants!  I was at the gym a few days ago, and a man came up to me out of the blue with perhaps the one sentence, of all possible sentences, that I was expecting to hear least: “You look like you’d make a good Buddha.” A few days later, a different man told me, “You look like you’ve bludgeoned a few people.” It started to make me wonder whether — are the two mutually exclusive? Reprinted from The Globe and Mail (June 2001), where it appeared as Red Flag Rising over Nepal. Six centuries of smoldering antagonism exploded into flames Saturday nigh, says Canadian writer Alexander Boldizar in Bali. 
The demiurge turns demoniac to rip, slit, and slash the thin veneer of civilized society with which we dull ourselves into submission. He’ll stab, shear, cleave, rend, gash, chop, wound, jab, prick and amputate — slicing and cutting to make us whole again. Alive. In Sharp, he fucks us with fifty pierced phalluses, he cuts us into strips and eat us. Vomits and bites us again, to pierce our imbecile parents, legal hypocrisies, and slave-morality religions — all the scaffolding we’ve erected to make ourselves flaccid, drained of strength. This is our safety: a tired vagina, a tired anus, sewed up by our daughter to keep the polluted seed inside. Sent home in tears. Something sharp is necessary. The demon has a hard on. He has fifty hanging from the wall, each pierced by a cockring. Named, one for each of his friends — mine will be named Aleko (Alex + kontol) — because his violence is care. Love in death. Killing, power, strength. These were once life. We grabbed the intestines and sometimes disgorged them onto the floor. Now we have perusal and market analysis. Like the old kings who sliced themselves to bits in ritualized regicides to revive the land, the demon does to the viewer what his razors and pins and swords do to the canvas. Cut, mangle, destroy, and make, in the end and almost by happenstance, beautiful.
 Reading Objects, in Gaya Art News (July 2008) Reprinted from Gaya Art News (July 2008). “His spirit moves in the rhythm of things. It is thus that art becomes akin to religion and ennobles mankind.” – Okakura Kazue, The Book of Tea (1906) If Suklu were a peanut, he would not be one of those peanuts that forgets its skin. “I want to be a farmer,” he says. “I want a farmer’s way of responding to materials and objects.” Not a farmer from 2008, but rather one of the ancient ones, perhaps half-mythical, perhaps real. One of the farmers who made art in the everyday-sculptures in the form of scarecrows; landscaped rice terraces; sculpted ladles and plates and bowls and water scoops out of coconuts, tongs out of bamboo, or cheese graters from duri plants; complex installations out of wind-powered soundmakers; or performance art within Bali’s religious-animist ceremonies. The dominant characteristics to Suklu’s work-a sense of purity and a rootedness of the work within Bali-make it awkward, artificial, to graft an exogenous analysis or philosophical framework onto it. A perfect review of his work might not include any names other than Suklu, Bali, and the farmer. But Suklu’s work is also such a rare living example of Heidegger’s concepts of authenticity and groundedness, not to mention his postwar agrarian nostalgia, that leaving out the comparison would be a disservice to both.  The Times reported today (Coffee Linked to Lower Dementia Risk) on a study that showed 3 to 5 cups of coffee lowered the risk of Alzheimers by 65%. Two cups of coffee did not have the same effect. More than five could not be studied because of small sample size. (I wish they’d studied what two to three liters of espresso does. I’m sure the results would be even better. On the other hand, who needs a study — I know if I don’t drink at least five cups I’m demented all day. Five cups should be the cut off. If you didn’t have at least five on, say, election day, then you don’t get to vote. Because you’re demented. We bar felons from voting — which makes no sense. But barring the demented might improve the country.) On a different note: the NYTimes lede when emailing the page was “A 21-year study finds that moderate coffee drinkers are much less likely to develop Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of dementia.” Five cups, for most people, is not “moderate.” Some editor is injecting his morality of moderation into that lede and twisting the results of the study, which basically supported extremism in coffee drinking up to the limit of what was studied (5 cups). This isn’t just about some unintelligent science editor. It’s the whole frustrating mantra of moderation is good. Moderation is dementia, as two cups showed. I asked my three-year-old son for a word that starts with “A.” Samson said, “Asshole.” I said, “There’s no such word.” He said, “That’s strange, the asshole exists but the word doesn’t.” |
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My favourite hamburger when I was in law school was called “The Heart Attack” at a little 4-stool dive called The Tasty run by a sour Iraqi man, with oil dripping and spritzing everywhere. But the Iraqi man didn’t have good legs and the burger didn’t have 8,000 calories and I can no longer pretend that The Tasty was the Platonic ideal of the hamburger joint. 
Reprinted from Gaya Art News (December 2007).