8-10 arrested in front of The New School’s UC.
A spring afternoon on Tuesday, two girls sharing a joint in the park, beneath the stripped bark tree, its leaves fully ripened; I lit up a guy’s spliff, a couple smiled at me.
Wednesday morning: a thunderstorm.
Thinking about the floating blue fetus—the starchild—at the end of 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY, the film’s final shot where the baby looks right into the camera, as if to say, This is about you; do you see the vision?
Entry on movies: watching and re-watching some James Benning pieces, since they are widely accessible on YouTube in variable quality: This is a movie that’s opening itself to the natural space from its camera position and for the period allowed by the film magazine; minimal intervention (editing) is like maximum truth, or indexical, visible evidence. But at the same time, the slowness of the movie puts us in a dream space. This is the central interest for me in these contemplative, or post-minimal, or post-neorealist movies, the tension between documentary and dream.
News: ceasefire negotiations in Cairo between Hamas and Israel; Israel is bombing Rafah.
Finished Antonio Di Benedetto’s SILENTIARY, tr. Esther Allen: definitely liked ZAMA more, but still a nice existential/absurdist vibe.
Past the dry grass and the ruddy gravel, a little white truck rolled along the dirt road, while the dump trucks went the other way, along the brown road to the level field of beige, on and on in brown and beige, till the haze-enshrouded shallow hills.
A new table of “genres” or novel types, based on Bazlac’s categorization of his own Comedie humaine: 1) Private Life, 2) Provincial Life (i.e. suburbs, pastoral), 4) Parisian Life (i.e. urbanism), 5) Political Life, 6) Military Life, 7) Campaign Life, 8) Philosophical Studies, 9) Analytical Studies.
I signed up for the marathon, but we didn’t run across the Queensboro bridge then up Manhattan before pushing off the Bronx and finishing back down in Central Park. First I had to go through a movie theater, a very large one, and I was coming out ahead, but then we all got stuck taking the bus.
From Court Square in Queens, the skyline was so hazy.
COLUMBIA BEGINS TO SUSPEND STUDENT PROTESTORS.
Second Slope 