63-68
06.30.09
2:23 am
Oh the notorious filmography (so notorious that i wrote that sentence and then read another blog referring to the notorious endnote 24; now that is fucking notorious). This may be the first moment us readers understand the extent of the wacky, off-the-wall creative world we have been dragged into. The first time i read this, i failed to stumble on Takahiko Iimura's work, and so the whole art-video concept was a completely novel creation that actually struck me as a hilarious characterization of erudite madness that might have even required such erudite madness to even conceive of it. Of course here it is in the actual third-dimension. Undoubtedly Wallace draws on Iimura's art extensively here. In any event, this is the hysterical creativity we live for.
The treatment of Himself's death got a bit annularific there. A burial "twice delayed by annular hyperfloration cycles"? I'm not even sure what visual that's supposed to evoke. Also, q: what does a July-October marriage mean? Not quite so May-December?
The Infinite Summer blog has produced some strange input thus far. It seems a bit more concerned with coping strategies than actual discussion of the novel; it's incredible to me that others don't find it completely immersing. I feel like my appreciation is completely tangential; the one critical quote: "It totally sucks that pages 17-27 of Infinite Jest (Erdedy waits for pot) are 100 times better than any short story i will ever write, and yet are only 1/100th of the whole." This is the main substantial analysis of the first 94 pages. I seem to have really diverged from the Infinite Summer crowd thus far. It is getting them through it a bit quicker though. I'm worried i won't be able to keep up, especially since things are only going to get more busy and potentially debilitating for me.
-"The figure of Death presides over the front entrance of a carnival sideshow whose spectators watch performers undergo unspeakable degradations so grotesquely compelling that the spectators' eyes become larger and larger until the spectators themselves are transformed into gigantic eyeballs in chairs, while on the other side of the sideshow tent the figure of Life uses a megaphone to invite fairgoers to an exhibition in which, if the fairgoers consent to undergo unspeakable degradations, they can witness ordinary persons gradually turn into gigantic eyeballs."-
-"The Joke. B.S. Latrodectus Mactans Productions. Audience as reflexive cast; 35 mm. x 2 cameras; variable length; black and white; silent. Parody of Hollis Frampton's 'audience-specific events,' two Ikegami EC-35 video cameras in theater record the 'film''s audience and project the resultant raster onto screen -- the theater audience watching itself watch itself get the obvious 'joke and become increasingly self-conscious and uncomfortable and hostile supposedly comprises the film's involuted 'antinarrative' flow. Incandenza's first truly controversial project, Film & Kartridge Kultcher's Sperber credited it with 'unwittingly sounding the death-knell of post-poststructural film in terms of sheer annoyance.'"-
-"Poor Yorick Entertainment Unlimited."-
-"Dial C for Concupiscence. ...black and white; silent w/ subtitles. Parodic noir-style tribute to Bresson's Les Anges do Peche, a cellular phone operator mistaken by a Quebecois terrorist for another cellular phone operator the FLQ had mistakenly tried to assassinate, mistakes his mistaken attempts to apologize as attempts to assassinate her and flees to a bizarre Islamic religious community whose members communicate with each other by means of semaphore flags, where she falls in love with an armless Near Eastern medical attache."-
-"The Film Adaptation of Peter Weiss's 'The Persecution and Assassination of Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum at Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade.' ...black and white; silent/sound. Fictional 'interactive documentary' on Boston stage production of Weiss's 20th-century play within play, in which the documentary's chemically impaired director (Incandenza) repeatedly interrupts the inmates' dumbshow-capering and Marat and Sade's dialogues to discourse incoherently on the implications of Brando's Method Acting and Artaud's Theatre of Cruelty for North American filmed entertainment, irritating the actor who plays Marat to such an extent that he has a cerebral hemorrhage and collapses onstage well before Marat's scripted death, whereupon the play's nearsighted director, mistaking the actor who plays Sade for Incandenza, throws Sade into Marat's medicinal bath and throttles him to death, whereupon the extra-dramatic figure of Death descends deus ex machina to bear Marat and Sade away, while Incandenza becomes ill all over the theater audience's first row."-
-"Even the 'we' is theory: i never get quite to see the distant opponent, for all the apparatus of the game."-
[archilochusColubris]
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