SHIFTER 15 call

SHIFTER is this great magazine (in a newspaper format!) edited by Sreshta Rit Premnath and coeditors. I am particularly keen on the ways Premnath is blending concept with wit, and bringing visual artists into conversation with scientists, philosophers, poets and others across various "disciplines." Submit if you will.

SHIFTER15 - Will

Editors: Sreshta Rit Premnath, Abhishek Hazra
Deadline: September 30, 2009

‘Indeed, the truth was not hit by him who shot at it with the word of the “will to existence”: that will does not exist… Only where there is life is there also will: not will to life – thus I teach you – but will to power.’
Friedrich Nietzche, “Thus Spake Zarathustra”

When Will shot Joan he did not mean to. He wanted to shoot the apple balanced on her head. The cactus wine may have put the gun in his hand. The spirit may have provided the reckless confidence. And in the spirit of its will he pointed his gun and squeezed the trigger. It may have been at the moment he squeezed the trigger, or perhaps a split second before, that the world had already begun to rip. Space and time had torn the future into an infinite set of possibilities. The set could be divided into two subsets: He would miss Joan / He would not. But the will of the spirit produced a second pair of possibilities that would not matter in the least - He would hit the apple / He would not.

If Will was not himself when he constituted this new reality, one without Joan, then who was responsible? Who’s will acted upon reality? His finger’s? The gun’s? The wine’s? Yet, we must not confuse will with intention - maybe this assumption of a causality itself is a mistake. What is known is that it happened.

If will is a potentiality - a vector that opens possibility and cleaves reality - does it precede choice? Are personal wills constituted by hegemonic ideologies (producing pre-inscribed realities), or rather is an individual’s will that space of agency which allows for an opening and aggregates with other individual wills to produce the transformation of the social?

There is a story about a revolutionary who was tortured to reveal the location of a comrade. He lied and gave his interrogators the wrong coordinates. But, when his interrogators arrived there, they found his friend.

Is reality willed into existence?

Details: Please scale image submissions for a 6″X9″ publication (6.25″X9.25″ with bleeds). Images should be at 300dpi. Rich Text, Word, Jpg, Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign files are accepted. Send submissions to shiftermail [at] gmail [dot] com

Monopoly Bloomberg Edition

Thanks to Andrew Levy for sending me the Monopoly Bloomberg edition: http://angrynyer.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/06/bloomopoly1.jpg

Death of a Hippie

after Mike Kelley and John Waters

We are just this kind of junk
Left out to rot in another
Caricature the concept of nature

Or essence means the world to us
Perhaps the symbolic death
That was Reagan Paul Thek

Adumbrated by Pop and not Junk
Not this actual material eroding
Ideas of the 'good' and 'real'

Someone to tuck you in at night
Someone to fuck you like we
Were not all monsters whether

We like it or not some concept
Of culture takes our place
What did the hippie leave us with

Except some notion of the citizen
Public unassimilable criminalized
Even though white crushed

By the political machinery
Deengineering a tenuous democracy
Containing American decadence.



I mean these men and not
These women (men) these places
That were never place enough
(displaced) to blame us in
The eyes of all people (unpeopled)
The sea will rise and we are
This rising (so sited) the dirt
Will move it will be replaced
By money (rather instantly)
It will erode and we will
Have been this dirt (here)
The difference it will have
Caused (always over there)



This is our sense
Of humor in hell
The mask you wear
Of a pig’s face
Reminds me of this

The maggots in that
Naval which would
Otherwise give birth
To the world the
Eyes that seem to

Be everywhere
Desirous frenzied
Not meeting each
Other in their
Reflections sensing

That total sense
Of senselessness
We awake from
All-too-privately
If you or I would

Ever shit still
If we would ever
Partishipate this
Filth could affirm
Empire’s manner.

The Hole (II)

Like that Black Sea
Called back by empire
It is overwhelming
The whole process of
The world irreversible
Someone told me they
Would shoot it all into
Space the waste products
They said that others
Would like to drill a
Hole to the core of the
Earth stuff-it full of
Everything we’ve made
But can't account for.

Yet tonight is like the
First night of the world
To be with you again;
A freshness of subjects
Reenacting our origins
Which are called pain
Which are subsequently
Called art.