There was a model, who did not live with us; one who kept a small rat. She walked the hall before her modeling session with the creature clinging to her shoulder. While modeling, her rat was stowed in her bag at the edge of the room. Once in a while, I was a student in a drawing session where she was the working model. I was furious with the way her interiority hung out–in rodent-form–and my sketches self-destructed because I drew to force a gap between me and her, or anyone, rather–but her imp deftly collapsed it. I modeled solo; no animal familiar; just the atmospheric thickening of my own trauma crackling between me and the sketchers. There would be no devil’s fawn suckling from a witch’s mark—a hybrid mole-nipple. When I think through the description of demons/imps/familiars in colonial New England witch-hunting tracts, zero are cervine. It seems deer will not work for humans (are good witches wicked bosses)?
Thanks to Andreas Petrossiants for locating this quote.
This detail comes from an online English translation of Bondarchuk’s memoir.
Arachnid specialists collected the data in Ukraine’s zone of alienation. The expanded perimeter of the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, Kyiv Oblast, Ukraine. The Polesie State Radio Ecological Reserve is adjacent but administered separately in Belarus.
In the making of Disney’s Bambi, would the mid-century American child truly be unnerved by the idea of forest versus one that has roots in a specific ecosystem? Disney appears to reverse the forces of simplification only temporarily. Really, Disney’s Bambi only contains the idea of deer, so why not heap on the simulacra? Ultimately, the specificity overwhelms the production process, and they regroup under the direction of Tyrus Wong.
The anecdote about the gifted train detail is from a crowd-sourced oral history of Griffith Park, California. I have not been able to source corroborating evidence at this point.
Spanish soldiers disrupted the estuarine flooding cycle at conquest, implementing the zanjas system of water distribution.
Jews settled in Narbonne, Occitania (contemporary France) in the fifth century, existing, for the most part, peacefully with first Christians and then Muslims and finally Christians again for long stretches of time. In the twelfth century, it was considered a chief center of Jewish thinking including science, biblical commentary, and law.
Ha-mashkif, June 8, 1944, 3. Tel Aviv and Haifa theaters continued to show the film over the next two decades. See Tel Aviv Allenby Theater advertisement, which continued to run for the rest of the war years, in Ha-mashkif May 31, 1944, 3. See advertisement for Bambi in Haifa in Ha-z’afa December 20, 1949, 3.
State laws vary.
I am seeking a flow chart that visualizes when the state camouflages itself from its responsibility to the creatures that inhabit its folds (in this case, cervine and humanoid) and how the government manages to dodge at the same time it controls. Can this sort of dynamic ever be mutual, mutually beneficial, and mutually agreed—a detente between half-citizen (a paperless entity) and half-government (the slush of corporation/army)? It feels more likely that a sort of mutual abandonment has risen? The state abandoning our living corpse … and without adequate health care or stable shelter, us abandoning the automatized corpse of the state.
Né Siegmund Saltzmann (1869–1945).
The feuilleton is a nineteenth-century form that literally translates as small sheet and proliferates in German language newspapers into the present. The genre been critiqued as wordy, superficial and often with loose relation to fact. Felix Salten was an eager producer of this Viennese newspaper staple.
He abandons lovers, engages prostitutes, brags in detail at the coffeehouse. This is not particularly unusual behavior for men of his class and position at this point in time. Another detail in determining the overall shape of their physical and mental lives is to note that many within this echelon contracted syphilis from the thousands of Viennese sex workers. I hesitate to mention these details because syphilis figures into antisemitic renderings of the “hypersexual Jew” but an argument can be made that our sexually transmitted infections are ours to disclose, however these dead operate as manipulables in far-right projects that depend on both the image of and actuality of reproductive heteronormative family life.
In the New England Homestead, November 13, 1897, Thornton Burgess writes, “Every boy over fifteen should be taught the use of a gun, and how to care for it.” Over time, he increasingly urges a more cautious approach. He reflects on a moment as a child (“I shot a chickadee”) to point towards the careless and simple way we might exterminate a species for leisure. His lifework includes the national organization of children’s groups dedicated to animal conservation. A blog dedicated to his works claims that 9,000 of these children gather for a sleepover in the rough of NYC, hosted by the Bedtime Story Man, aka Burgess.
In early twenty-first century America, instead, guns are oft equated with humans hunting humans. The Uvalde school shooting (June 2022) predictably centers a male teenage shooter slaughtering children. What surrounds and soothes the remains? It is unbearable to mention the bees of Uvalde as a source of sustenance, known for the taste of their honey.
A play on the casually deployed slur “FEMINAZI.” In the US, the combination of Nazi and feminist is intended to communicate an authoritarian misuse of power as specifically deployed by feminist women, while also undermining the historic abuses of actual Nazis.
After the translation, we (Che Chen and myself), a former couple, sang Hocquengham’s text at a symposium at Cooper Union. The pamphlet has since been formally translated and published.
Jelenik’s father, Friedrich, was a working-class Jew who became an industrial chemist. He was spared by the Nazis in order for his work to be incorporated into their war production; Friedrich Jelenik died in a mental hospital in 1969.
Kathryn Shultz, “‘Bambi’ is Even Bleaker Than You Thought,” The New Yorker, January 17th, 2002 →
Additionally, another pornographic work featuring a teen prostitute, Albertine, is found in his papers.
Initially addressed to a banking family–the Rothschilds–in order to raise a sum thought to be enough to insure the founding of the modern state of Israel, in Palestine or Argentina. The money is explicitly intended to pay the inhabitants for their land. This sum is never raised in full, and the idea of restitution is abandoned by Zionists. I haven’t yet located the texts that indicate that the inhabitants would be given a choice as to whether they willfully vacate or stay rooted in place.
Deer Harvey,
If a letter can have a soundtrack: Herb Alpert’s “Rise” (#1 on the billboard charts, October 1979) ... slinky trumpet wail-surround piped into the surface of my city, the Big Apple Core, into you and now, your pen.
Harv, I realize I have a real problem. I listen in to trauma’s sound wave with the comfort of a familiar but bested technology, wax cylinder or Walkman. I am conditioned to tune into and infinitely examine the perpetrator to the extent that all other options are foreclosed. It seemed that repetition, a reexamination of evidence, might release the means of vanquishing all violators, always. And yet I have got nothing on anyone.
“Rise,” a “monster hit single,” got its start as the soundtrack to an infamous daytime soap opera sexual assault scene at the afterhours Campus Disco. Back then, you were probably not tuning into General Hospital but by ‘79, you were probably already raping people, am I right? On the same album, a song is crafted in hopes that it will serve as the theme song for the 1980 Moscow Olympics. It’s always bodies, Har.
Did it rankle you that Natalya Bondarchuk and Elfride Jelenik remade Bambi before you got to it with real live gamines? Did it irritate that you could not remake Bambi with human starlets, that you could not keep dilating the harm? Do you read the NYT while you are in your Golden Crib? Maybe you skimmed Bill McKibben’s Op-Ed on Bambi and its ecological lessons. But he spoke about a book and not a flic. How much does each year of cinema production heat the earth? Are all of the movies worth all of the forests? If I live through this extinction, I wonder if people will sit around and tell old movie plots, like stripped and junkered Benshis. Which of your films will survive that? If you are alive, will you, Olde Stag, squat by the embers and lip sync your version of Bambi to your bambinos? Will your bambinos learn to market the trauma of being your issue? A buck to be made. I hear from the capitalists that one should fuck capitalism before it fucks you–that freshly subversive egos can be self-sourced and self-marketed.
Best (fuck off),
Me
P.S. But now that your ego has been shucked, do new political possibilities reveal themselves? Fess Up!