Kombinat!
Kombinat! Coming to America
We are going on a Trip. To America. Tomorrow going to Amsterdam. Then flying to Detroit, Memphis, Dallas and Austin for
SXSW. Trip is incognito of course. So if we meet you will not know we did not. If we don't meet you will not know if we did. Such is the way of Kombinat!
Of course I hope Kottke or Zeldman are not gonna recognize me or our cover will be blown. And it would be fun to spook
Jon Lebkowsky.
So off to Austin, Texas.
If you do want to meet in Austin over the weekend or in Dallas later on to discuss our plans of taking over the world please do leave a message after the beep.
Beep.
Depleted Uranium News
San Francisco Bay View - National Black Newspaper of the Year:
"Out of the 580,400 soldiers who served in GW1 (the first Gulf War), of them, 11,000 are now dead! By the year 2000, there were 325,000 on Permanent Medical Disability. This astounding number of ‘Disabled Vets’ means that a decade later, 56% of those soldiers who served have some form of permanent medical problems!” The disability rate for the wars of the last century was 5 percent; it was higher, 10 percent, in Viet Nam
[via
pierrotsfolly's comments]
The Essence of Americanism
The essence of Americanism is not necessarily the convenient selective hearing but the convenient agreement to pretend not having heard; even if the undesirable thing gets said out loud, oftentimes very very loud.
How loud should you say things in America to break up the culture of pretending of not hearing?
I don't know; the agreement to pretend is very strong and when opposed one can get a bloody nose very fast.
It does require a lot of personal courage to break this up. However most of the time that essence is explored and monetized by smart people. They become the taboo breakers and they alone are paid enormous amounts of money whose only purpose is to make sure the rest of us continue pretending.
hmm...
Conversations about Dante
Dante is dead. We don't talk about Dante. Let Dante die. Let him die please. Let us not talk about Dante any more. He is Dead. Dante is Dead.
Please don't talk about Dante any more. If you do we can't move on to forge the new future of America. Of English Language. Of Humanity. We will be forced to sit down and read Dante, read and talk and contemplate and what good is that for? what good? Nothing. Nothing. So let us bury Dante. Please. Let us bury him. Dante is Dead. No More talking of Dante please. No More.
He is dead. Let him be. Good night.
Dumpster Shadows Reading
This post was written as an echo in my brain while reading
How to Write like a Liberal Sack of Garbage from The Happy Tutor.
The shadow is not a translation of your body. Plain texts are like a shadow that pulls the strings and makes you laugh or smile on queue. Even with careful reading the body can not be constructed because the text describes the shadow in minute details forever hoping the body will be understood. Such is the writing of "Those Nice People". The best write such that the body is reconstructed, resurrected while the shadow discarded for the text is but a shadow that draws us to life flowing from... (you provide the text here)
The beginning lines of Mandelsztam's poem in
English"We live, deaf to the land beneath us,
Ten steps away no one hears our speeches"
from
Russian:
"
Мы живем,
под собою не чуя страны,
Наши речи за десять шагов не слышны"
for which Mandelstam was prosecuted by Stalin is a shitty translation. I think Mandelstam's poem was a fuck up. He should have written prose like Mihail Bulhakov in Master and Margaret. If you gonna write a protest piece just write yourself out to the end.
Of course the
English translation of Bulhakov's novel is shitty too. The first line
"At the hour of sunset, on a hot spring day, two citizens appeared"
mimics a
Russian Mастер и Маргарита
"
Однажды весною,
в час небывало жаркого заката,
в Москве,
на Патриарших
прудах,
появились два гражданина"
Hm... Shadows.
While touching on Bulhakov let's talk about
Wajda's film "Pilat and Others". The Crucifixion scene is filmed at a garbage dump near a highway and in the film there is a shot of a passing Bus full of tourists. Here is his commentary:
"In the film, I showed tourists who crowded at the coach windows to catch a glimpse of an execution. But a modern motorway has a will of its own: the road signs, which forbid vehicles to stop, solve the moral problem. If we had nailed a man to the cross with real nails, their reaction would have been the same. What can one do for a suffering man, how can one help him, if the coach cannot stop anyway. I believe the film conveyed the sadness of the indifference and loneliness of death."
The Dumpster and You. In a Bus, Moving Fast. Tracing a Shadow of Existence. Clearly Visible. Imporant.
Big Time.
Invisible Spaces Are
From:
public alley 818:
Invisible spaces are everywhere. They are not just alleys and abandoned buildings. They are assumptions, whole frameworks and contexts, the myriad perceptions discarded, the parts of our environment that we do not see because of expectation.
Invisible spaces are exciting. The rules that apply to the front of the building on my street do not apply in the alley because people cannot see it. They are spaces to be mined for dramatic potentiality and narrative possibility. How can these spaces become active, transformed, transported into a new realm of significance?
The point of these projects is not to make "the invisible visible" (as the oft-repeated theme goes) because it would be boring to thrust a dirty old alley into the forefront of people's attention. It is rather to use what is invisible as a space of radical potentiality and transformation; to bring something entirely new into the world through an unnoticed trapdoor as it were
Kombinat! An Invisible Space. A Trapdoor
Corporate Commands
From:
The Institute for Infinitely Small Things: Events & Expeditions Archives:
WHAT IS A CORPORATE COMMAND?
A Corporate Command is an instruction work, a call to action in the form of an imperative:
"Just Do It"
"Turn on the Future"
"Live without Limits"
"Tap into great taste"
"Think different"
"Ride the light"
"Live Like You Mean It"
It is the hypothesis of the Institute for Infinitely Small Things that these commands, largely and consciously ignored by a public over-saturated with advertisements, function at the scale of the infinitely small. Tiny events that do not disturb one's consciousness or disrupt one's identity as "free" agents, these commands seep under the surface of the individual and lay claim to the territory of the Deleuzian Virtual. Desire, memory, and future potentiality become territories for conquest and tactics for social and political control.
By compiling, tabulating, concretizing and enacting these commands in the International Database of Corporate Commands (IDCC), the Institute for Infinitely Small Things seeks to better understand the mechanisms behind this deployment of power and its larger cultural ramifications.
More at
corporatecommands.com. Do More, Feel Better, Live Longer. Be Delicious. Invent. Start Your Best Life Today. Be Cool. Just Click it.
Kombinat! Marketing Corporation of Worst Practices Mission Statement
Our Mission Statement. -
We don't have one yet but by the time we finish this post we hope to scrape some bird shit off the sidewalk and glue some words with it to have a kick ass mission statement. Scraper and Glue in hand. Here we go. Let's explore.
Where do we start? Definitions; what do we see when we start
looking up definitions of 'mission'? - "a special assignment that a is given to a person or a group" - "an operation that is assigned by a higher headquarters"
The word 'Assignment' just went Splat Splat on our brain. - Hm...
We can 'assign something to ourselves' like a homework or a work order, huh?! - Or we 'assign ourselves to something' which is a bit different. It's like you take on something that is maybe not very well articulated and you constitute yourself as that. (you can also prostitute yourself as that too as seen by Enronited Corporations worldwide) - (There was a long discussion we've had at the HQ and decided to delete it from the public eyes. It was embarrassing and long too. Louie finally won by forcing us to explain why we are even doing this mission statement, so...)
Hello Visitors (I swear I am writing this with Louie holding a 55 caliber machine gun to my head so there). Welcome to our website. Please read our Mission Statement which will explain who we are.. (ok, Louie just went out for a smoke break so we can just write so I will cover this quickly) - Well, because we are starting Kombinat! Marketing Corporation of Worst Practices aka Gonzo Marketing Outfit (Remind me to tell you why we decided to do this). - (A quick note: We are already really really huge on another continent (no, not that one - that other one) and we are ready to take over America by storm. - Few words about the Storm, they say when you are gonna take something over it's best when it's done by storm, or as Bible says by Flood, and of course you can't discount the stormy waters of Red Sea after Moses and his people crossed. --- well, let's not be too graphical about what happened afterwards.)
(Shit, Louie is back.)
So, mission is something you may assign something to yourself, or self to something or even self to some other self - this assignment is like transfer - you transfer, you embody, you constitute yourself (... louie is looking I have to pretend I am writing this mission statement) - you transfer some part of self to something therefore you make that something part of you, you make it important just by the virtue of assignment. (that's easy you know, this assignment part, this mission statement formulation, the hard part is to stay true to this assignment over time.)
Having just discussed the mechanism of a mission statement we need now to find 'the something' and we just need to reshuffle words found in english vocabulary to formulate it as a string of words that read out loud inspire you and me (and Louie too, definitely must inspire Louie or there will be bullet holes on a sidewalk and no amount of glue is gonna fix that)
So, let's get inspired by a mission statement.
