An alternative to the Manichean mask of Left versus Right diverting us from the real issue of Power versus Powerless, or Civilization versus it’s majority of Discontents (why is the majority always discontented, forced to slog through life at gun-point surveyed by camera? was it this way in tribal cultures?) might be an invigorating change of pace. A venue that goes down deep, way deep, to a part of ourselves beneath (and predating) political fixes and even sound philosophies from which sincere opinion and belief are derived. Deep Art as opposed to Deep Politics (though politics and all that is deep form the blood and guts of art). Time to “go down” as Nietzsche’s Zarathustra did. From the depths to reach the heights, the kind of inner drama Aeschylus created with The Oresteia. Athena (female, same as The Furies) has id and womb, but also has a mind (born from head of Zeus, fully armed). This seems dangerous compared to Apollo, whose radiant light is a bit more “civilized” than the mad, Dionysian darkness screaming fury-ously for blood.
A work such as W.B. Yeat’s “The Second Coming” or T.S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland,” could have expressed fear, disgust, frustration felt by representatives of every gradient on the imaginary prism of opinion from far “left” to far “right,” most people falling along the liberal-conservative median of “some-where-in-between.” Bloodlefilth.org would be happy to accept such a work, should Yeats or Eliot be inclined to submit one.
Munch’s The Scream
Peddlers of traditional, linear collaborationist Monopoly Media propaganda pimped under the guise of “important” 1000-page novels, heavy to carry but light and tedious to read, by Graphomaniac sylvanicides, such as Jonathan Franzen, David Eggers, David Foster Wallace, and other quisling immortals, or “indy” films show-cased on a “movie-site near you” by Dreamworks or other “independent” sheiss-meisters, need not apply.
A submission by David Lynch or Ishmael Reed — raw, not “peer-reviewed” — would be nice, as would “Raw Power” by Iggy Pop (with The Stooges).
What we are talking about for bluddlefilth.org goes deeper than ideology, whether “left” or “right” which changes in terminologies and “new” idea sets, but is essentially the same protest or angry acceptance resulting in demonizing the “other,” as the case is with right-wing, as well as left-wing slaves of ideology, which creates a false piety and love/hate of “everyone” (“Communists love humanity but hate people,” as the old saying went; Fascists just hate everybody, particularly those who remind them of something naughty or downright nasty about themselves…).
“The Second Coming” or ” The Wasteland,” could come to us from either the “left” or the “right” and we would not know the difference and be none the worse for it. It is this that will make bluddlefilth.org a multimedia site (text, graphics, audio, video) that stands as a supplement (not alternative) to other, more news and opinion-oriented political/social” sites on the Internet, which, being journals of intellectual opinion are – possibly must be by definition — Manichean “this side” or “that other” Nothing strictly from the depths or wherever art comes from.
Also, there is the female perspective, which we have not really seen develop, in general, beyond the politics of feminism — whether lipstick-feminism, lesbian feminism, or chick-lit feminism — which is why works produced by Kathy Acker and Barbara Mor (her creative work, i.e. The Blue Rental), photographer Nan Goldin, performer/musicians Lydia Lunch, Laurie Anderson, and many others might stand out as examples of deep female discontent, rage, outrage, at eons of human energy frustrated and suppressed, although from the even more oppressed perspective of the “second sex.” Kathy Acker is dead, but Barbara Mor still lives to write more…
Joyce’s “bluddlefilth” states the “civilized/oppressed human condition,” i.e., frustration of natural way-down-deep desire of the many in order to indulge the ego-exaggerated desires of the few, more truly than shibboleths like “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity (again — where’s the ‘Sorority?’).”
I’m with Mary Daly and Derrick Jensen on this, not to mention Joyce, Gertrude Stein and Rimbaud (and Keats, Shelley, Byron through, Beckett, Ralph Ellison, Ginsberg, Burroughs, Anne Carson, Ishmael Reed, Pynchon and onward). Let’s go a bit south of consciousness for a while, though not too far south; even Cro Magnon expressed the complexities and contradictions of humanity in painting…
Hence, the bloodlefilth.org proposed masthead:
philosophy: crie de coeur (with acuity of kupf)
political affiliation: Id; on the Eros/Thanatos ticket for next and all future (s)elections
mission statement: “From the Depths…”
I doubt our words, sounds and images will cause Power to collapse, but it’ll be fun to throw rocks at its glass towers.
People create art and devise creative, subversive methods of expression in concentration camps. The greatest sin of De Sade was that he was sadistically boring (his point, actually, well before the Evening News: scenes of horror and perversion repeated over and over and over make one numb); nevertheless, shorter versions of his own crie de coeur, perhaps with some small intro, would be acceptable, as would a recording of a Haudenosaunee “death song.”
We’re coming from a Crazy Horse/Sitting Bull/Nat Turner/Warsaw Ghetto mentality of, “no way to win, so nothing to do but fight — today is a good day to die!”
Even if others do not share this assessment, it will at least defuse the rhetoric of the “why don’t you see reason and do it my way” dynamic, whether it comes from Moses, Mohamed or Marx… all of whom Power sees as equally ineffectual and boring, though It might use this or that idea-set as a moral cover for its own ambition…
Picasso’s Guernica
A NOTE ON TRANSPARENCY: It should be stated upfront that I am a “kept man.” I sold out big-time to my own publisher, Oliver Arts & Open Press: they’re paying the $18.00 needed to get a “bluddlefilth.org” domain name and website (receipt available upon request); nevertheless, bluddlefitlth.org will be open to all submissions, including those by younger artists, musicians, video/film-makers and writers if there are any to be found who aren’t already in prison (of one form or another).
ADVERTISER’S NOTE: This call for bluddlefilth, by any means necessary, if necessary, will go out to as many established sites/zines as I can find. Each can choose to post/publish it or not, according to taste/agenda/audience. However, anyone who sees this as an “advertisement” for potential “competition” (quite the opposite: hope to spawn many riverruns of bluddlefilths) should think seriously about what they’re doing and why, or should at least get smart and charge money for it…