life sucks // nothing matters // lulz

ekstasis

thatcher / mandela

sing for yr supper

Democracy /// Arthur Rimbaud

'The flag goes with the foul landscape,
and our jargon muffles the drum.'
In the great centers we'll nurture
the most cynical prostitution.
We'll massacre logical revolts.

In spicy and drenched lands!--
at the service of the most monstrous
exploitations, industrial or military.
'Farewell here, no matter where.

Conscripts of good will,
ours will be a ferocious philosophy;
ignorant as to science, rabid for comfort;
and let the rest of the world croak.
This is the real advance. Marching orders, let's go!'

The Commune of 1871

On 12 April 1961, Yuri Gagarin became the first human to travel into outer space. In his space capsule he carried the remnant of the red flag flown over the Hotel de Ville in the heart of the Paris Commune in 1870.

 

the French insurrectionist Louis-Auguste Blanqui (1805-81), ... spent most of his adult life in prison, and whom Walter Benjamin (writing in the 1930s) judged the most famous revolutionary before Lenin. Blanqui was elected as leader in absentia by the Paris Communards who offered to release hostages in exchange for him, but were refused, and it was in the wake of the Commune’s failure that Blanqui wrote his cosmological treatise L’Eternite par les astres (1873). In an infinite universe made from atoms of a finite number of types, Blanqui argues, the same combinations must arise again and again.

“The entire universe is composed of stellar systems. In order to create them nature has only one hundred simple bodies at its disposal… Every star, whatever it might be, thus exists in infinite number in time and space, not only in one of its aspects, but as it is found in every second of its duration, from birth until death… What I write now in a cell in the fort of Taureau I wrote and will write under the same circumstances for all of eternity, on a table, with a pen, wearing clothing… The number of our doubles is infinite in time and space… These aren’t phantoms: they are the now eternalized.”
Whereas Tegmark emphasises spatial repetition and variation (the idea that there is another “you” reading this article right now), Blanqui additionally highlights temporal repetition, leading him to conclude that progress is illusory; everything that can possibly happen has already occurred. It was this aspect that led Benjamin to see Blanqui’s cosmology as a precursor to the doctrine of eternal recurrence in Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra (1883-5).
In The Arcades Project, Benjamin considers Blanqui’s significance as both revolutionary conspirator and pseudo-scientist, concluding that Blanqui’s cosmology is a capitulation to the principles of bourgeois capitalism that Blanqui had spent all his life fighting against. Blanqui’s multiverse is, says Benjamin, “the phantasmagoria of history”, a nightmare projection of capitalism itself. 


Andrew Crumey

monument mobbed

The equestrian statue of Frederick the Great in Berlin is decorated – and mobbed – in celebration of the German victory over the French at the Battle of Sedan, September 1-2, 1870.

Lost allegorical sculpture /// work of Francois Willeme // l'angleterre venant au secours de la France 


At no point in time, no matter how utopian, will anyone win the masses over to a higher art; they can be won over only to one that is nearer to them. And the difficulty consists precisely in finding a form for that art such that, with the best conscience in the world, one could hold that it is a higher art. This will never happen with most of what is propagated by the avant-garde of the bourgeoisie. … The masses positively require from the work of art … something that is warming. Here the flame most readily kindled is hatred.   WB konvolut K

There is one notable dead tree . . . the inscape markedly holding its most simple and beautiful oneness up from the ground through a graceful swerve below (I think) the spring of the branches up to the tops of the timber. I saw the inscape freshly, as if my mind were still growing, though with a companion the eye and the ear are for the most part shut and instress cannot come.  GMH

 

william faithorne

‘The Embleme of Englands distractions as also of her attained, and further expected Freedome, & Happines’ (1658), traditionally known as ‘Cromwell between Two Pillars’

 

The Wilkinson Head of Oliver Cromwell and Its Relationship to Busts, Masks and Painted Portraits

FTW! //victory ceremony//militainment

roma

alphabet

Oxymoron

wallinger's flag/ southbank

flagdatabase

island

speech scroll

A Banderole (Fr. for a "little banner") is a small flag or streamer carried on the lance of a knight, or flying from the mast-head of a ship in battle, etc.

The term is also used in art and architecture for a speech scroll or streamer, representing a roll of parchment carried by or surrounding a figure or object, for bearing an inscription, typically the name of or a quotation from the figure depicted, though many are blank and were decorative and never intended to be lettered.

please advise the sender
immediately of the error in transmission.>