But, Your Honor, My Friends Will Tell You I Wasn't There

Recently, I attended a lecture that revolved largely around Phalaris's brazen bull (the concept of which is illustrated to the left).  The concept is pretty gruesome, but the lecture was incredible and went into the politics of sight, compartmentalization, and the politics of pleasure and pain. It was pretty fascinating to learn about this killing device and how it's aesthetic beauty (the sculpture itself), pleasurable scent (the heat would eventually ignite incense that is kept in the nose of the bull), and pleasurable sound (there were pipes within the bull that would convert a person's screams into music) would sometimes lead people to not know of its function or, perhaps more often, would sway them into willful ignorance of what was happening.

I've been thinking a lot about this concept and some of the things that came up in the lecture quite a bit since attending it.  I'm not quite ready to rehash or to riff on it. For now, and pardon the disgusting pun, I will let it simmer.


[This lecture was based on ideas and research of Timothy Pachirat, Univ of Massachusetts Amherst]

Don't Look Now, or, The Pretty Construction Worker Fumbles His Smooth

Currently, I am a feather floating down to the ground from the heights of an airplane.

And, let me tell you:

It

feels

so

good.

Let me say something, here, about the power of being treated right: My body is not on guard 24/7. There is no stress and random bleeding because there doesn't need to be.


There is only sleeping in
and kissing
and fucking
and coffee on a white bedspread in the sunlight on a Sunday morning.

(pause)

I am currently reading Tragedy: A Tragedy, the play by Will Eno that was suggested to me by uncertain yet talented lips. I am also reading the third book of a trilogy that will not be named. It is an escape. It's not that I am embarrassed. It's that I'm not quite sure I would like to endorse it quite yet. There is, I must say, the satisfying feeling of coming around the bend of the last few chapters of the last book.

Completion, in all of it forms, seems to be a theme in my life as of late.


be well; be loved,


k.

(image via bluesonplanetmars tumblr)