En outre, déclara-t-il, ces poupées présentent l’avantage d’échapper à la pesanteur. Elles ignorent tout de l’inertie de la matière, cette propriété des plus antinomiques à la danse ; car la force qui les soulève est plus forte que celle qui les maintient à terre. Que ne donnerait pas notre bonne G. pour peser soixante livres de moins ou pour qu’un égal contrepoids lui viennent en aide lorsqu’elle exécute ses entrechats et ses pirouettes? Les poupées, comme les elfes, n’ont besoin du sol que pour l’effleurer, et ranimer l’élan de leurs membres sur cet obstacle provisoire ; nous-même en avons besoin pour nous reposer, et nous remettre des efforts de la danse ; moment qui, manifestement, n’est pas la danse et qu’il faut donc, autant que possible, éliminer.

– KLEIST, Heinrich von (1810). Sur le théâtre des marionnettes, [PDF] [English version]

Apollo 8, the first manned mission to the Moon, entered lunar orbit on Christmas Eve, December 24, 1968. That evening, the astronauts; Commander Frank Borman, Command Module Pilot Jim Lovell, and Lunar Module Pilot William Anders did a live television broadcast from lunar orbit, in which they showed pictures of the Earth and Moon seen from Apollo 8. Lovell said, “The vast loneliness is awe-inspiring and it makes you realize just what you have back there on Earth.” They ended the broadcast with the crew taking turns reading from the book of Genesis.

[William Anders] “For all the people on Earth the crew of Apollo 8 has a message we would like to send you.

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.
And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep.
And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.
And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.

[Jim Lovell]

And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day.
And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters.
And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so.
And God called the firmament Heaven. And the evening and the morning were the second day.”

[Frank Borman]

And God said, Let the waters under the heavens be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear: and it was so.
And God called the dry land Earth; and the gathering together of the waters called he Seas: and God saw that it was good.”

—And from the crew of Apollo 8, we close with good night, good luck, a Merry Christmas, and God bless all of you –all of you on the good Earth.”

—Source: The Apollo 8 Christmas Eve Broadcast, NASA.

and to think, after I’m gone
there will be more days for others, others days,
others night.
dogs walking, trees shaking in
the wind.

I won’t be leaving much.
something to read maybe.

a wild onion in the gutted
road.

Paris in the dark

– Charles Bukowski, A New War, 1997 in SOUNES, Howard (1998). Charles Bukowski. Locked in the Arms of a Crazy Life, Grove Press, New York.

It’s just another psycho nightmare
So don’t you forget
You’ve always been the teacher’s pet

It’s a tired and slow song baby
Don’t be upset
Just remember the future has not happened yet
Every shiny thing of good luck
Could be made true
Every single thing you dream up could happen to you

It’s just another worldwide broadcast
You better think fast
It’s always the good times girl that really last
The lonely looney one inside of us all

You don’t have to sit up to stand tall

Every little thing you joke of
Will be made brand new
Every living thing you speak of could become true
It’s just another psycho nightmare

– JOHNSTON, Daniel (1994). «Psycho Nightmare», album Fun.

A man was dangling there, above the street, upside down. He wore a business suit, one leg bent up, arms at his sides. A safety harness was barely visible, emerging from his trousers at the straightened leg and fastened to the decorative rail of the viaduc.

She’s heard of him, a performance artist known as Falling Man. He’d appeared several times in the last week, unannounced, in various parts of the city, suspended from one or another structure, always upside down, wearing a suit, a tie and dress shoes. He brought it back, of course, those stark moments in the burning towers when people fell or were forced to jump. He’d been seen dandling from a balcony in a hotel atrium and police had escorted him out of a concert hall and two or three apartment buildings with terraces or accessible rooftops.

Traffic was barely moving now. There were people shouting up at him, outraged at the spectacle, the puppetry of human desperation, a body’s last fleet breath and what it held. It held the gaze of the world, she thought. There was the awful openness of it, something we’d not seen, the single falling figure that trails a collective dread, body come down among us all. And now, she thought, this little theater piece, disturbing enough to stop traffic and send her back into the terminal.

– DeLILLO, Don (2007). Falling Man, New York: Scribner, p. 33

» Voir aussi Man, Falling (infra)
» JUNOD, Tom (2003). «The Falling Man», Esquire, septembre.
» Photographies de Lyle Owerko
» «The Falling Man», article Wikipedia (anglais)

She walked beneath a flophouse marquee. It read: TRANSIENTS. Something about that word confused her. It took on an abstract tone, as words has done before in her experience (although rarely), subsisting in her mind as language units that had mysteriously evaded the responsabilities of content. Tran-zhents. What it conveyed could not itself be put into words. The functional value had slipped out of its bark somehow and vanished. Pammy stopped walking, turned her body completely and look once more at the sign. Seconds passed before she grasped its meaning.

 – DeLILLO, Don (1977). Players, New-York: Vintage Books, p. 207. 

She worked for a firm called the Grief Management Council. Grief was not the founder’s name; it referred to intense mental suffering, deep remorse, extreme anguish, acute sorrow and the like. The number of employees varied, sometimes radically, from month to month. In its brochures, which Pammy wrote, Grief Management was described as a large and growing personal-services organization whose clinics, printed material and trained counselors served the community in its effort to understand and assimilate grief. There were fees for individuals, group fees, special consultation terms, charges for booklets and teaching aids, payment for family session and marital grief seminars. Most regional offices were small and located in squat buildings that also housed surgical-supply firms and radiology labs. These buildings were usually the first of a planned complex that never materialized. Pammy had visited several, for background, and the photo she took for her brochures had to be severely cropped to eliminate the field of weeds and bulldozed earth. It was her original view that the World Trade Center was an unlikely headquarters for an outfit such as this. But she changed her mind as time passed. Where else would you stack all this grief? Somebody anticipated that people would one day crave the means to codify their emotions. A clerical structure would be needed. Teams of behaviorists assembled in the sewers and conceived a band of futurism based on filing procedure. To Pammy the towers didn’t seem permanent. They remained concepts, no less transient for all their bulk than some routine distortion of light. Making things seems even more fleeting was the fact that office space at Grief Management was constantly being reapportioned. Workmen sealed off some areas with partition, opened up others, moved ou file cabinets, wheeled in chairs and desks. It was as though they’d been directed to adjust the amount of furniture to levels of national grief. 

– DeLILLO, Don (1977). Players, New York: Vintage Books, pp. 18-19.

–Alfredo Jarr, Lament of the Image, 2002

Lyle passed time watching television. Sitting in near darkness about eighteen inches from the screen, he turned the channel selector every half minute or so, sometime much more frequently. He wasn’t looking for something that might sustain his interest. Hardly that. He simply enjoy jerking the dial into fresh image-burns. He explored content to a point. The tactile-visual delight of switching channels took precedence, however, transforming even random moments of content into pleasing territorial abstraction. Watching television was for Lyle a discipline like mathematics or Zen. Commercial, station breaks, Spanish-language dramas had more to offer as a rule than standard programming. The repetitive aspect of commercials interested him. Seeing identical footage many times was a test for the resourcefulness of the eye, its ability to re-select, to subdivide an instant of time. He rarely used sound. Sound was best serve by those UHF stations using faulty equipment or languages other than English.  Occasionally he watched one of the public-access channels. There was an hour or so set aside every week for locally crafted pornography, the work of native artisans. He found on the screen a blunter truth certainly than in all that twinkling flesh in the slick magazines. He sat in his bowl of curved space, his dusty light. There was a child’s conspicuous immodesty in all this genital aggression. People off the streets looking for something to suck. Hand-held cameras searching out the odd crotch. Lyle was immobile through this sequence of small grey bodies. What he saw retained his attention completely even as it continued to dull his senses. The hour seemed like four. Weary as he was, blanked out, bored by all these posturing desperadoes, he could easily have watched through the night, held by the mesh effect of television, the electrostatic glow that seemed a privileged state between wave and visual image, a secret of celestial energy. He wondered if he’d become too complex to look at naked bodies, as such, and be stirred.  “Here, look. We’re here folks. The future has collapsed right on us. And what does it look like?”  “You made me almost jump.”  “It look like this. It looks like waves and waves of static. It’s being beamed in ahead of schedule, which accounts for the buzzing effect. It looks like seedy people from Mercer Street.”  “Let me sleep, hey.”  “See, look, I’m saying. Just as I speak. I mean it’s this. We’re sitting watching in the intimacy and comfort of our bedroom and they’ve got their loft and their cameras and it gets shown because that’s the law. As soon as they see a camera they take off their clothes. It use to be people waved.”  “Good.”  “Right here. Ri’chere, ladies and genneman. See the pandas play with their shit. Triffic, triffic.”     

– DeLILLO, Don (1977). Players, New York : Vintage Books, pp. 16-17.

Then he spread the sheet of plastic on the ground and got the coats and blankets from the cart and he took off their damp and muddy shoes and they sat there in silence with their hands outheld to the flames. He tried to think of something  to say but he could not. He’d had this feeling before, beyond the numbness and the dull despair. The world shrinking down about a raw core of parsible entities. The names of things slowly following those things in oblivion. Colors. The name of birds. Things to eat. Finally the names of things one believed to be true. More fragile than he would have thought. How much was gone already? The sacred idiom shorn of its referents and so of its reality. Drawing down like something trying to preserve heat. In time to wink out forever. 

– McCARTHY, Cormac (2006). The Road, New York : Vintage, p. 88. 

In those first years the roads were peopled with refugees shrouded up in their clothing. Wearing masks and googles, sitting in their rags by the side of the road like ruined aviators. Their barrows heaped with shoddy. Towing wagons or carts. Their eyes bright in their skull. Creedless shells of men tottering down the causeways like migrants in a feverland. The frailty of everything revealed at last. Old and troubling issues resolved into nothingness and night. The last instance of a think take the classe with it. Turn out the light and is gone. Look around you. Ever is a long time. But the boy knew what he knew. That ever is no time at all.  

– McCARTHY, Cormac (2006). The Road, New York : Vintage, p. 28. 

De toute mon existence, je ne me rappelle pas que mes rapports avec les autres aient donné un résultat autre que destructeur. J’entends par là que mon existence a non seulement affecté mes relations avec les autres, mais aussi que j’ai été anéanti par eux ou que j’ai contribué à les anéantir. J’ai été affecté de diverses façons jusqu’à ne plus croire en rien et surtout pas dans l’être humain. J’ai affecté leur existence – en supprimant leur espoir, leur vision du monde, leur sentiment, tout ce en quoi (monde des croyances et des valeurs) ils croyaient – au point qu’il n’est rien resté de ces relations. Pour dire le moins, j’ai été pour eux décevant. Mon existence n’a rien laissé – attendu qu’elle devait ou qu’elle aurait dû à tout le moins avoir quelques résultats, fussent-ils négatifs. Je ne crois pas l’avoir fait volontairement, avoir eu l’intention de détruire, mais le résultat a toujours été celui-là. Je ne crois pas non plus que les autres aient eu cette intention de me détruire. Il n’est pourtant rien resté. Ce rien, dont il est question ici, ne renvoie ni à la souffrance ni à l’absence ou à la fin de la relation. Ce rien, est-ce le résultat de relations entre personnes incompatibles, de malentendus entre elles? Est-ce le constat d’une existence particulièrement troublée? Je ne le crois pas. C’est une explication facile et habile que de renvoyer à une détresse, à une angoisse ou même à une névrose la difficulté, l’impossibilité de vivre avec les autres. Mais ce rapport à soi troublé, à quoi tient-il?

– OLIVIER, Lawrence (2008), Détruire : la logique de l’existence, éd. Liber, Montréal, pp. 11-12. 

The fast pace of life and the increasing speed of mouvement across vast American spaces, well before the beginning of the twintieth century, had begun to put a premium on quickly impressive, attractive images. They were creating a new Iconography of Speed. Competition for attention put a premium on attention-getting. The word “billboard”, which was invented in America, had first come in use about 1851, in the early days of the Graphic Revolution. The rise of the automobile, the improvement of highways in the 1920’s and ’30’s, and the consequent vast spread of billboards were now incentives to produce images that could catch the eye in a flash and remain indelibly imprinted on the memory.

– BOORSTIN, Daniel J. ([1961]1992). The Image. A Guide To Pseudo-Events In America, New York : Vintage Books, p. 199.

J’ai esquissé les grandes lignes de Teenage Pussy pendant l’été et ça avait pas mal avancé en dépit des heures passées à jouer au Tetris sur mon Gateway et à contrôler mes e-mails et à ranger sans fin les étagères des éditions étrangères qui s’alignaient sur les murs de mon bureau. Interférence du jour : il me fallait trouver pour la promo d’un livre banal et inoffensif, écrit par une connaissance à New York, encore un roman médiocre et poli (La Plainte du mille-pattes) qui allait obtenir quelques critiques respectueuses et puis être oublié à jamais. La phrase que j’ai fini par concevoir était désinvolte et évasive, une suite de mot si vague qu’elle aurait pu s’appliquer à n’importe quoi : «Je ne pense pas être tombé sur une oeuvre aussi résolument tournée vers elle-même depuis des années.» Et puis je me suis mis à lire une nouvelle d’un de mes étudiants de l’atelier d’écriture et je l’ai rapidement terminée. Dans les marges j’ai inscrit des points d’interrogation, j’ai encerclé des mots, j’ai souligné des phrases, j’ai corrigé la grammaire. J’ai eu le sentiment d’avoir émis des jugements mesurés.

– EASTON ELLIS, Bret (2005). Lunar Park, éd. Robert Laffont, tr. P. Guglielmina, Paris, p. 91.

 – Dedication without talent is useless. Understand what I mean? Dedication alone is not enough. You can starve and wanna do it… Hey! You know… And how many do that? They starve in the gutters… They don’t make it.
– But you knew you had talent.
– They all think they have! How do you know that you’re the one? You don’t know. It’s a shot in the dark. You take it or you become a normal civilized person from 8 to 5… Get married have children… Christmas together… Here comes gramma : «Hi gramma, come on in… Hi you…». You know… Sure I couldn’t take that, I would have murder myself.

– From The Charles Bukowski Tapes, Barbet Schroeder, 1987.

– Brad Harris Photo

» Via Who Killed Bambi?

Well, he’s a space orphan from Long Store 6
Left to rot on Cyborg 9
He was trying to find his way to Planet X
But stepped on a land mine
He only lost his third leg
But he’d never beg or put anybody down
And behind the great walls of China
Underneath the galaxies
He had a studio
And he wrote this song

– JOHNSTON, Daniel (1994). «Jelly Beans», album Fun.

OTTAWA (Reuters, Friday Dec 14, 2007) – Canada’s post office and police are trying to track down a “rogue elf” who wrote obscene letters to children on behalf of Santa Claus, a newspaper reported on Friday. [Lire la suite]

Talk about a lousy weekend
Couldn’t find a single friend friend
Had my heart set on disappointment
Up walks a super Joe Joe
Asks me how my day go go
Tells me good luck and spits on my shoe

CHORUS
But oh, oh, oh, the telephone rings
And oh, oh, oh there’s nobody there

Saw a girl on the street corner
Say, “Hey I’m a lonely loner”
She looks at me like I’m some sort of crud
Fast cars pass me by
Everybody curse me why
Find a donut in the sewer

CHORUS

Doesn’t matter what you eat
I think you’re all a bunch of creeps
And I would like to see you all gone
Stop comin’ round my door
I don’t care for you no more
Wish you would all just go away

Oh, oh, oh the telephone rings
Oh, oh, oh, there’s nobody there
Talk about a lousy weekend

– JOHNSTON, Daniel (1994). «Lousy Week-End», album Fun.

» Voir aussi «It’s Saturday»

» Sorry Entertainer (Yip/Jump Music, 1983)

Where the wind blows
That’s where I go
Where the moon is
That’s where I am
And when I just
Have a problem
Always hoping the wind will blow me away again
I’m a loner
I’m a sorry entertainer [...]

David Mauas recently completed the conspiracy theory-laden Who Killed Walter Benjamin? The film heavily critiques the largely accepted idea that Benjamin committed suicide and, instead, theorizes that he was assasinated by agents working for Stalinist Russia.

– WHITSON, Roger (2007). «Who Killed Cultural Studies?», Long Sunday, 27 août. [En ligne]

In the meantime we were joined by an elderly gentleman, a younger female and her son. The gentleman, a German university professor named Walter Benjamin, was on the point of having a heart attack. The strain of mountain climbing on an extremely hot September day, together with the anxious endeavour to escape German arrest far too much for him. As we were at a resting place, we ran in all direction in search of some water to help the sick man…

– BIRMAN, Carina (2007). The Narrow Foothold, Hearing Eye. [Site officiel]

[Lisa] Fittko’s account of what followed is now a justifiably famous element of the Walter Benjamin cult. Carina Birman’s personal story is not, but it includes the most recent of many last words about Benjamin’s death, a death on which, for his admirers, so much seems to hang that it, too, seems suspended: symbolic to the point of unreality, an enactment more than an event, like the death of the Christian messiah and the disappearance of the ‘risen’ body, for so long a matter of ardent conjecture.

– HARDING, Jeremy (2007). «Through The Trapdoor», London Review of Books, 19 juillet. [En ligne]

It seems natural to assume that the more closely robots come to resemble people, the more likely they are to elicit the kinds of responses people direct toward each other. However, subtle flaws in appearance and mouvement only seem eerie in the very humanlike robots. This uncanny phenomenon may be symptomatic of entities that elicit a model of a human other but do not measure up to it.

– MacDORMAN, Karl F. (2005). «Androids as experimental apparatus: Why is there an uncanny valley and can we exploit it?» CogSci-2005 Workshop: Toward Social Mechanisms of Android Science. July 25 – 26, Stresa, Italy. [PDF - draft]

» Le phénomène de «uncanny valley» (Wikipédia anglais) ;
» HORNYAK, Tim (2006). «Meet The Remote-Controled Self», Wired, 20 juillet 2006. [À propos du clone du professeur Hiroshi Ishiguro, apparaissant dans la vidéo présentée ci-haut];
» Voir également le compte-rendu de la rencontre d’un psychologue américain avec la jolie androïde Repliee-Q2 intitulé «My Date With A Robot» et publié dans le Scientific American Mind (June/July 2006). Enregistrement vidéo de la rencontre ICI.

Objet : Demande de partenariat
Date : 8 novembre 2007 19:46:47

Bonjour,
Nous venons de lancer un nouveau site consacré à la danse Tecktonik. Pour améliorer le référencement, nous souhaitons faire un échange de lien avec votre site. […]
Merci d’avance.
Cordialement.
L’équipe Tecktonique Dance

Quand Myspace joue les faux amis: Un philosophe s’est découvert une page à son nom… et les ennuis qui vont avec.
par Judith Revel

C’est l’histoire d’un ami. Un dimanche matin paisible, après le café et la lecture des journaux, il fallait répondre à quelques mails. Dans l’un d’entre eux, une connaissance le félicitait de son blog sur MySpace, se montrait ébahie et admirative du soin avec lequel il répondait à chacun des « visiteurs », et disait sa très grande fascination pour le nombre conséquent des « amis » virtuels dont il pouvait se vanter. Mon ami tombe des nues : avec une coquetterie un peu affectée – mais à laquelle il tient beaucoup -, il refuse depuis des années de se servir seul d’Internet, et utilise au contraire toute une série d’intermédiaires (secrétaires, collègues, et – le dimanche matin – sa propre compagne) afin de conserver ce qu’il considère comme une sorte de « distance de sécurité » face à l’outil informatique. Il est donc hors de question qu’il ait pu créer puis gérer, sa propre page sur MySpace. […] Lire la suite

—Source: Écrans.fr

Bonjour
Lisez ce message et vous comprendrez plus. Je vous le demande s’il vous plait. Je me nomme Sarafiner Bamba agée de 21 ans de nationalité ivoirienne, la fille de Feu Bamba Estelle, un grand homme d’affaires et agriculteur de café et de cacao et je vis en Côte d’Ivoire. En effet, mon père est mort suite à un empoisonnement fait par ses associés qui pensaient avoir profit de son décès. Et malheureusement pour moi aussi, je suis orpheline de mère depuis l’adolescence et me voilà sans famille. Étant la fille unique de mes parents, je deviens normalement héritière de la somme totale de US$5,500,000.00 que mon père a déposé dans une banque ici en Côte d’Ivoire. Donc je vous demande pardon de bien vouloir lire attentivement l’histoire de ma vie et avoir un cœur de bonté afin de me venir en aide à faire transférer d’argent sur votre compte bancaire et voir après comment investir cette somme dans un domaine et aussi me permettre de venir chez vous pour suivre pour continuer mes études auprès de vous. S’il vous plait, je sais que vous êtes de bonne foi, aidez-moi car je suis sans famille et je vous promets une garantie de 20% de cet argent une fois le transfert sur votre compte c’est à dire 15% comme intérêts et 5% comme dépenses établies à mon égard. Et les 80% seront investis. Aidez une orpheline qui a besoin d’assistance, d’amour familial et surtout d’éducation. Pour plus d’informations sur mon argent et surtout sur ma vie, écrivez-moi car je suis disposée à vous renseigner pour que vous me veniez en aide sur cette affaire et voir aussi comment faire pour permettre le transfert de ce fonds en votre compte bancaire parce que pour le moment j’ai pas accès car il est sur compte bloqué de deux ans. Je suis prête à vous donner tous les renseignements concernant ma vie et aussi les informations sur cette affaire. S’il vous plait il faut que vous me veniez en aide pour que je puisse vous rejoindre avec cette somme que mon père a laisse en ce compte avant de mourir et dis-moi dans quel domaine on pourra investir cette somme je vous joindrai les photo de moi dès que je reçois une réponse de vous à mon émail afin que vous puissiez me connaître physiquement s’il vous plait aidez-moi car je souffre ici et ma vie n’est pas garantie ici.
Cordialement,
Sarafiner Bamba

My father decided in the sixties that he would try as much as he could to present his ideas in an aphoristic style. Aphorisms, as Francis Bacon said, are incomplete, a bit like cartoons. They are not filled-out essay writing that is highly compressed. The aphorism is a poetic form that calls for a lot of participation on the part of the reader. You have to chew on a aphorism and work with it for a while before understanding it fully. A good aphorism could keep you busy for a week – kicking it around, playing with it, exploring it, taking it apart to see what you can get out of it. And applying it here, and everywhere. My father deliberately chose this form of statement because he wanted to teach, not tell or entertain. He said, “For instruction, you use incomplete knowledge so people can fill things in – they can round it out and fill it in with their own experience.” If what you want to do is simply to tell people something, then by all means spell it out in the connected essay. But if you want to teach, you don’t do that. There’s no participation in just telling: that’s simply for consumers – they sit there and swallow it, or not. But the aphoristic style gives you the opportunity to get a dialogue going, to engage people in the process of discovery.

– Eric McLuhan, in BENEDETTI, Paul et DEHART, Nancy (1996). Foward Through the Rearview Mirror: reflections on and by Marshall McLuhan, Scarbourough: Prentice Hall Canada Inc., p. 45

» McLuhan comme corps de fragments, par exemple ICI 

I was thinking about the note I left her when I got on the boat. How can you explain something like this to someone? I’m just not the kind of person that settles in to anything. I don’t think I ever will be. There’s really anything left to explain that can be and that’s what I was trying to explain in the first place. I’m just not like that. I don’t want a job, or a house, or taxes… although I wouldn’t mind a car but… I don’t know. Now that I’m away I whish I was back there more then even when I was there. Let’s just say I’m a certain kind of tourist… tourist that’s on a permanent vacation.

– Jim Jarmusch, Permanent Vacation, États-Unis, 1980.