Friday, September 08, 2006

Desiring Machines versus Repression, Part II

I don’t believe it is possible to mistake the serious intent of a naked man in a pink feather boa, heavily puffing on a cigarette.

No one was in the television studio except for me, Pussy L’Amour, and the television crew.

The place was strewn with masses of television equipment – cables, light sources arrayed on the walls and ceilings, cameras, including mobile camera equipment on cranes and motorized seats, tracks, audio recorders, and a very large assortment of stuff I don’t even know the general name for.

Pussy was in his element here.

He was walking around admiring the complexity of it all, smoking, and he was “On.” He was turned on. He was plugged in. He was ready to go. He was ready to operate. He was ready to produce. I was glad of that, because there was a great deal that I wanted to ask him about. I also wanted to see what he’d do.

Maggot: “It’s the drama of the place, isn’t it? I mean, it’s dark in here, and mysterious kind of like a cave or a medieval cathedral… Here it is, the sacred and the profane, in one place and time…”

Pussy L’Amour: “ Mystery, schmistery… Maggot, come on. This place is a desiring machine, pure and simple. Look at all this. This gadgetry, this circuitry. These devices for provoking and circulating affect and emotion and for making a world, and for making un-named concepts…”

Maggot: “Yeah, that’s funny. All of my literary and artistic friends who love the cinema and who hate the technical of any kind… they would come into a place like this, a movie or television studio like this, and would feel the electrical mystery of it… and would literally ignore the machinic element here. They love the movies as dancing visions free of the material dimension… I guess it would spoil it for them, even, if they had to contend with what’s going on behind the scenes, in the production of these dancing images.”

Pussy L’Amour: “ I had nothing to do with Gilliam’s cinema books, but clearly Gilliam didn’t hate theater per se. What he disliked, I think, was this attitude of your friends… which exhibits the most thorough-going REPRESSION known to humanity… to consume ‘flicks’ and ‘flickerings’ in silence and solitude in the dark and to not reconnect them, ever, and to deny even the manner or even the fact of the flickerings' production… that they are produced...”

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