Cantastoriedimorte - Cantastoriedimortie

I am very proud, revengeful, ambitious, with more offences at my beck than I have thoughts to put them in, imagination to give them shape, or time to act them in. What should such fellows as I do crawling between earth and heaven? We are arrant knaves, all. Believe none of us. Go thy ways to a nunnery. Hamlet, Act 3, scene 1

City of the Broken Dolls, a photo book by Romaine scolombe, 1993-1996

_The humanistic cinema of Yasujiro Ozu, where frames, sometimes, speak louder than characters. 

[...]I suppose you want to see my rags’, she said. Gripping the table with both hands, I turned to face her. Still sitting, she lifted one leg high and wide above her head, and to open her gash still further, used the fingers of both hands to draw the folds of skin apart. Thus, Madame Edwarda’s ‘rags’ looked at me, hairy and pink, and as full of life as some revolting squid. I stammered softly: ‘Why are you doing that?’ ‘You can see,’ she said, ‘I am GOD’. ‘I’m going crazy.’ ‘Oh no you’re not, you’ve got to see: look!’ Her harsh voice sweetened, becoming almost childlike as she said with such weariness, with the infinite smile of abandon: ‘Darling, the fun I’ve had . . .’ Holding her provocative position, her leg still raised in the air, she spoke to me with an air of command: ‘Kiss me!’ ‘But . . . ,’ I protested, ‘in front of all these people?’ ‘Of course!’ I trembled. I stared at her, motionless, and she smiled back so sweetly that I trembled again. At last, staggering forward, I got down on my knees and pressed my lips to that living wound. Her naked thigh caressed my ear and I thought I heard the sound of a sea swell, the same sound you hear when you put your ear to a large conch shell. In the absurdity and confusion of the brothel (I felt I was choking, flushed and sweating with the heat) I remained strangely suspended, as if Madame Edwarda and I were losing ourselves on a night of wind, alone together at the edge of the ocean. [...] Madame Edwarda went ahead of me . . . rising into the clouds. The room’s noisy indifference to her happiness, to the measured gravity of her step, was both a royal consecration and a flowering festival: death itself was present at the feast in the guise of what is called, in the nakedness of the brothel, ‘the butcher’s cut’. . . Madame Edwarda, Georges Bataille *Madame Edwarda: a figure which, in Hegel’s words, ‘attains its truth only when it finds itself in absolute laceration’, when the life of the spirit ‘contemplates the negativity of death face to face and dwells with it’. _Illustrations for Madame Edwarda by René magritte, 1946

                   Anneè Olofsson (Swedish) ,  Unfamiliar 3, 2001 Olofsson’s an iconography that carnally and directly comments on the tension between detachment and affinity, time and aging, she works primarily with analog photography and video, occasionally even sculpture. Olofsson returns repeatedly to her own body as an unrestricted artistic tool.

_sickness unto death 2: story by Hikaru Asada art by Takahito Seguchi

Capital (Abridged) in summary

Recently I formed with some friends a communist reading group, where we are currently making our way through Capital (Abridged).* To help the group members who are less experienced reading such theory, I have been preparing summaries of each chapter, which I have thought to begin sharing here as well!

Chapter I: Commodities, Prices, Profits

Chapter II: Profit and Value in Circulation

Chapter III: Value in Use and Exchange Value, the Socially Necessary Labor

Chapter IV: Purchase and Sale of Labor Power

Chapter V: How Surplus Value Arises

(Currently I have been writing these at a pace of 1–2 per week, but the posting schedule here will be a bit more frequent at the start, while I catch up)

*Ed. Julian Borchardt, 1919. Trans. Stephen L. Trask, 1932.