5 ms·
We are bored in the city, there is no longer any Temple of the Sun. Between the legs of the women walking by, the dadaists imagined a monkey wrench and the surr
by lotsofmangos 12y ago
We are bored in the city, there is no longer any Temple of the Sun. Between the legs of the women walking by, the dadaists imagined a monkey wrench and the surrealists a crystal cup. That’s lost. We know how to read every promise in faces — the latest stage of morphology. The poetry of the billboards lasted twenty years. We are bored in the city, we really have to strain to still discover mysteries on the sidewalk billboards, the latest state of humor and poetry:
Showerbath of the Patriarchs
Meat Cutting Machines
Notre Dame Zoo
Sports Pharmacy
Martyrs Provisions
Translucent Concrete
Golden Touch Sawmill
Center for Functional Recuperation
Saint Anne Ambulance
Café Fifth Avenue
Prolonged Volunteers Street
Family Boarding House in the Garden
Hotel of Strangers
Wild Street
And the swimming pool on the Street of Little Girls. And the police station on Rendezvous Street. The medical-surgical clinic and the free placement center on the Quai des Orfèvres. The artificial flowers on Sun Street. The Castle Cellars Hotel, the Ocean Bar and the Coming and Going Café. The Hotel of the Epoch.
And the strange statue of Dr. Philippe Pinel, benefactor of the insane, fading in the last evenings of summer. Exploring Paris.
And you, forgotten, your memories ravaged by all the consternations of two hemispheres, stranded in the Red Cellars of Pali-Kao, without music and without geography, no longer setting out for the hacienda where the roots think of the child and where the wine is finished off with fables from an old almanac. That’s all over. You’ll never see the hacienda. It doesn’t exist.
The hacienda must be built.
http://www.bopsecrets.org/SI/Chtcheglov.htm http://www.bopsecrets.org/SI/Chtcheglov.htm
- koenigdavidmj 12y ago...what?
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- ErikRogneby 12y agoI think a room full of monkeys wrote this.
- coldtea 12y agoFor one, it's obviously quite good literature, of the "manifesto" style favored by modernist movements. Second, it makes perfect sense. It describes things seen in strolling around a city (Paris in this case), listing funny street names and shop titles. Plus some references to older art and poetry movements (namely dada and surealism), regarding their promise of a "fuller life" etc. Not sure what it has to do with TFA, but surely not the work of a "room full of monkeys".
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- mpyne 12y agoCertainly not a room full of monkeys, but I'm having great difficulty trying to disprove the hypothesis that this wasn't just a Markov chain generator left to generate a few paragraphs.
- thibauts 12y agoIn any case I guess the revelance of said paragraphs depends on what the Markov chain generator had been fed. Leaves me wondering if we are or can be, at times (and when), Markov chain generators.
- coldtea 12y agoProbably it's just like with Perl code. Can look like line noise to someone uninitiated, but if you know the syntax, operators etc you see that it's not and what it does. For me, who know the surrelist and dadaist history references (and the place, so to speak, this text is coming from -- it's a plea from a bored existential youth for an "exciting" city and an exciting life) every line makes sense and has its place. What I mean is, it's not absurdist -- like some dadaist poetry. He picked his words to convey a specific message, and the references and metaphors work in this context.
- jonstewart 12y agohttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivan_Chtcheglov http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivan_Chtcheglov
- lotsofmangos 12y agohttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2CQLAhNlbfQ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2CQLAhNlbfQ
- ivain 12y agoAnd the original French version is here: http://debordiana.chez.com/francais/is1.htm#formulaire http://debordiana.chez.com/francais/is1.htm#formulaire
- bcoates 12y agoThis makes me wonder, how does the NSA choose their goofy codenames?
- thematt 12y agoI'm sure they have an app for that. Maybe more than one.
- contingencies 12y agoGreat post! Great link! What a writer! Some subsequent portions are really good: half a century earlier expression of Unabomber-style anti-technocratic sentiment imbued with the Parisian aesthetic. Dreams. Sunrise. Pre-brutalist architecture. Things society has almost forgotten, or banished to the Disneyland of yore... powered by travel selfies.
- sespindola 12y agoI somehow doubt that GCHQ geeks read anti-modernist manifestos. Depending on the age of the name pickers, I'd say they either went to the Hacienda nightclub at Manchester or saw 24 hours party people[1]. 1: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0274309/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0274309/
- lotsofmangos 12y agoTony Wilson read that manifesto. That is where the name comes from for his nightclub. Edit - and I wouldn't like to bet on what GCHQ geeks don't read. I suspect their reading is very wide.