Please help! I need a title for my thesis… Here’s a sampling of the pieces that will be in the show. Unfortunately, I don’t have more photographs right now, but I hope this gives you a sense of the work. There will be about 20-25 pieces in total. India ink on watercolor paper, sizes varying from about 12 x 14″ to 36 x 42″. Any title suggestions would be much appreciated.

Hey dudes,

if you read my last post called “Black and Blue,” you’ll remember a point where one of the characters starts talking in an Irish accent. I have a lot of friends who do this for no apparent reason, and I think once or twice I’ve said “Cheers” instead of “Thanks” or called a truck a lorrie. For a long time I couldn’t think of any rational explanation for this other than base pretention. But a few days ago I was watching, I’m embarrassed to say, Entertainment Tonight, and they were talking about how Britney Spears has recently begun addressing the press in a British accent. Here’s something I wrote as an addition to that story that I thought you all might enjoy. Cheerio!

Black’s  occasional use of an Irish accent is not one easily explained.

Those who follow tabloid journalism will be familiar with a certain popstar’s recent use of a phony British accent while talking to the paparazzi. Her reasons for doing this are obscure, because this certain popstar is known to come not from Manchester, Leeds, Sussex, or Brixton, but rather from a small town in Louisiana.

 The popstar’s first hit was a song that rhymes with “Shmit Shme Shmaby Shmone Shmore Shime,” and its lyrics could be interpreted as either an admonition to overly-strict parents or someone asking for a spanking. In the song’s aburdly well-known and well-loved video, this popstar is provocatively dressed as a Catholic school girl. Later on, though in the meantime she would don a thousand provocative outfits, this popstar would insist on her virginity–even during a high profile romance with a popstar whose name rhymes with Justin Timberlake.

In short, for a long time this popstar (both fresh-faced and nubile, both innocent and sexy) embodied, as Chuck Closterman puts it, the paradoxical roles of both virgin and whore. For many years she reigned as America’s princess because she straddled the gap between Shirley Temple and Debbie from Debbie Does Dallas. America loved her all the more because she often straddled this gap wearing nothing but her bra and panties.

In her long (long, especially considering her age) and prolific career, this popstar only made one mistake: she became pregnant. The media and the public, confronted with the visual evidence of her defilement in the form of her turgid stomach, became sickened. They found themselves looking at a whore where once had been a virgin–and in our hearts we knew that we, WE, were the father. In a spirit of collective shame, the national perogative became, if not to kill her outright, then at the very least to drive her completely insane.

As a nation, we have succeeded: now she often addresses the press in an English accent. Why her insanity should express itself in this manner, nobody can say–there are no words to discuss the phenomenon. I do know that it can not be easy to have such a deep understanding of the fact that at the heart of the American psyche is a strong tendency toward a ravaging kind of canibalism.

I believe that, though under wildly different conditions, Blue sometimes speaks in an Irish accent for similar reasons. He is not a popstar.

Engo’s Introduction

He attempted to set down a thought. It appeared that Foucault’s persistence in quoting from the legal reformers indicated something, a powerful trait, an inhabitation of the matter at hand. At the same time Foucault never ceases to be Foucault; one sees turns of speech pregnant with irony, usages of the legal discourse not far short of satire. If you sight the traces of method, you will shudder with joy. Ecstasy verges and urges on primordial zeal. But which one. Is Foucault a prophet, and if so, of what sect. How sit within the penal colony, don the lineaments of the warden, and retain a voice tonally intact. Or, how diverge from that tone and remember the scale back. How represent the representation and still remain present. See the following.

Main Subject

Foucault has mastered assimilation - he has taken in the language of the Structural One. He has studied its logic, its history, its means of arriving at the present status. This allows him to speak with its words, allude to its insights, as if they were his own - all the while keeping autonomous to some degree, maintaining an interrogatory voice within the logos.

If we do not wish to say that this constitutes Foucault’s authenticity (that would indicate an original autonomy to which one ought to return, to which one’s ‘ontological’ imperative directs one), then we should at least say this is his genius. To be within and still to see it all.

What this means is that Foucault keeps sight of what he is doing, whose points he is making: he keeps an eye on the discursive flows emanating from the pen. What eye is this? In any event it is not the I. He becomes a speaking-through, but under a guidance - he has something to tell us, but it will not be him that reveals the story. Every time he points, he uses another’s hand; and like the webbing of fingers, the pointing always finds that which is conjoined, phenomena con-sensed. Many colors, many tongues; the eloquent production of a synaesthetic polyvocity.

But who oversees? Well for one we have a revision: overseer, not overman. If we must bear the heritage of industrial revolution, let us not despair of our bondage to the factory. Let us be a transparent managerial prism. A prism that inflects, connects, divulges, underscores, revisits, duplicates - but does not judge. A prism that sees.

I verge on a discredited thought. What I meant to say was this: Foucault has an intention. He is the nerve structure around the eye. He is that which stakes energy in the seeing, the compiler of good tidings. Again I misspeak. I wish to move us towards a new cross-discipline, and what a term that is, in a Foucauldian exegesis! I want us to see why Foucault is a sort of visionary, and why we already see that. Foucault has an intention. He is in tension. He is intent. In a tent. Camped in sentence. The sentence being served. Sent to dispel tense. Tends to misspell sens. Sent; no. Sen–tence-sen–tense-sen. Sen. Ssen. Sssen. Ssssssssssssssssssssszen.

Absinth’s Verse

Once men met at random

now they are divided by disposition

and observed

for the potentiality

of danger

lies hidden

in the smallest

most everyday matters