A Different Time (2024)
Inkjet and Watercolor on Hanji Paper.
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As I typed out "Dennis Cooper called Jon Jost the American Godard" I was reminded of a sketch of an essay that I never wrote, it remained a constellation of ideas and never took form. The same thing happened last night - a constellation of ideas under the title "Bitch I'm Back Out My Coma" about nations and the art they produce, about Proust, Joyce, and Blanchot, about The Book To Come and the need for addiction to a form, about Richter's Betty, Christian Petzold, and Klee's Angelus Novus, about OT7 Quanny's "Write A Book", "Stupid Bandz", and "Youngest Turnt". I think of essay writing like freestyling - maybe I've already said that somewhere in here - you have to stay in that mode throughout in order to maintain the work and maintain consistency in it. Too long and the threads get mixed up, the tone is in disarray, and it isn't cohesive. The problem I often run into is sketching out too wide a frame for the essay, and then being unable to maintain the freestyle session to get it all written down, or not even getting in the booth because of material circumstances (time, space, place, money). The following sketch is the latter.

It's about the idea of Remakes and Godard, of Remaking Godard, and of the role of "Paul" in Godard. In the first episode of Histoire(s) du Cinema, a subtitled voiceover reads: "They'll forget all the details, but remember Picasso". In Godard's adaptation of King Lear, Woody Allen appeared, wearing a Picasso t-shirt. In the summer of 2022, Luh Tyler appeared, wearing a Picasso shirt. The idea of the essay shifted, away from remakes and Godard and Paul and into this obsession: "Why is Woody Allen in King Lear wearing a Picasso shirt" - which is a question all about remakes and Godard and Paul, of course.

Additional stars in this constellation: the Paul's of Godard's films - JPL in Masculin Feminin, Paul in Weekend, Paul Godard in Every Man For Himself — a film which Godard called his "Second First Film" which then splinters off another series of stars. The idea of a "First Film" as a "First Philosophy", and the idea of remaking this "First Film-osophy". The frame rate manipulation in Every Man For Himself as early VCR technology arrived, the need to re-theorize cinema due to the fundamental difference of video images. That Paul is also the name of Godard's father, of his bourgeois background, Freudian blah blah blahs. And the face of Jean-Pierre Leaud, a leap to Irma Vep and "images about images about images", a leap to Pasolini's Porcile and Pasolini's St. Paul screenplay. And the Paul of Contempt, the film an adaptation of an Italian novel, but "Riccardo" becomes "Paul" rather than "Ricard". The idea that Godard is to Cinema as Paul is to the Bible.

Further stars: Fassbinder's Love is Colder Than Death as a remake of Breathless, as his own remake of a "First Film-osophy", one that brought in Brecht and the theater and the essence of the German Nation. The idea of Fassbinder as a "German Godard", and this is where Cooper comes in, with the idea of Jost as the "American Godard", and inserting the opposition to Woody Allen, who saw himself in Godard, which confused Godard. And then a reading of JLG's 1994 Autoportrait as a nest of Woody Allen jokes, in which Godard flirts with his young hot assistant, squeezes her ass without permission, and then appears playing tennis in WA type drip towards the end, recalling Annie Hall.

Distant stars: Chris Marker's Statues Also Die, incorporated to ask the question of whether the images of film stars will die or if they'll be resurrected. In Spain, new stars emerge. Picasso and the African mask. In the shadow of the Alhambra, I realize that Chris Marker is a Geoffrey Crayon joke. And somewhere in this book on Marker I got lost in last summer "The Suffering Image" was that somewhere, I can't recall where, Marker said that there would be no second century for cinema. I deleted a tweet on a burner account that said "Thinking in centuries; or lies about time"; I've noticed it's a very French way of thinking about time. The tweet was accompanied by a collage of a Chinese painting of a woman over a still from Ouvrir that showed a car crash. "The Suffering Image" focuses on Marker's shows at Peter Blum Gallery, his return to the still image, if one thinks of La Jetee as such, but there's an inverse at play - not celluloid stretched out over time and reprinted onto a real, but video, frozen and manipulated, printed to be placed on a wall.

They'll forget all the details, but remember Picasso. While Godard squeezes his assistant's ass he says "Europe is condemned to death". In the footnotes of The Suffering Image, one can read Marker say "life has become a fiction film" and "No, film won’t have a second century. That’s all". Paul appears throughout this text, as it investigates Marker's Messianicity, by way of Agamben's The Kingdom and The Glory, which also brings Pseudo-Dionysius into the fold, and the text is a mess, Anselm Kiefer appears for a paragraph, and as a reminder that I need to make it to London before Finnegans Wake is gone. I wonder where it'll go.

The Kingdom and The Glory factors into The Suffering Image, but not Agamben's The Time That Remains, which Simone White references in METRO BOOMIN WANT SOME MORE NIGGA, a section of an essay called "Dear Angel of Death". She talks about her students' understanding of XXXTentacion and Travis Scott, that they "understand something about the coming situation, this nothing, as Giorgio Agamben works the question of the now through his reading of Paul, that I am not equipped to understand". This reading of Paul contains a quote that was the central star of another constellation that never came to be, titled "RIP JEWELXXET":

"This does not mean that gossip cannot be interesting; on the contrary, to the extent that it entertains a nontrivial relation to truth that eludes the problem of verification and falsification and claims to be closer to truth than factual adequation, gossip is certainly a form of art. The peculiarity of its epistemological status lies in the fact that in itself it accounts for the possibility of an error that does not entirely undermine the definition of truth. Intelligent gossip therefore interests us independently of its verifiable character. That said, to treat gossip as though it were information is truly an unforgivable apaideusia [lack of refinement]."

They'll forget all the details, but remember [Paul].