Notes from the Cliff Edge of Oblivion: Weekly Intervention

Communique#20

from the new William Carlos Whitten EP THE THIRD INTERVAL

The Third Interval refers, of course, to the critical transition involving an onset of real-time technologies that kill 'present' time by isolating it from its 'presence' in the here and now for the sake of another commutative space that is no longer composed of our concrete presence in the world but of a discrete telepresence whose enigma remains forever intact...

 

Communique#19

new video/audio book of a short story... 

 

 

 

Communique#18

*Lay Down and Die* by St. Johnny from 1989 First Songs

...beer flowed like blood on a battlefield. Rock music before the irreversible mutation of the internet: crazed, flawed, chaotic, beautiful..

Communique#17

...another landmark in William Carlos Whitten’s chthonic rock career

*élégie pour la musique rock*

Communique#16

Lollollol😆

Communique#15

Art is initiatory; the arts prophesize social and political mutations, they don't question the world but announce and bring in to being what is in the offing. Another word for this is hyperstition. 

Transgressive art is not social commentary but indoctrination. 

If you don't believe in being (essence) you can only believe in becoming. 

what is left? Trauerlaufbahn - a career in mourning.

Listen to BLACK MYSTIC SPEED by William Carlos Whitten

Communique#14

“Where there are no gods, the phantoms reign” -Novalis 

"I am filthy. I am riddled with lice. Hogs, when they look at me, vomit." - Lautréamont

(Sometime in the 1990s) A Hollywood producer walks into his handler’s office in Langley. “Boss, I’ve found the book that can serve as a blueprint for 21^st century America.” He opens a copy of Bahktin’s Rabelais and his World and begins to read at random: “the aesthetics of the grotesque are...immeasurable and exaggerated dimensions...a phenomenon of transformation...constant flux, an erasure of binary borderlines…of history…a metamorphosis of death and birth…growing and becoming…incomplete, in disarray, destroyed;bad behavior goes unpunished in the carnival, destruction and uncrowning are related to birth and renewal. Debasement is the fundamental principle: to degrade an object does not imply merely hurling it into the void of nonexistence, into absolute destruction, but to hurl it down to the reproductive lower stratum, the zone in which conception and new birth take place. Carnival offers the chance to transform the nature of all that exists and enter a completely new order of things.” 

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

 

Listen to YOU MEAN WELL

  

Communique#13

Great crimes, far from being suspected, are not even imagined. Today only unreserved adherence to a totalitarian system...can give a solid illusion of inner unity. That is why it constitutes such a strong temptation for so many souls in disarray. -Simone Weil

Listen to LOWER YOUR HEART

Communique#12

Q: Speaking of psyops…do you think the post-Nirvana-1990s indie rock explosion, which you were part of, was a psyop?

William Carlos Whitten: If it was a psyop what would the goal have been? To transform (in tandem with other cultural engineering projects) the population of the West into solipsistic, nihilistic, porn-addicted drug-takers, incapable of reading a book or watching a film in its entirety, compelled to stare helplessly at electronic devices 20 hours a day while fulfilling their role as the world’s consumer of last resort? Is there a clear trajectory from Kurt Cobain to the Strokes to Occupy Wall Street…and then…to Bernie Sanders and AOC advocating for vax mandates and Endless War? Was/is Williamsburg, Brooklyn a CIA outpost, a Bermuda Triangle of transhumanist-mind-control-pseudo-left-lifestyle politics? 

Could be…

Listen to US vs THEM

Communique#11

Q: How does one write a rock song?

William Carlos Whitten: Try to picture the music you’d like to hear as you’re being escorted in chains to the electric chair...

Listen to GIVE YOURSELF TO THE DEVIL HERE

Communique#10

Q: What is the guiding myth of America in 2023? 

A: Psychosis Is Liberation...

Listen to St. Johnny perform Mr. Clarinet

Communique#9

George Steiner asks the question: Do repressive systems produce better literature?

Find out the answer HERE

(This question is certainly relevant in the West in 2022.)

Communique#8

There is hope, but not for us.

Listen to Burn the World

Communique#7

The rock muzhik dies quietly...it fades away like Christianity, like the internal combustion engine.

Do we stand in the very twilight of the most monstrous transformation our planet has ever undergone, a twilight in which earth itself hangs suspended? Do we confront the evening of a night which heralds no dawn? Is the land of evening only now emerging?

God help us.

Listen to the Death in Vegas remix of 

Stay in Bed 

Communique#6

Certain commentators - B.C.Han among them - have tried to paint Giorgio Agamben as the Alex Jones of Continental Philosophy. Despite the fact that Agamben has been right about everything. Unitam coniurati te in foro interficiant! 

Listen to Superstars

Communique#5

the green program is genocidal. it will lead to famine in the near future, famine and mass death in the ensuing decade. the poor will suffer the most. the attack on modern agriculture is being made in such a way that it will lead to the bankruptcy of farmers and result in what could euphemistically be called the 'third collectivization of farms'. we know how the first two went...

Listen to KWKA remix of DISASTER FILM HERE

Communique#4

“One party in power and all the others in jail.” 

– untimely words from Mikhail Tomsky, a man who shot himself to avoid execution by Stalin

Listen to THE BALLAD OF ST. JOHNNY 

Communique#3

In America, the Right is stupid and the Left is evil.

Listen to GOOD LUCK

Communique#2

I am an ellipsis. The things I try to represent are unimportant and devoid of meaning, though I make them just as discernible as if they were important (I write about everything as accurately as possible). The events, sensations described inevitably acquire different meanings: they become stories.  Fiction suits my purposes: the stories are statements about a reality I neither know nor understand nor judge nor identify with. It would be a catastrophic error to write about anything having to do with my personal life or personal pain or tribulation. I can't even imagine it. Why would anyone write about such things?

Mysticism is preferable to rationalism to emotionalism...

Listen to: LAUGH IT OFF