Ronnie O'Neal / THE CAGED TIGER

Video Still of Ronnie O'Neal's Trial Glitched by My Phone 

    Ronnie O'Neal transformed his murder trial, for a crime of which he was obviously guilty, into theatrics of his own fractured personality, the personality which killed his child and his child’s mother. When his public defender refused to use a “stand your ground” defence, Ronnie decided to be his own attorney, and the resulting pacing and yelling went viral.

In this impacful staging, Ronnie succeeded at becoming famous, even if his intent was only to free himself. I get the sneaking suspicion, though, that Ronnie did not anticipate his future freedom, and instead pursued something like notoriety or self-expression. Somewhat, his intent did not matter, as he was stuck in a situation ahead of himself, unable to escape.

So, in such a situation, isn't there something in performance? All the world's a stage, and the company acts pointlessly, as Georges Batallie says in The Accursed Share: “Beyond our immediate ends, man’s activity in fact pursues the infinite and useless fufillment of the universe.” Didn't Ronnie's defence pursue something useless, and universal?

    Joe Exotic, convicted animal abuser of Netflix's "Tiger King" fame, is back at it, this time running an online contest entitled "Bachelor King." The purpose is to find romantic leads for when he’s released from prison. Joe is pretty much a cult leader and as such we can’t really sympathize with him, but I think we do, anyway. There’s maybe something so ridiculous and pathetic about him that it captures our love.

Maybe it is just that we love trapped things. They become like pets. To have the whole of someone in a net is almost the same as having them tamed.

The captured criminal is the tiger in the zoo, so different than the tiger upon you. There is a visible sucking out as the caged thing writhes in the audience’s view. The passion of life becomes alike begging, the lines of power make themselves known.

Joe Exotic knows how to use structures of power, naïve as he was about his security within them. I’ve said that outlaws tend to have a Death they are seeking out, their unrestrained actions show an ignorance that must be, in some ways, intentional. I think Joe is aware of the potential for it all to come crashing down and is somewhat unafraid.

That, at least, is what ambitions tells us. Either in Ronnie O'Neal screaming at his jury or in the search for a Bachelor King, there is an admirable *image*, at least, of “I AM NOT AFRAID.”

But, of course, Ronnie and Joe are scared, everyone is; and we might, too, value leaving an image, when facing eternity.

on the theft of rare books by gregory priore and john schulman

Cw: discussion of suicidality and joe exotic

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/20/us/Carnegie-library-theft-schulman-priore.html Essentially: Gregory Priore managed the rare book room for the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh. Over many years he raided the rare books and fenced them to John Schulman, a local books dealer. 

 The theft was abysmally stupid. Neither the thief nor the fence decided to think about what would happen when the vault was checked. They both relegated themselves to discovery, eventually, and instead just enjoyed the extra income while it lasted.

This reminds me of times I've heard of gambling addicts embezzling entire businesses. Tho Gregory and John's actions weren't attributed to addiction. But there is that same decision to not think, to not hide, to just trade the future for the present, as in such an addict. 

Both of these men came into their jobs everyday for years and either knew they were fucked or suppressed the knowledge that they were fucked.

Greg priore said greed led him. I wonder if it wasn't a specific kind of lust for the books. Valuables .

Treasure.

(Greg and John)

(Joe Exotic of "Tiger King" fame)

treasure = genes = beauty

Joe Exotic was able to bargain the thrill of exotic animals for income. 

These men help us understand something about ourselves, because they show us tales of greed.

Everything that we love is, in an essential way, as base as the greed Greg faced or the brutality Joe showed to people and animals alike. 

Too much desire negates the self... Desire is suicidal, desire is the desire for change, the desire to want something different. These men were essentially not at peace.

Greg, John, Joe-- all Willy Loman's, a-toil, stewing, family men... Can't blame me for relating.

(Fredric March playing Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman)

I'm more like Joe than Greg in my family structure. I live in a pod of young adults. It's nice, I'm lucky. I feel a sense of disquiet.

Travis was one of Joe Exotic's husbands, and he was abused by Joe. Travis accidentally ended his life in a bizarre gun incident. I relate to Travis's ennui. I smoke a lot of weed. I don't intend to hurt myself and I'm not liable to point firearms at myself and at my friends for fun, so I do not think I will meet an end as sudden and stupid. (Nor any kind of end anytime soon God forbid !)

I think Travis loved guns and the sense of power they gave him even as he was trapped in a cult of another man's personality. Note the zoo uniform. 

Perhaps, as Greg Priore donned his uniform (collared shirt, vest, glasses)... A Willy Loman, he also desired the sense of control destruction can give you. Theft, treasure, tigers, family, weed, guns. All can be said to be powers of death (change).

Good ol' Skeleton Farmer.

Death is the harbringer of change. I am blessed to realize that human consciousness cannot be prolonged forever. Someday, the burden will be lifted-- everything must end. 

No hell can outlast death. The toil of years of knowing you'll eventually be caught, get your career ruined, and be imprisoned-- change will end that toil. 

Alternatively, maybe the weight of knowing you were going to be fucked somehow didn't bother Greg and John. Joe, I know, has gravitas. Maybe the book thieves just 'blanked" it.

In any case, guilt or no, their futures were traded away. 

A review of 120 Days of Sodom: Honey Boy, Love and Mercy, Succession, Nxivm, Hannibal, The Office, and Familial Concentration

 

Keith Raniere, Cult Leader of "Nxivm"

Yes, we're vulnerable. Reporter Barry Meier said the Nxivm story stuck out because it showed how people are always vulnerable. I think the extent to which we end up in situations like Nxivm or Jonestown speaks to our existential fuckedness. It's a family matter, I think.

In "Honey Boy"(2019), Shia Le Bouf plays an abusive father figure raising a child actor, the story being Shia's childhood biography.  Remarkable in the film, I think is a discussion of where the power lies in a father/child relationship, as the child actor wields a "per diem" (an envelope stuffed with cash the kid earned, which the dad wants for strip clubs) and technically employs the abusive father, a technicality which becomes more significant as the child ages.

"Love and Mercy" (2014) had a similar treatment: a therapist harangues and abuses a multi-millionaire depressive artist, who has slid into the therapist's legal clutches. These kinds of situations are not unknown for rich people. 

There is a kind of diffusive, tentative chaos among the rich, if HBO's Succession is as real as it feels. A young distant cousin of a powerful mogul manages to step into the mogul's family, half by accident, and half by dumb resilience. 

Consider what it feels like to move from one conception of power into another. We are always able to wield the valued props of our power's position. These props, wielded by Keith Raniere for example, don't amount to much. A childhood of awards. Some real skill, like martial arts, or volleyball. A degree and years of education.

Yes, they make you into better people: successes. Keith Raniere I think has many successes. But these achievements are fundamentally empty to the extent that they do not guarantee much about the people or the situations these empowered people are in and draw people into.  

Jonestown's communist bona-fides* are another example: not enough to guarantee much. The lives we lead are the proof of their roots; changing the way people live was Keith Raniere's oestensible goal. 

Which is absurd, and what is sad, is the over promise // under-delivering of these cults. Overpromise on bona-fides, under-deliver on results. At least, long-term results. Obscure the meaning. I'm reading 120 Days of Sodom; there's no expression of rich people, dominance, and wealth which is truly significant. Which is why Keith's branding scheme was, in essence, pointless. (ed: he coerced women to ritually brand each other with his initials)

*

There's no expression of rich people, dominance, and wealth which is truly significant. What it amounts to is a coercion of sexual sensation by any means necessary. Inflating their sexual needs in such a way, through exhaustion, eventually deprives 120 Day's "libertines" of the usual libraries of sensation and thus they choose to employ more and more depraved methods to stimulate themselves.

The libertine's pleasure is very close to nothing at all-- the lives of at least 30 people are suborned just for the joys of about four people in 120 Days of Sodom.  It is possible to see the book as a story of a massive amount of waste. Of course this perspective equivalizes human life with garbage; tho this is the perspective of the book's libertines. They view the lives of others as a tremendous barge of garbage which they the privileged may pluck from at will, like seagulls.

The Marquis De Sade's philosophies on life, be that as they are for a version of sexual liberation which concludes the lives of women are pointless but for total subjection, are never convincing to me. I feel that they are arguments the times give context to: conditions are repressed, better to open up then to play slave to god and husband. Ofc the destiny of the women who "open up" is quite bad. 

This brings me back to Keith Raniere. He I think offers propositions similar to Sade: an alternative life to the mainstream-- a life of scientific building blocks for taking control of ourselves and the world. Let me provide some context.

Indie Game Designer Porpentine reviewed the NBC series Hannibal: 

I think a lot about fellow indie game designer Stephen Murphey's essay on Robert Walser, and this quote in particular: (which Porpentine quotes in her standout essay Hot Allostatic Load):

"The dream of an imaginary community that allows total identification with one's role within it to an extent that rules out interiority or doubt, the fixity and clearness of an external image or cliche as opposed to ephemera of lived experience, a life as it looks from the outside." - text sourced here

The dream of human existence is to live a life which is external with no internal living, no warm meatbag slip-and-creak of nerves, guts, digestive systems, psychological troubles, etc. etc. I think, in a way, the mafia sells this identity to its members; "our way", Cosa Nostra, Omerta, an alternative system of control. These of course designed to isolate people and turn them into bodies/soldiers/corpses.

There is no PURPOSE beyond concentration for those who wish to establish something like what Raniere or Jim Jones had, or what Sade imagined, or what Porpentine saw in the story of NBC's Hannibal. I think, in some ways, there is no purpose to FAMILY beside concentration. As concentration is the bringing of people closer together.

Intimacy *is* the goal of the "libertine". "I wanna be married and have 100 kids so I can have 100 friends. And no one can say no to being my friend." A quote from Michael Scott** of NBC's "The Office".  I see the same sort of impulse in Sade's libertines, who with total impunity curate an entire society.

This! Is the point of Raniere's brandings: the (attempted) creation of a society/social truth/identity. I see a similar impulse in the serial killings as depicted in Mindhunter's Ed Kemper:

"You know, women were initially indifferent to me. They weren't interested in sharing. My whole life, no one wanted to interact with me. Not even our cats, when I was a kid. The only way I could have those girls was to kill them, and it worked. They became my spirit wives. They're still with me." 

Ed Kemper, as depicted by Cameron Britton in Mindhunter

A ritual designed to inflict a social truth (the absence of the victim in our society) and a personal pleasure (the memory of a victimization).

I've been studying true crime as an interest for about a year, and I'll admit today that I am fascinated in social situations organized by selfish people. Like Keith Raniere's brandings or Ed Kemper's killings, the point is to create a social reality (scarred or dead victims) as a means to supplement personal experiences (the memories of the murders/ a support network of subordinates).

This was, ultimately, what Jonestown became about. People in charge manipulate societies purely for personal experience.

I think we all have, to some extent, some desire and ability to appeal to society. I think we all have the desire to live an external life, a vicarous imagining of our experience which would supposedly comfort our internal routine suffering. This externality includes opportunity. A person who is famous is widely thought to be so comforted-- an assured external persona, filled with opportunity, is thought to comfort our internal life. An imagined ideal life that includes prospects and opportunities.

Dealing with the future: proposing a revolutionary change in the future: changing your self through practice to create a future, better self. The future stretches out endless and fairly unknowable. Contrast that with the past, which we pretend to know. 

I think, in that imagination of our past, our identities rest.

*Angela Davis was fooled too-- we are all vulnerable, I think!

**These words spoken by the character Michael when he was a child, filmed in an interview with a puppet on a fictional children's tv program, "Fundle Bundle". Episode 18, Season 2. 

first post

peterwebb webb

trying to make a webb of connections
ha ha
trying to make criticism.
I was really struck by comparing these two images.

The first one was on the front of nyt.com.
The second one I found when I thought the first one kind of looked like Freddy Mercury.
They're both holding the gun or microphone in sort of the same position.
Their jackets are billowing up.
Also they're kind of color inverses of each other, black suit/ white exterior, white clothes/ black exterior. The notable difference is the body and the paintings.

Also, the expressions: obviously the as-yet-unnamed gunman in the first is facing his imminent death, making a political statement about Russia and Syria. It's an assassination, an act of terrorism.
He's also doing this in front of a bunch of cameras; thus the high-quality photo, a photo shoot photo.

The first image is striking and composed in a way that sends a direct message. Even without context it sends a narrative.

I'm sure already there are /pol posts about this gunman. In the process of image making, some popular images gain life as reaction images, get text added to them, are used to express. This image has the unmistakable verve that belongs to these category of images, such as the one of Freddy Mercury making the above pose, which has been redrawn and captioned on reddit and other places on the internet, to express victory.

I think the first image as well is an expression of victory, a terrible one. By the very clarity of the image, the composition of it, and the focus, the image represents the terrible victory of the gunman who sought to create an impression.

~

Devotional violence; using violence as an image-making, impression-sharing tool, as a way for people or institutions to threaten. Dexter Filkins talks jokingly that terrorists get off on their devotional pre-suicide bombing images. Gandhi uses nonviolence and the British press to win independence from India; I think there's a lazenby quote about flipping the bugs on their backs or whatever.

Lunch counter protests where black folks sit down at the counters and don't move and generate images of white people abusing them at the counters. The use of images, at least, to gain notoriety, and the subjects of the images themselves are affected. That Russian Ambassador is dead; the gunman is dead; people are traumatized. & this all in response to genocide.

So you take the opportunity to have sympathy for one side or none or rightfully evince repulsion, but the strength of the image remains; that's what incredible about it, is that, abject as it is, it remains composed, it remains undeniably strong. This is my analysis of that image, it's powerful, this the collaboration between gunman and photographer.

It feels like a pathway into fascism. Sure, the attraction of that power. The strong iconography, glorification of violence. Recognizability.
I think we're able to compete on the same scale, generate our own images for anti-fa. Take out the central figure, take out the violence. Still make it essential. Sure, Freddy Mercury.