unaccounted

Whatever you say, don't say it twice
If you find your ideas in anyone else, disown them.
The man who has not signed anthing, who has left no picture
Who was not there, who said nothing:
How can they catch him?
Cover your tracks

 lesebuch für städtebewohner

all of your bases

robot // i too must understand

‘No one would imagine that a living bird was inside, but would suppose that it was clock-work which made the head, eyes, and beak of the bird move.’

...it was the custom in Italy to tie a string to the leg of living birds or big cockchafers and give them to children to play with. 

Thanks TA
Beetle use:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hFguLwUT5lg

Deleted scene from Pinocchio about the grandfather tree:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jAQgTfY8sIM

Tickle Me Elmo on fire:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GYGhmJD9LKc

FTW! collection

‘Verwisch die Spuren!’

But as well as supporting Surrealism’s analyses of kitsch and clutter and all their utopian and dystopian investments, Benjamin and friends are compelled to propagandize for the opposite, more conventionally Modernist strategy of wipe-out, emancipation from clutter. In 1931 Benjamin invents the persona of the ‘destructive character’ - enemy of the comfort-seeking ‘etui-person’:

The etui-person seeks comfort, and the case is its epitome. The inside of the case is a velvet-lined trace that he has imprinted on the world.

The destructive character is a type opposed to repression in its political and psychic senses, who - causing havoc by cutting ways through - removes the traces which sentimentally bind us to the status quo.

The destructive character knows only one slogan: make space; only one activity: clearing away. His need for fresh air and open space is stronger than any hatred. The destructive character is young and cheerful, for destroying rejuvenates by clearing away traces of our own age... .

The destructive character wants to make possible the formulation of experience according to revised and appropriate tenets.

 

...

‘Verwisch die Spuren!’, ‘Efface the traces!’, Brecht insisted in one poem in his 1926 lyric cycle ‘Handbook for City-dwellers’. For those traces, the monograms, screens, knickknacks on mantlepieces secreted like sprays of dog-piss, are also tied up with possession; and so signal class society. Brecht’s poetic sentiment details the issue of autonomy at stake: Efface the traces, rather than have someone else efface them. ‘Efface the traces’ - screeched Benjamin in February 1933 in ‘Live Without Traces’, a tiny fragment which presented a horror-vision of the cluttered bourgeois parlour, and detailed the new, potential, lives to be led within shiny, translucent steel and glass. In his 1939 commentary on Brecht’s poem, Benjamin noted that the phrase ‘efface the traces’ now seems to have been a secret indication of the strategy of crypto-emigration by communist activists. By 1939 it had long been obvious to Benjamin and others that it was ‘Jewish trash’, plus other bits of social refuse, which power decreed must be swept out. 

esther leslie

kuhle wampe

Auch ich muss es verstehen.

COVER YOUR TRACKS

WB // Commentaries on Poems by Brecht

The War Primer is written in 'lapidary' style. The word comes from the Latin lapis, 'stone', and describes the style which was developed for Roman inscriptions. Its most important characteristic was brevity. This was conditioned, first, by the effort required to chisel the words in stone; second, by the realization that for one who speaks to a succession of generations it is seemly to be brief.
If stone - the natural condition of lapidary style - is no longer the material of these poems, what has taken its place? What justifies their inscription style? One of them hints at an answer. It reads:

On the wall was chalked;
They want war.
The man who wrote it
Has already fallen.

The first line of this poem could be placed at the head of each of the War Primer poems. These inscriptions are not, like those of the Romans, intended for stone but, like those of underground fighters, for fences.

The Socialist Object

.. the light from the East is in the new relation to the person, to woman, to things. Our things in  our hands must be equals, comrades, and not those black and mournful slaves, as they are here..

Rodchenko in Paris

The production should bring out the material of the action quite soberly and objectively.
Brecht

WB wooden horsey

Lehrstücke

Gestus

Gestus, as the embodiment of an attitude, carries at least two distinct meanings in Brecht's theatre: firstly, the uncovering or revealing of the motivations and transactions that underpin a dramatic exchange between the characters; secondly, the 'epic' narration of that character by the actor (whether explicitly or implicitly)
Henry Müller The Geste of Citation: Three Points

beginning ceramics project

the space of the donkey

Brecht's donkey

-->

July 24 On a horizontal beam supporting the roof of Brecht’s study, there is a painted inscription: "The truth is concrete." On a window ledge stands a little wooden donkey that can nod its head. Brecht has hung a little notice round its neck with the words: "I, too, must understand it."


Hobbes: there is no covenant with beasts

Robinson, which of the lakes do I prefer?

… the ultimate foundation upon which the Brummell phenomenon rested was the commodification of the real…
In a period that submitted hyporitically to the elephantiasis of ornament, the absence of every kind of bad conscience with respect to objects explains the almost ascetical sobriety of Beau's wardrobe and his foundation of the criteria of elegance on elusive nuances, like the accidental folds of a cravat. The technique of tying a cravat - worthy of a Zen master- invented by Brummell was rigorous in its elimination of any intentionality: it is realted that his valet Robinson could be seen every evening emerging from the dressing room, his arms laden with with barely wrinkled neckwear. 'They are our failures' he would explain. Beau himself, who some of the greatest poets of modernity have not disdained to consider their teacher, can, from this point of view, claim as his own discovery the introduction of chance into artwork so widely practiced in contemporary art . Agamben / stanzas / 53

morgan fisher / standard gauge
















остранение - defamiliarization - Shklovsky - Art as Device -- politicised by Brecht as Verfremdungs technik - alienation - estrangement - the fundamental character of a work of art - distancing being the key attribute of the uncanny.

at the chess table in the pear tree’s shade