work, love, waiting

"The first thing we have to learn is that love is an art, just as living is an art."
- Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving

"They heard me singing and they told me to stop /
Quit these pretentious things and just punch the clock"
- Régine Chassagne, "Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains)"

"If we line up one hundred years of scenes of people leaving factories, we can imagine that the same shot had been taken over and over and over. Like a child who repeats its first word for one hundred years to immortalise its pleasure in that first spoken word. Or like Far Eastern artists who repeatedly paint the same picture until it is perfect, and the artist can enter the picture. When we could no longer believe in such perfection, film was invented."
--Harun Farocki, Arbeiter verlassen die Fabrik, 1995. (via)

"perfectio propter imperfectionem"
- Lucilio Vanini, on Empedocles

"We used to wait for it... /
We used to wait for it..."  - Win Butler, "We Used To Wait"

"In the Book of Jonah, God explains to Jonah that the essence of love is to labour for something and to make something grow, that love and labour are inseparable. One loves that for which one labours, and one labours for that which one loves."
- Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving

"I'm gonna write /
a letter to my true love, I'm gonna sign my name"
- Win Butler, "We Used To Wait"

"We watched the end of the century /
Compressed on a tiny screen /
A dead star collapsing and we could see /
That something was ending"
- Win Butler, "Deep Blue"

"Sometimes I wonder if the world's so small
that we can never get away from the sprawl"
- Régine Chassagne, "Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains)"

alienated (organ-harvesting) labor // Capitalism eats her young

You might be aware of this if you follow my Twitter, but I recently saw Alejandro Adams' film Canary, which utterly floored me. I'll be putting together more content on Canary soon, including some thoughts on the way that it offers a formal approach to capturing capitalism's relationship between indoctrination, oppression, and the complicity of the "Little Eichmanns"* who are also made it's victims.

* you probably first heard this phrase when used by Ward Churchill in his essay Some People Push Back from September 2001, but it originated in John Zerzan's 1995 essay "Whose Unabomber?"


Somewhat related: this excellent article from the New York Times Magazine by Matthew B. Crawford is an adaption of his new book "Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work." It's the kind of piece that you expect to be some sort of mythologizing of the yeoman farmer à la Jefferson, that instead is a sly, intelligent critique of the relationship between alienated labor and suboptimal systemic and personal outcomes.

Georg K. Glaser - Schriftsteller und Schmied

"Georg K. Glaser is a working-class writer. Quite literally: he spends the morning at his desk and from midday on he is in his workshop in the Paris district, Marais. There he makes bowls, lamps, vases, jugs, and other metal products. He has mastered techniques that almost no other smith is able to carry out. Born near Worms in 1910, Glaser left home early and went wandering. He was put in children’s homes and joined the Communist Party. In 1933 he went underground and fled through the Saar region to France. There he was naturalized and worked for the state railroad until he was conscripted in 1939, soon finding himself in a German prison camp. For years he had to pretend to be a Frenchman who could speak German well. After escaping and being placed in a penal camp, he returned to Paris and worked for Renault. He found working on a conveyor belt intolerable and inhumane. And so, almost 40 years ago, Glaser opened a craft workshop in order to exercise his critical facul-ties in thought and practice. He combines his craft with writing and points out that the French word for craftsman, artisan, contains the syllable “art,” so that art is no longer separated from work." (Harun Farocki)

Kino Fist June 08

The new issue of Kino Fist is up online; IT has an index post.

My contribution: This Woman's Work: Chantal Ackerman’s philosophy of work in Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles