The Manchurian Candidate (1959; 1962) and sex between the lines, pt 2 of 3.

Rev., Jan 24,25,26 2023.

The dream sequence is, of course, the center of the 1962 movie, and the book, and after the point where Marco makes a crash pad bachelor pad for the bedding of girls seemingly in every corner of New York who were ready and willing for one night stands or hookups, he gets down to business. It is interesting that Condon describes the core scene of the dream as a Technicolor print

complete and edited like an attack upon his sanity. He also calls it an incubus, which is a demon that attacks one in one’s sleep, often of a sexual nature. He also became part of the Technicolor print. This seems to infer that the dream rolled out, but then there was one moment, the sit bolt upright ephialtes leap moment, which distinguished itself as a trigger from every other element, and this was the Technicolor print. This would seem to lend itself to the idea that the movie make use of the switch from black and white to color, like in the Picture of Dorian Gray, but it did not. Then he began to take notes about the dream, and ask it questions, details that he might’ve overlooked.

Once again, what interests me here, not in the movie, was the presence of a chalkboard, and whatever is written or drawn on it being in different colored chalks.

This strongly suggests a rational source for the origin of the Psycho Notebook, that is, the interpretation of dreams, that then spills over into life in the form of a conspiracy theory, and paranoia, to then think the dream a key to explain one’s connection to or submission to an influencing machine (Tausk). If you get to the point that the Trigger image begins to dominate you, so that you can think of nothing else, that would seem to then be able to invade every waking aspect of your life too. And that sort of belief would make you paranoid, clinically speaking. The Technicolor Print and the chalkboard with colored chalks suggests to me the trope of the Rainbow of the Color Wheel which as if commences an activation of a vector, but going out into ambience. I first analyzed this form in the art of Justin Matherly, 2020, rmarts, and still see it a lot, as a trope of jumping back out into ambience, from being on or in a vector. If it turns one way, you are haunted, the other, and you are released, so it has a place

as I have it here, it is a simplified idea of a nightmare bounced out of into a fear vector, from which one keeps bouncing out. Then it is the conscious rational mind going back into the dream as if into a sealed nuclear reactor after an accident, that extracts from it connections that would then allow Marco to develop a paranoid vision of its importance. This is psychologically problematic.

Quite the opposite, Raymond has been fixed under the linkages of an impellation or spell cast onto and into him by hypnosis and brainwashing. At one point officials from the Pavlov Institute come to New York to test how up to date the linkages have kept, they kept very well. What Marco does not know is that he is more or less under the control of the same linkages, minus the last few activating ones. In any case the point of his discovery is that he realizes that this dream is not constitutional, but a “mondo”, my term for an image implanted into him by the power of a tyche, the tyrant Lo, Korean operator hypnotist.

This again asserts that Raymond’s dream has become a screen, something that he did not count on, because the important thing with him is not the dream but that through the dream they instilled some hypnotic charges that compel him by their influence to do bad things. Thus, dream coopted, something like this

that is, under the High Light, which keeps one from sleeping, his normal brain has been emptied out, and a sort of short-circuit limited machine brain has been as if inserted into him. And the series of linkages that get him to do what they want him to do, him being a good “resenter”, the line of dialog which triggers a moment, the playing of the solitaire, the Queen of Diamonds, which cast him into his state, in which he kills, he experiences as nightmare, This is an intrusion of the rational mind into the hypnagogic mind of a human being. And, of course, the problem here, which Marco does not fully appreciate, is that this formulation keeps the locale of the dream as an insomniating form, the High Light, to as if blind the rest of his brain so let his brain operate on the smooth linkages of the impellation of the spell upon him. This chain of linkages also goes back to the dream, and the locale of the dream, and so it is as if Tunghwa becomes a magic word that speaks of the place and the problem. Tunghwa becomes a gestalt ruling his mind, stamped onto his mind. Marco does not have this problem.

And it is precisely this problem which spurs my continued worry that Putin is carrying out the Ukraine war entirely in a gestalted way. His gestalt is being limited by trauma to only be able to see the promised land from Phobos, then to see the sky filled with catastrophic celestial images that then wipe out life on earth. Thus the scorched earth tone of his way of warfare. Even, indeed, this winter, winters and wars in that part of the world creating such a corpus of images of human carnage, WW2

and misunderstandings in the press. in fact, he loves this sort of bleak landscape

and that history acts on his mind in the same way as the gestalt of the Tunguska event, of 1908, to set down the look of devastation by which he thinks passionarity might be achieved on earth

and we have had a burst of Wagner imagery of that nature, convincing me again that he likes this idea, widespread bleak carnage, today

In the same way, Raymond is programmed in a short circuit of an impellation of specific cues and triggers, after which he acts in a purely un-conscious robotic way, under the direction of the operators, a golem to their need. This, alas, I now see as a mainstream element of Russian thought, which obviously stamped the half-life mind of Vladimir Putin.

In remembering part of the dream again, Condon again backs up the comment on Technicolor print by describing the light around the hat of a woman in the dream, I think, as like St Elmos fire, which, of course, is the basis of my idea of the “corporsant”,

He is seeing, but maybe suspecting, by that reference, that his mother is the operator in the US. She then unleashes an apocalyptic tirade which is of the same nature of Waetzwold’s paragraph on the spread of the blood rain mania through the low countries and Germany in the 16 the century in his Durer biography

and what shocks me again here is that when they test Raymond to see if his linkages are in tact enough for them to give him an instruction and him in hypnosis to carry it out, he goes to a colleague’s house at four o clock in the morning and kills him in his bed. Again, the four o clock demon is the demon of the it dawning on the mind that the coming day is going to be a disaster or trouble, and if you are awoken at that hour to wake up the brain in worry you will never get back to sleep and thus be a zombie for that day too. For Raymond to strike at this hour signals that they envision the whole future as a version of the attack of the four o clock demon, full of doom, which they will then win over.

Finally, Marco realizes that Raymond was having the same dream as he was.

the trope of a group of people having the same dream evinces the presence of a Sleeper. In spy terminology a sleeper or mole is exactly what they are making of Raymond, an agent for their side hidden in plain sight in the highest echelons of power of the other side, them to manipulate it. The idea reinforces the notion of brainwashing. My guess is that Condon believed that it is only by the interference of a devious power that such a thing could happen.

At this point, the added element that irritates Marco, and is the problem for him, is the contradiction between his own power and his sense that he is being pulled at by another power. That is, he knew that there was a Figure Eight that had formed in his brain, and that it involved conflict, and a fight between a controlling power and his own power, and the friction of the fight was causing him extreme distress. This seems to be the essence of the Figure Eight. It is in transition

and to describe it, Condon uses some colorful language indeed, :”every nerve end of his body had grown a small ticklish moustache, and they sidled along under his skin like eager touts, screaming on tiptoe”. A tout is someone who sells something too aggressively

Every Nerve End of His Body Had Grown a Small Ticklish Moustache, Like Eager Touts, Screaming on Tiptoe, The Manchurian Candidate (1959), Jan 16 2023

(The presence of the tyche is there, but not yet entirely taking over. As a result, there is a pre-spin friction, and as this is turbulence I picture Marco as become a body tunnel falling across the Luor, or in-between, the nerves agitating him as screaming touts, which in this case I picture as Gene Kelley in his man about town outfit in American In Paris (1953)

A reminder running all the way up to The Shining (1980) that there is a good deal of tacit criticism of male behavior in modern cinema.  Also if this is an example of the use of th “chorus Line of nerves” as a trope, then it links up with the use of the chorus line trope as an image suggesting mental manipulation in Don’t Worry Darling (2022) too.

Then, just like Mariah in Play it As It Lays (1970), Shaw had the illusion that he could see and hear everything at once and had lost all of his ability to edit either sight or sound. Sound particularly detonates his reflexes 181. It says he had to stop listening to people talk because an open A sound repeated several times within a sentence could make him weep uncontrollably (this is a disorder, dysphonia)181 Then his teeth would chatter, like he had a chill, and after five nights of nightmare he developed a bad facial tic. And Condon nicely sums up the Figure Eight, “Marco was being rubbed into sand by the grinding stones of two fealties”. He was slowly being rubbed away by two …realities 184.

It is not just that people develop their own tolerable visual culture, but that under certain stressful situations they can develop very limited visual cultures. One of the reasons I needed to get out of that hospital room last week, 401 south, was that all of its signage, and all the coming and going, and all the rules, and record keeping, was so out of the norm of my usual tempo of encounter with others that it stressed me out and pulled at my standard umwelt (the limited of visuality of which is pictured in Uexhull’s basic book).

one of my favorites, of a sea creature who does not see, but only senses

It was, just like above, a case of their pace and tempo of visual reality pulling against mine, and mine was losing, and in the losing of it I got, just like above, very nervous, almost to the point that I “had to get out of there”, and began to act strange, asking the nurse to turn the bed to the wall, trying to cover the signage on the beds and walls with blankets, it could’ve got quite weird had I not got out. The sudden opening up of the iris to that scale, given that most of my life since lockdown had been seen in a very limited iris, hurt in itself. All of this is sign of the activation of the Figure Eight, and the feeling that something is pulling at you, and tearing at you.

And by contrast what you seek to counter it is ballast that lets you have the illusion of having some control back. In Marco’s case he lay his head in Eugenie’s lap, and Condon describes her from that POV as an almost geological formation offering solace and balm to him. From in her lap, her belt was a shining silver belt buckle shaped as Quetzalocoatl, an urbane feathered serpent, then, past that, uplifted, high-setting, pronounced breasts that stared back at him eyelessly through dark blue wool, 184. Thus, he has called in a demon to fight for him, and she is composed of her belt buckle and her breasts.

Marco’s Quetzacoatl, Pronounced Breasts that Stared Back at Him Eyelessly Through Dark Blue Wool, The Manchurian Candidate (1959), 184, Jan 26 2023

Here her breasts, under blue wool, become the eyes of a protective demon. Equally protective she had a mouth whose shape he had yearned to see in living flesh since he had seen its counterpart in a photograph he had found in a German magazine twenty-three years before, rolling up in his father’s effects 184. This seems to refer to his mother, maybe he saw a picture of her in his father’s effects? It is also true that it was often in one’s father’s effects, well, other guys’ fathers, that one was first exposed to pinup Playboy=style nude photography. But my guess is a picture of his mother, now manifest, above him, in her. This is yet another demon (of the mind)

Living Flesh from a German Magazine 23 Years ago, The Manchurian Candidate (1959), 184, jan 26 2023.

This too is a demon, and if the magazine mentioned is stored deep in his drawers, and is something he came across in his father’s effects, which made him think maybe this is how his father kept a memory of his mother, then she, Eugenie, is the realization of this dream image, and in that provides him great balm, acting on him in a pacifying way that pulls him together. This is another pre-feminist way in which men made use of women to help them with psychological balance. In terms of an image that sticks in the mind and that may be related to one’s mother, and maybe a nursery picture (well, my example is the perennial fashion of the black dress with pink flowers on it, which always harks back in that way, in fact sets me off on a crush that feels at times like a painful hypnosis. One has shown up on Alison Williams in the movie of the moment, Megan (2023).

And then, confirmation that he is speaking the tropaic language of popular culture, that moment of ophthchthony, that is, the seeing of the angel who would save him, he then wafts out into angelspace, imagining women as, in fact, angels, “yaztas, fravashi, and Amesha spirits, seraphim and cherubim, hayyot, ofanium, arelim, and Harut and Marut, who had said, We are only a temptation. Be not then an unbeliever”. So he decides that Eugenie could only be one of the travashi, that army of angels that has existed in heaven 185. So confirmation, Then he envisions such angels as a natural force. The wind is called khamseen, and after a flood throws a lot of power down a mountainside the desert is reborn and millions and millions of white and yellow flowers come to bloom all across the empty desolation 188.

His rescue from this nervous breakdown was offered by Eugenie, who did seem in the original to throw herself at him very, very quickly. She arrived as a lifesaver just in time, but he conceives of her, out of being in the state of being pulled at, as a succession of two demons, rising up out of the chaos created by him being rattled, as a tout.

Then Condon does a little praise of New York. It’s a wonderful town. The west side of the island was rich in facades not unlike the possibilities of a fairy princess with syphilis. Which is quite snappy190. Central Park was betrayed by faggots, a 50s word, and I think referring to the Ramble, a gay assignation place on up through the 70s, at least, though, again, see Cruising (1981), now on HBO). He unleashes on the dirt that can never be cleaned up because thousands cannot clean up after millions, and as for Times Square, well, it was like this when I arrived, it was “the pig-eyed part of the city that were lesions of neon and incandescence scabs pustules of lights and color in suggestively luetic lycopods, illuminating littered streets 181. Luetic means syphilis, lycopods are moss, so, a vision of hell on earth NYC, and as for a linkage to the atomic scare movies of the 50s, the buildings of the city are described as “so many extended fingers beckoning the Bomb” `”192, It is unclear if this is Marco in panic again, or a narrator’s reality.

The Pig-Eyed Part of Town That Wore Lesions of Neon and Luetic Lycopods, The Manchurian Candidate (1959), 191, Jan 26, 2023.

So Many Extended Fingers Beckoning the Bomb, The Manchurian Candidate (1959), 192, Jan 26, 2023

Then even more startling, when Marco comes to Shaw’s and finds Chunjin there, he triggers big time, and they have a knock down drag out fight in the movie, and here in the book too. But his response in the book is haywire, proof to me that Condon has, indeed, a demonic imagination, a figurative demonic imagination, because the instant he sees Chunjin he thinks of an Arab nose in Cyrano, and then quotes Aristophanes who described a mythological monster called Hippocampelephantocamelos? 192 which is exactly the demon or monster of mass public hysteria that I saw appear month by month during covid lockdown (see my essay on Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, my logo on FB is still the hippalektryron, even though I was not the horse neighing chicken with its head cut off at the demonstrations in 2020, devoured as happening, because happening on an unsound, hysterical reactive basis. A blogger has made a picture of it,

or being part hippocamp

combined with elephant and camel, I saw a glimpse of him in I think January 2021 in Dali’s pictures of the Three Wise Men, that shaggy camel

In seeing Chunjin, he remembers in monstrous form the projections of that room, a many headed  thing, with Stalin and Mao all over, and others. In the opening 360 spin there is a lot of background-foreground monster making. House plants means trouble

then as I can hardly believe that American women at a garden party in 1951 looked like they were grandmas from the 1930s, this too is made as a cover image of the real image behind it, which is Russian and Korean officials.

Since all freaks are required, this appears to be a set of identical twins, confusing the memory

more excellent houseplants

then it makes no sense that they are stuck in this place. Where they are told this is is the cover, and Marco is remembering it, in this dream sequence, half real, half cover

but Stalin-Mao and Eskimo monster all play a dominant part

then, a transposition that happens in the dream, Lo sometimes turns into the lady leading the garden show

then we get a Figure Eight and Lo recollected as the nexus or the composite thereof

then when Raymond moves his chair up, the compositing becomes overlapping almost

then this is one of the most classic examples of true glass onion symbol play, which you can see in a light dream. The strange gestures that he can never figure out, someone is dealing cards.

Chunjin is portrayed by an Italian American actor, alas, the times, but a compositing of Raymond and Stalin too

and then this woman is identified, in the next second, as a Russian general

and it is when Shaw strangles the soldier that Marco (Sinatra) wakes up from the nightmare, bolt upright in bed.

It is a pretty nice piece of modernist dreamwork, using most of Freud’s four dream functions, the first psychodynamic functions of the mind I learned, fifty years ago, and applied in a paper in The Waste Land, condensation, displacement, secondary revision and consideration of representation. Condensation is when a number of elements are combined into one; displacement is when an idea in a dream is replaced by another associated with it; secondary revision is when the conscious mind gets involved to try to make sense of it; and consideration of representation is transforming thoughts into visual elements. All the big pictures, a trope in 60s horror movies, combined in a memory of Lo is the first; the general depicted as a lady at a New Jersey garden party is the second; when the Russian General and the lady who represents him appear in one scene giving a scarf for Raymond to strangle with that is the third (with that nice picking apart uncanny quality that dreams that partly surface can have); and then I think the role of Chunjin is to  represent the idea that somehow as soldiers they were brought mentally under the control of the Koreans.

The logo for the movie seems to suggest that their brains under their helmets have been scrambled, but that they hold on to themselves on the surface level, represented by the helmet, and its claim as a symbol of fighting for liberty.

But, then, the thing that stuck in the movies, and all mind control movies thereafter, is the effortless ease of action in the commission of an entirely foreign and irrational act contrary to one’s own will and reason. Thus, the nonchalant manner in which Raymond kills, illogically too, with a scarf

end of part 2.

The Manchurian Candidate (1959; 1962) and sex between the lines, pt 1 of 3.

Rev., Jan 24,25,26 2023.

Richard Condon’s novel, The Manchurian Candidate (1959), has a deep set of images that play out in what I call the pit, the space between the lines that lets the imagination dwell on ribald or obscene things that the culture thinks is OK to have in the brain, but not Ok to bring to film. My interest is not in comparing book and movie, it is impossible. But the between-the-lines pit does offer images that dwell in the honeycomb as it were preexisting to the movie. The novel is notable for generally being obsessed with sick sex as the motor that seems to enable the brainwashing of Raymond Shaw. Though none of it is mentioned or shown in the movie, as movie Raymond Shaw would find the sex life of his mother to be inconceivable, the implication is that she seduced her father when she was a teenager, then after a good marriage, chose a political marriage, was relieved when new husband could not “mount” her, so settled for pimping young girls to him nightly. Condon describes Iselins’ attempt to mount Mother with a vivid image

Johnny is described as a mattress screamer, which brings up an image, a “mondo”.

Johnny, that Old Time Mattress Screamer and Gasper, The Manchurian Candidate, 1959, Jan 24 2023

emptied out of mind, this places him on the place of sacrifice, he screams at sex..Then, a description of their sex, never a word in the movie, a butterfly on a pterodactyl.

As impotent as a Male Butterfly Atop a Female Pterodactyl, The Manchurian Candidate, 1959, Jan 24 2023

Even more sick, the mother was extremely pleased that Big John could not consummate, she was not in it for that.

the next scene has a certain film noir character to it

like this

Never Seen By Him, As Though They Had Been a Carnal Dream, The Manchurian Candidate (1959). Jan 24 2023

this simple trap of the control of her over him entails her being the Famulus, but as the third, negotiating his pleasure by switching the vector to ON and then sending Presences, that is, just pretty faces seen from afar, brought forward under her control, but as they came closer to remain at the remove of the Presence, phantoms, who had sex with him in the dark, then departed before it got light out, dream visits. The scene has a certain degree of precedence to the JFK sex scene in Blonde (2022). The Venetian Blind effect communicates the spuriousness of it all. One thing I might’ve missed is that she is the US “operator” (i hypnotist) of Raymond but practices the same manipulative skills on John. As a result, she is a Tyche figure, with that sort of power, second removed from the original brainwasher, Lo, This means this whole complication occurs not only behind closed doors deep in the private intimacy of their marriage, but under the Figure Eight of her manipulation of him, and the Blue Streak created in fallout from that, in the Black House, at the edge of sentience, where he is more likely not o pursue the fact that when he dreamt he had a sex dream last night it sure did feel real.

this then creates a counter vector, that is, he acts against its presence, by preferring to see the bevy and parade of nude females to his bed at night as a sign from god or psychology, and not as an arrangement made by his wife. He accepts the dream of the mondo (inserted image) of his nightly visitations, so that he is satisfied sexually and therefore able to be kept in control.

And as a mondo

The Perfect Proof of Her Love For Him, The Manchurian Candidate (1959), Jan 24 2023

This is a mondo floating in moonfire below the Blue Streak of the false atmosphere of sub-figure eight helter skeltering. which means that he was all but living in one of her hypnotic zones, on the model of Lo. She has transferred her sexual excitement to her ambition, happily accepting Johnnay’s onomatopoeia with all the other women

Here again, the spider demon of the prematurely matured young woman, which caused her to lurk in the attic of her house waiting for her father to come up and fuck her, the incest her idea, to control a man, even her father

this is a ten-year-old, or so, having sex in between the lines of a 1959 novel, and not, apparently, a word, the image is vivid, with precedent of the Black House as presented even in Nope (2022).

She had Lain in the High Dark Attic of Her Father’s House, The Manchurian Candidate (1959), Jan 24, 2023.

This image, of 1930s incest, in the population of Anglo-Saxons, who ruled the First Republic of America lock, stock and barrel, this the onset of their decadence, strikes me as already placed in a long line of similar images, and as a predecessor to images of Three in The Attic (1968) sex torture or seduction, going on through movies into the contemporary period. In these scirps of the in-between-the-lines spaces of books, this is the second such scene I have sketched, the other being Hitler’s delirium in the attic of the Hanfstaengel House, when the Mrs, used her sex to calm him down. It is amusing, the only sex that seems able to fit between the lines of books are perverted sex scenes. It strikes me that the rationalism of the prose automatically exploits sex, much in the manner in which exploitation of sex is the basis of all scenarios in pornographic movies or scenes. The two go hand in hand in a decadent modern society. All sex is disgustingly transactional.

Well, this is some writing!

Every compulsively brutal blow from that hockey stick in the hands of that young man, ouch, reminds me of the pulsating rod in The Godfather, page 25, but again, let’s be clear what the mind of the reader is being asked to imagine, a dick entering a vagina in a series of brutal blows, and the dick so hard, and feeling so foreign to her, that it is a hockey stick, with an afterimage of it swatting at her twat like it is the puck, or hitting the puck like fucking, and her vulva is the net of the goal. Right there in the book, a full-on pornographic scene

Every Compulsively Brutal Blow From that Hockey Stick in the Hands of That Young Man, The Manchurian Candidate (1959), Jan 24, 2023

It is such a weird scene, it is almost as if he is like a porn cockmeister who swats at the face or face fucks deep to bring up the throttle, right here in a 1959 book, an image that still would not really be allowed to be seen on film, no? My intent is to show that she is the one in control, even as he fucks her, and he is her father.

It is humorous that she goes to school in Minnesota, which is Norse Country, in the USA, funny to hear the Norse being talked about as if an unassimilated population at the time

Even stranger, like Fiend Without a Face (1958), and The Giant Claw (1957), and The Thing,(1951) this is another work of American popular culture in the 1950s that takes places along the guard-line of northern Canada, in this case Greenland.

Once again, as in all war movies of the time, sex is the problem. At one point, he fucks his secretary, or something like that, a little sprawl on a desk,

then, amazingly, a comic tale is told of Iselin’s army escapades to get some sex, and his idea was walk over to the Eskimo village and see if one of the ladies would fuck him. Comic, right? Condon mentions Nifelheim

lately, my idea of the fata morgana keeps expanding in an upward direction. Though my mind is weighed down with gravity, so I tend to concentrate more on the bottomless pit, there must be an uplifted counterpart, the Topless Sky, and maybe this is Nifelheim, a nice name. In any case, in the 50s, the fear of Russia coming over the top was so great it made it as a trope into several movies. Here we are again, and theme is always, not only that it is ice cold, but that the ice cold is a metaphor for there being no sex. This then enables the What Did You Do In The War Daddy? trope, which are escapades in which GIs tell each other what they had to do during the war to get sex. Iselin here tells one of the more grotesque ones, I am sure to mark him as an oaf and a fool, even if he got mileage from it. It is all about cultural exploitation on a major scale, but “ok” because undertaken on the devil’s road, in a life and death situation, and in whited out ambience. White Hell is the zone beyond fata morgana where German Heimat movies are set (and I want to write up Hitler’s nest as an example too). Nifelheim would be in sentience, perhaps, I envision this escapade happening running along a line across the top of the guard line between US and Them, and as such it serves as comically apotropaic fun

by local custom swatting back at his intrusive request for sex from some willing eskimo women. Though such stories always also have the trope that the sex is offered by the man in charge, and it would be an insult for you to not mate with her, here it is parodied in a cruel way.

It seems like he goes back and forth making this trek, a kind of figure eight, trying to get women

Johnny at Etah now used his hands to show the men what he needed

but now it seems that the key to the humor of disgust is that the eskimos save their urine for hygienic and other purposes, so he gets into an igloo and finds a crowd of women circling some pots full of urine, it smells horrible.

the placement of this scene inside an igloo readymade builds it as a mondo in the mind, for those listening to envision all camped out, in the shadows, women, in the foreground, buckets of urine, and he scrunches in above trying to wrestle out of his coat and get his pants off and his dick up so that he can get some poontang now. This is clearly a mondo, possibly not even true, a tall tale

It Was a Case of Poontang Now, The Manchurian Candidate (1959), Jan 24, 2023

Then it gets even crazier, you cannot not almost hear him tell it

She Wasn’t Letting Go Because For Whatever Crazy Reason She Liked Johnny, The Manchurian Candidate (1959), Jan 14 2023.

But at last he realizes he isn’t getting any, so he gives up, and starts squeezing his way out the opening, into a storm. I imagine the reference to Orson Welles could be an expression of largeness of that time, something you might hear in the Sopranos, and then too his cheeks might refer us to Johnny’s ass he squeezes out, I imagine bare assed, and dangling, and then he meets the hurricane outside, the perfect man’s locker room story.

Inside An Area About as Big As Orson Welles Head, Everybody Howling For Blood, The Manchurian Candidate (1969), Jan 24 2023

But then the woman attacks him, trying to keep him

I picture all this as a mondo as I cannot be sure this is not all just Johnny telling stories. In any case. The big trick in the plan of hypnosis is that it removes from the subject all memory of the murder, and therefore all awareness of guilt, when there is no guilt, there is no remorse, and no end in sight.

Tar (2023) which I did not like much, had a brief shower scene when she takes a head down shower to burn the stress out of her after she first reads of some incriminating emails that might come her way. It is fun that The Manchurian Candidate also has a shower scene. And it consists of Raymond’s mother taking a double shower, and then a hit of morphine, and then sitting down to write a letter from Raymond to Jocie breaking up with her.

She Took A Hot Shower Followed By a Cold Shower, The Manchurian Candidate (2023). Jan 24, 2023

But, again, imagine this, another nude scene for Angela Lansbury in this movie within the between the lines of the book

We also hear that Raymond got all his sex from prostitutes. In the novel Condon makes prostitution seems entirely normal, and pictures all single women in the postwar world as entirely willing at any hour of day or night to jump into bed with a nice GI come home.

Then, more! Once Marco, the Sinatra character in the movie, shows up, he invites all sorts of women to the apartment and they shack up for one-night stands, Raymond getting some of the overflow.

Because Raymond is shy, he gets asked, of course, the question, men still get asked this, I took it a few times too.

Marco also holds a séance, which is fun, and he got the idea from a book which he read on the train cross country.

he beds some of the girls brought back by Marco

in all of this I suspect brainwashing. I posted.

“Unlikely I will get to read them all, but covers of paperbacks from the 60s and 70s do rather catch an undercurrent of the times, no? Right now we live with the myth that before the internet all was truth, only now are we subjected to post truth. So not true, and I’ve decided that special sewer of suspect knowledge in my coming of age was a space between the lines in the texts of PAPERBACKS. Question everything. Some books of the time.

To return to the pit, between the lines of the text of the novel. The dream sequence is, of course, the centerpiece of the 1962 movie, and the book, and after the point where Marco makes a crash pad bachelor pad for the bedding of girls seemingly in every corner of New York who were ready and willing for one-night stands or hookups, he gets down to business.

end of pt. 1.

Anne Imhof, Nikita Gale and a Glimpse of the Bottomless Pit.

Rev, Oct 11,12 2022.

Part 2 is mostly about Nikita Gale.

Having considered a work of art by Anne Imhof which in its structure depicts both the mind of the tyrant controlling a person, and person’s efforts to get around that power, the idea that the power is projected as if in a rhabdom, or spear, plays out in movies all the time. Indeed, at about this time, I saw a movie which was precisely about the struggle between a tyche power, and a psychic power used against it, by an agencyless woman, in The Eyes of Annie Jones (1964), and I was surprised to see that to convey the idea that he has power over Annie Richard Condon uses a poker to express it

So, very much like the viewing persona in Imhof’s exhibition in London, Annie is a modern girl whose life is entirely controlled by the tyche figures, the tyrants in every direction, She is agencyless, but she has resource, because of psychic powers, and when a woman decides to make use of them to solve a mystery she has, the rhabdom of her seeing is projected into the movie in its narrow, focused way, that is quite interesting

And, from this, another idea. The sightednss of the rhabdom is a spear, or stab, it is narrowed because like an iris it is a focused gaze, but it is such because it is the gaze of the tyche which has hacked or overridden the gaze of the subject, so that the subject, with some resistance and confusion, is seeing the world with the tyche’s gaze through their overridden subjectivity. Thus, like this

that is, it narrows coming through the back of the head of the subject, because of resistance and size fit, and because in duress, in a bleak agencyless empty world, and thus it is in a machinelike way its narrow rhabdomic gaze sees things in a quasi-predatory way (this explains to the Eyes of Laura Mars as well as Annie Jones, which is why her eyes are red )

But, then, this is precisely the gaze that artist Nikita Gale tries to create in her installation this month in London. That is, the gaze is the gaze of Circe, full of hate, and a will to blind the memory of the masters, and then through the dogs, and this creates, indeed, narrow conelike vectors of gazes, literally rhabdoms!

“Second Nikita Gale ping this month, Chisenhale gallery, London, it appears they make precise videos for vimeo: no fanfare, just the facts, then let me loose (the exciting part for me is in my current hyperreading mood I’m interested in artists who scry up imaginings from literature; then, in characterizing the visuality of the gallery according to dog vision, Gale not only creates a semblance of an Umwelt, term from Uexhull, the world as seen from, to survive. Finally, it has been a very long time since I read Song but what Circe has done is create a “chamber of desolation” of a house she suffered in. This idea I know from De Quincy’s strange novel on a Jewish assassin serial killer who takes vengeance on a German town that killed his mother and sister in a pogrom, and he stirs up the anger, to remind himself, by having gone to the effort of beautifully furnishing a room, then, all done, perfect bourgeoise birdcage, he utterly trashes it, then locks the door, only to visit his “chamber of desolation” on the day of remembrance. When the ideas run deep, you don’t need the fanfare. Closes Sunday.

Nikita Gale, this month, seems to be the harbinger for the vibe shift that I have guessed, in this last season of a three-year market cycle, to soon descend upon the art world. I previously made a shout out to her exhibition in LA

“Hollowscene, Nikita Gale, C & C, LA, easily the most challenging work so far this season, and, as I am a-harbingering after a vibe shift, on the edge of that. And vibes with some thoughts of mine of late. Looking for the ways of perceiving in “sentient” mindspace, aka the far darkness, recently, I bumped into hollow earth theory, synchroetherrhoe-ly mentioned in the press release here, hollow earth theory! and my tentative answer as to why is one would cling to hollow earth theory is that it provides one with an almost embryonic sense of one’s personal space in creation set up as a defense against a forthright awareness that viewed from planet Exos in far sentience you appear to be, precisely, entirely hollowed out and not there. This is not a recommended space (I think it was where I was at in the 70s), but Gale’s art lets you glimpse at it. Which means, if Gale is after the same, Hxstxrical* Record is literally a completely turned inside out work of contemporary art fanfare and, remarkably, Gale thought that all through (with a gloss in Another Anthem beseeching us to turn the volume down on our egotism so we can actually hear the far whir). Very challenging exhibit! *Mxre vxbx mxtch, I xlsx sxmxtxmxs wxnt tx x xxt xll vxwxls”.

this installation I tentatively categorized as being staged in sentient space. The remarkable press release to the show was simply a glossary of the relevant terms, enough to feed the logic.

Especially interesting is her definition of an eggcup, which is new to me, and then a form of nostalgia. But what really stuck out was that she refers to hollow earth theory, which I looked at, searching for foo, last Spring. Hollow earth theory is an attempt to grasp the nature of the sentient realm. It is, however, an attempt curtailed or restrained by primitive personal safety needs. One of the gazes that comes in from the sentient is the Black Rainbow; Fredericka Hauff, the original seeress, also saw in full fifth stage clairvoyance the whole of the universe reflected in herself as if a mirror. From hollow earth theory is discerned that you could look back on the world and see it as if everything in it was hollowed out, even to a point beyond the periacqueductal diminishment of materiality in the ambient zone. But taken in whole as derived from mind and supported by dream machines to be made to seem plausibly real what hollow earth theory really does, and it is similar to the end of the world at the county line POV that I adopted to explore middle America trailing behind my brother in the 70s, is it, in a radically phenomenological way, creates as if a sense of embryonic safety around a selfish self. If they are enclosed in the center of an earth whose construct fills their sky, they are spared the self-devastating conception of real space, in which, let’s face it, man is nothing.

This does seem to be what Gale is after, her installation strikes me as a phenomenological attempt to create a turned inside out world, a hollow world, as seen from the POV of Exos in sentient space. As a result, her portrait is reduced to a sketch of her teeth, much in the manner of Eyes Wide Shut

and, then, rather than paint a portrait of herself, that is, according to rules of representation 101, it being good for an audience to see people who look just like them, or look like everyone looks, or represents them or sees them for the first time ever, all of which simple answer philosophy Gale (and I) seem skeptical about, a shadow of herself only

so, representation 101 is this

that is, an audience sees an artist create a portrait that makes real a cult figure, or a valued self. In the context of the art world, such a portrait is intercessional, as it represents an underrepresented group and gives them, at last, some petitional power, that is, a narrow sense of ageny, in the world. This then as a form of reagency resets the current representation culture of the time and place, and makes a new representation cult, the other now the not-the-other, the one. This then reflects back on an audience which, so the party line goes, feels empowered by having been represented by “someone that looks like me.”

You might imagine that the goal to be represented by “someone that looks like me” is a problematic statement for a second born identical twin, who, in fact, has, in my family life, up through my 20s, been literally represented by him. Indeed, that representation allows others to talk to me through him, and they feel like, having talked to the “representative” of the twins, I am covered. In other words, being represented by “someone that looks like you” ends up with you being represented by a preferable lookalike, which once again diminishes you to a state, and in quite a wrinkled conundrum, of not being represented while being represented (to say nothing of the fact that representation 101 usually settles for types, which soon in time curdle into new limits upon full selfhood)

By contrast, theoretically, Gale sees representation 101 as but a process that offers up to the preexisting and presiding cult, which is, in America, still majority white America, as a kind of offering, sacrifice to the cult, for it to then feel exonerated of its regime of singleton-based ego representation, which, in aegis and other pictures, represents cult power (which is a negative in modern civilization, under the exploitation of a tyche figure, or tyrant).

and here is the tyrant, and the way in which a tyrant singleton makes use of sacrificed representations of others is one of the primary means of him controlling them and maintaining power, no?  So, she is suspicious of representation.

So, it could be said Galle turns away from representation 101 culture, to create a counter reality of periacqueductal dematerialization where “representations” of things become ghostly, and demonic, in a looser ambient space, in the mind expanding in dream states. But, then, it is not exactly her interest, ghosts. So, what really happens is the counter agentic culturing she has in mind is then flipped to a negative, that is, moves out into sentient space, at the far ping of tinnitus, and it is at that far off place that she roosts, on Exos, to, with exoagency, gaze back in.

and it is out in the sentient zone of the mind that she tries to work out what the hollowscene will look like. I switch now to my other form of graph.

Now, a problem, a tyche figure, or tyrannt, empties out the life of the mind of the people, to then pacify them in a culture filled with superheroes and the sort, to make the powerless think they have power. They don’t, not until time passes to overthrow the current regime from the inside out.

now I am saying that a gaze from the sentient can hollow out the culture, to present it in critical way. This demon sees real mindspace, inside an embrasure, behind a peripteral wall, formed by its shadow and shaped by its whisper.

And I THINK, this is where Gale’s installation is. I mean, take this work

it is called

The x-ing out the vowels in the title is both an apotropaic device, the more consonants in a word the better, and a rejection of naming per se, refusing that way in which language is used. This x’s out the whole game of, for example, commonplace in culture today, where preemptive manipulation of language and terminology is used as a shibboleth of password politics to reinforce the us-them power of a particular constituency.

Then, normally, a bleachers is a sunny place, where parents sit to watch their kids play sports, or whatever, and those who take a seat cheer, and are lead in cheering, to give support to the team or whomever needs support. This support is also undertaken by cheers, banners, mascots, amplifications, songs, bands, the whole bit, all designed to make the us-them wagon-circling group of the bleachers feel their own power and magically exert it to the field to help the team win.

Here, is it all turned inside out. The bleachers is nowhere, and in the dark (my keenest bleachers memories, in fact, took place under the bleachers), If a klieg light is meant to shine a light on a cult figure, and as such be part of the fanfare, here lights reject that power, turn them around and cast them to the wall, in one place catching a shadow of a representation. A transducer is an electronic device that converts energy from one form to another, that is, here, it is a dream machine in a picture-in-picture situation bespeaking the intentional plausibility of the whole turninsideout process. And ten rocks and such are meant in various ways to represent the unrepresentable nature of long time, beyond even Braudel’s longue duree, geological time, which–and this was in a title in a recent New Museum show– which happens so slowly no one can see it, so it seems invisible.

I dealt with a bleachers in work by Oscar Murillo a couple of years ago, here is another bleachers, but I think Gale has pretty thoroughly taken an object out of the world and then in the POV looking in from sentient space hollowed it out, by reversing the valency of every pulse a bleachers exerts. And seeing it, I thought, perfect example, a work of art as might exist in sentient space, all the usual currents of power turned inside out,

then, it is true, when someone casts their mind to such sentient places, now and then they will lift out of it, and drift back in to less completely “radical” postures. This piece mentions Anthems

I saw it as intending to locate representation of self in the minute changes one makes to objects in one’s routine life, which are for that almost entirely invisible to the eye of the other. Indeed, here, it might be said (I have no access to the audio, video or performance aspects of Gale’s work) the “art” is in the stickers, by which a person working a shit job nonetheless finds some sense of self in the particular way he or she carries out such tasks.

this, however, does complicate the problem as it is under the tyche that one loses all agency, and in an emptied out world one begins to build up a response of alternative, clairvoyant power. My current periapt of an idea is that it is in such straitened and controlled-against-one’s will posture that this form of expression comes out (and seen in popular culture in, for example, the whole discourse which believes that females communicate their feelings by secret codes hidden in how they dress).

This, then, was a work for the moment, with eyes tiring of, and the mind I-told-you-soing about representation 101, one tranche heads out into deeper water.

Which brings us to the current show at Chishalen.

Though the word “reimagining” has been buzzworded into meaninglessness, I give her a pass here. What she is describing is a scenographic occupation or possession of the gallery, very much in the tradition of the European practitioners of this art, of which Anne Imhof has emerged as the prime example. What the intent of this instrumentation is is to reposition the POV of the viewer in a space where agency is altered, either improved or weakened. In Imhof’s case she is almost in the business of creating what Gell writes about as equal to works of art as portraits of persons, traps, and the trap spaces in which, under the obliterating power of a tyrant, one scratches out a life in a severely curtailed and truncated cultural space. Gale seems less determined to wallow in the bottomless pit, but it would not be a surprise if at some point she visits there. The point is that just as the mind dreaming passes from hypnagogic to REM and then to ambient dream space, things turn periacqueductal and materiality is reduced to cardboard. So, as one moves from a power space to a trap space power depletes out and in the limits of the new dispensation one has to work things out. And then everything else in the room must adjust its materialism to correspond in a vis-a-vis way with the original inciting depletion in a way that recreates its former relation. So, if, for example, one “reimagines” the white cube as a bathroom, and the mirror is the “painting” of this new world, as it was in an exhibit by Pope L in Chicago last year, then what is the sculpture of a gallery-as-bathroom? Here, Gale has a particular space in mind

She tries to imagine, abstractly, as a state of mind, what happens in the Toni Morrison novel Song of Solomon (1977), when Circe lives on after all the persons in a family that kept her as a slave have died, and in response to her new but default freedom she keeps the family’s pack of dogs and lets them run wild in the house, tearing it apart, and the house to decay so that everyone thinks it is abandoned, but she is there, with her negative power, in plain sight.

I suppose the curtain is the thing that represents the former regime

but the whole effect is to create an embrasure which captures Circe’s state of mind. This is an example of what I call lift, where an ego dispenses with his or her own POV and tries by reimagining through it to recreate what another thought or saw in a situation one admires (this sort of thing being done by Walter Price, Candice Lin, and Richard Hawkins’s work on Artaud: Gale is more situated in the Euro scenographic tradition).

As I noted in my post, this immediately reminded me of a trope in De Quincy’s The Avenger, where, indeed, the avenger himself, really a high society crypto Jew who goes on a serial killing spree against a town in vengeance against the town having killed in a pogrom his mother and sister, and raped them, and paraded them in the main square; and to steel himself to his mission, he did in fact create a chamber of desolation, that is, a negative motivational space, to by mournfully triggering his rage anew to a pitch that would let him kill, he visits once a year, only.

This trope goes back to the Locked Room device in some horror, including Phantom of the Opera (1910), it is said to have started in a New York hotel in 1888, I wrote it up somewhere; then it is most characterized in movies in So Long At The Fair (1949), and then I found another example of it in Dark Purpose (1964) where Shirley Jones visits the art collection of an Italian count, to itemize it for sale, but the daughter begins to be a problem, and is reaching out to her for help. Jones seems helpless, woken at night in bed, and quite exposed.

But then the count’s crazy daughter disappears. And Jones is haunted by the daughter, a lost brooch sparkles on her eye, out of the underbrush, she picks it up.

Then begins to suspect something is wrong, she searches, based on a picture of the house telling her that there are rooms she has not been allowed to enter, a secret wing

She searches using the art as the map, and a clue

Then finds it, and finds out, somehow, that he murdered the daughter

but then he comes home, so she has to climb out of the window

And so there is a chase scene at the end which totally puts her on the edge of a cliff, several times, the place of sacrifice, as all Italy to postwar Americans seemed poised on the cliff edge of the Tarpeian rock

But then she kills him in the fight, the end.

Gale’s space then is simply a space as it is rearranged in the mind of Circe, having adopted a regime of rage to live out her days in a kind of negative payback, destroying the house where she suffered so much.

So, then, in my working it out, there is some ambiguity here, where Gale’s sentient hollowing out POV meets her need to apophatically represent (by not representing) her rage, and the POV of that rage, she has devised these slashing cones from ceiling to floor which are LITERALLY an artistic example of the form that I think the POV of a subject under the oppressive POV of a tyrant in its closing iris takes, and which I call a rhabdom, for rod. And then the whole arrangement an ommatidium, bespeaking the fact that at this point, wherever it is on the averruncate vector, where one might even cut off one’s leg to pars pro toto sacrifice something of oneself for the whole to survive, it is in this zone that human POV begins to look a lot like the POV of animals.

And, surprise, Gale also decided that since the dogs are the primary instrument by which Circe altered the space to conform to her rage, she accommodates dog vision too, a thought she calls a “funny idea” (as in funny odd). But, this IS, precisely Uexhulls’ notion of Umwelt, which consists of the few steps taken that an animal needs to survive in its environment. Some wonderful images in Uexhull show how a fly sees, compared to the human, this is the Umwelt,right

Some show some species can coexist, because the sensing of the greater predator literally does not see the lesser form

and Uexhull even sees the eye as a sort of rhabdom, or sword

An umwelt is very much like a magic “impellation”, which is narrowed down like an iris in the form of a kind of rhabdom, and, indeed, the word rhabdom comes from elements of a fly’s eye, and an ommatidium is the whole of what the fly sees from one eye. And in general Umwelt in dreaming is either the simple one-two-three chain reaction of a path by which one gets simply to one’s needed sources (so, for example, to get onto my website, I click Bava for Bava Black Sunday, then I click to rmarts, the current page, one two three); and then too Umwelt can be those talismans of self that are one’s own uniqueness and if found and grasped can let you live in White Album, it means a lot to me, this word, but to formulate devices to accommodate the vision of dogs in an art space, that is, precisely, the making of an umwelt.

This presence might be made known by wandering lights

in this what she calls a “sensory economy”

where she correctly sees the dogs being turned into a machine of destruction by an angry women seeking revenge from a tyrant

then, the lift, she wants human visitors to her occupation to see what dog vision in this duress must have looked like

and that involves abstract gestures, because Gale is mainly an abstractionist, dog bowls with water in them, which real dogs which visit the gallery are free to drink from,

then a kind of sculpture which evokes by representation the presence of dogs

and as if to make of them throws to give to the dogs, she permeates them with lavender, so the smell attracts

and there is also an abstract sonic element, a strong element in most art by African Americans in the current moment, there is fed through the gallery clicks, and whistles and callings, all the ways in which a dog owner calls a dog to it

and, there it is, the thesis being that in the end, representation 101 is fine, but it is, in fact, right out in the open, and due to the copycat tendency of popular culture, and the nature of culture, prey then to exploitation and depletion. Maybe it is better to hide and lurk, to exert one’s power as assassins of old, unseen

For this then, Gale creates a very sharp, theoretically succinct expression of a state of mind that is not often addressed or imagined in an art world, I increasingly complain, becoming once again lost in a daydream of fanfare magical thinking.

Is Gale in the bottomless pit? No, not yet at least. Her use of abstraction, and precise devices that abstractly suggest the umwelt of a specific being, dogs, and the mind of a particular character, Circe in Song of Solomon, means that she is working from sentient space to create understanding through hollowing out us-them space to let all viewers see through to it and feel empathy for the mindset that directs and creates this “reimagined” space. To be continued.