Is Zizek a Tzadik? Or what does he Stand For?
Yo, microphone check one two vat iz dis:
Zizek spoke at Stanford yesterday to standing room only at Cubberley Auditorium. There was a giddy acceptance over almost anything he said, no matter how outrageous, inscrutable, non-PC or hard to figure behind his accent. True, a few people left before the Q and A was completed. He is inspiring. Ipso facto, here I am writing about him. (I also met him briefly, as he and a bald guy and a hot chick entered Cummings, twenty minutes before the hit; I caught, despite my lacan of German or Czech or Serb or what-not, some disparaging remarks about Toni Morrison; I think he called her the B-word, and on top of that referred to her by her phenotype. But I agree. Toni Morrison, beyond the Nobel Prize, is, indeed, a be-atch. I got this on good account from my ex-girlfriend the trauma surgeon who got all dressed up and stood in line and paid good money for a meet and greet, this was for “Errol Garner” in Philadelphia, in 2005, and was put off. Nearly to the point of tears. Maybe they(Baldie, Hot Chick – but not Jamina Bocik — were discussing the Othello-derived piece that is playing in Paris right now. He did go into a long riff about Corilonius. Although I did not get who the producer was. I asked him or name-check Astra Taylor. He made a self-assuming remark about it being “stupid” or showing “one stupid face” (meaning his). During the Q and A a perhaps too earnest (I was the same way, in the 80s, around Kurt Vonnegut) asked about “his documentary” meaning Zizek’s and Zizek responded “do you mean “Examined Life” but it was the other Zizek.
Zizek is sort of like: Marshall McLuhan, especially in the Woody Allen movie “you know nothing of my work”; Vaclav Havel, Andrei Codescu, but a misanthrope, George Costanza, especially the “backwards George” riff; George Carlin, Lenny Bruce, Guy Debord. Borge Y Yo, which reminds me that I sat next to a Stanford English professor, named Saldivar or something, and blathered him with a long list of name-checks: Stegner, Festiner, Elizabeth Wiltsee, Juvenal Acosta, Enrique Chagoya, Gustavo Ramos Rivera – he’s probably an Elizabethan, like David Shapiro, which makes me a racist; he had a little earring. I sat between he and an undergrad(?) who was reading a book on Colonialism and “wild men” but not the Woody Allen movie.
It reminded me of the lecture I saw in San Francisco some years ago after which I was invited back, with one or two others, to the flat of a lady who said she dropped acid every day in Japan with the “Japanese Tim Leary.” I was at a Tim Leary lecture, at the JCC. I recall that within the first 500 words Leary took the mic from the stand and started to walk with it and had to tear the chord from the gaffing job, the mic was taped into place. I had just seen the Joseph Campbell series and recalled an anecdote about a monk giving a lesson where his signal – lifting a flower, in a toast or salute, was the lecture and the actual text or speech was just epilogue. I said to self “the tearing of the microphone chord from the arbitrary tape job was the message – “break free”, “resist”, “don’t be confined, arbitrarily”. So years later I could not help but drift from the cascade of words and thoughts and funhouse-mirror commentary and ask “Is there something else going on here that I am supposed to be attuned to?’ A revelation, perhaps. A briefly considered whether I was actually interceding between “Saldivar” and the student then went back to the lecture.
The film professor had introduced Zizek with a joke about Lacan: the punch line is something like “You fools!” And he ordered a beer that he did desire.” I think I had exactly one lecture on postmodernism and therefore without searching too much for more info let’s assume here that Lacan in this context means all bets are off as to intent. (As opposed to Lamark which means lamarkable virtually nothing about giraffes elongating their necks to reach the apple of knowledge, not to mention Steve Jobs or Jasmina Bojic, again, and her apple, the apple of her eyes, or all our eyes, the fourteenth United Nations International Film Festival, which features something like 40 visiting filmmakers but regratably not Astra Taylor, I wouldn’t think. And speaking of Jobs, but thinking of not Bill Rose this time but Groucho Marx – always, it seems, as if it is in my blood, my genes, my pajamas even, though how Groucho Marx got into my pajamas I will never know, as Freud would say, or Jung – did he, Baldie, but not the Bald Soprano, say “an Etruscan mask”? to symbolize Jung? – and Candye Kane – that’s her real name – and her pancreatic cancer. She was barred from singing at a blues festival near Birmingham , Alabama for her alleged eating pussy – can I say “eating pussy”? on the internet? Not even apropos of Zizek? Can I say “with mother finally ____?” She kissed a girl, maybe even my former client Laura Chavez, theSaint Francis. As opposed to the St. Ignatius grad Tonilyn Sideco, of PMSTA (“This is What Democracy Looks Like”). And I posted, perhaps inscrutably, perhaps foreshadowing my Zizek encounter, “Maybe she should go to Tuscaloosa ”.
Because the undergrad had a cute little notebook and labeled “Zizek lecture 10/17” I pulled my black sketchbook from my over-stuffed REI backpack and mimicked her. Here is a verbatim reproduction of my notes:
Zizek lecture
Oct 17, 2011
You Fools. Orders a
Beer, he does not desire
Lacanian
Jungian – Etruscan mask
Shamanism Colonialism + Wild Man
Lacan
Film studies teacher (that’s like man bites dog – I didn’t actually write that)
Zizek
Serbian joke about Gypsy/Roma
(a crude drawing of two musical notes that look more like pi
pi or chet
or Hebrew chet)
Racist and specist joke
Our name is a monument to white men’s stupidity
Indians
________
tolerance v. class struggle
Krugman 2008
Would think you not difficult w/funkaahge!
(GDR) “NO” ?? (I admit I don’t recall what the funkaahge)
Psychoanalysis
LIFE IS BEAUTIFUL>>{LIE IS BEAUTIFUL}
EGO – Baby
Dirty water
{superego, id?}
Don’t throw out baby with the bath water is opposite of psychoanalysis??
I stopped taking notes about 15 minutes into what turned out to be a two hour lecture. I thought of Jello Biafra (Eric Boucher) and his four-hour diatribes. The student next to me, who I inferred must be some kind of a super-genius, acing her courses despite a possible language-gap, finally opened her little book about 75 minutes in and wrote two or three succinct sentences that seemed to sum up the matters much more cogently than here.
It also occurred to me to ask the grad student in comp lit from Johns Hopkins to send me her photos. We met when I asked for directions to Cubberley and she had us both heading perhaps towards Mem Aud – where indeed Zizek is speaking to students only NOW i.e. was to be speaking the next day, at noon – and then I flagged down a Stanford staff member in a golf cart and said “Take the girl. I will walk”. She sat two rows directly ahead of me, but apologized or at least acknowledged the humor of out little interaction. I tried to sit with her but the open seat was spoken for. (It had been speaking to me, but I misunderstood).
Here the computer crashed on me as I was referencing accurately thanks to the Daily News the Toni Morrison piece that is coming to Berkeley later this month “Desdemona” although the writer says that it is a passing reference to Barbary that is “the beating heart” of the new work, the derivative work, ala Stoppard’s “Rosenkranz” or Mark Stewart’s “Passing Strange” — the title comes from Othello discussing Desdemona. Rokia Traore. Peter Sellars. It’s a digression.
Tzadik is a label by John Zorn, was mentioned in Times’ review of Coen “A Serious Man” but is also, according to wiki attributed to Maimomedes a man whose value outweighs his iniquity — wickedness.
I mean to link to Astra Taylor “Zizek” — it seems to be posted in entirety, but misspells her name. Her sister Sunaura Taylor to me steals the show in “Examined Life” My Lacanian or Zizek-like conception is that it is a love-letter between the sisters. I should probably strike the cunnilingus reference — so direct — especially if I plan to run for City Council in Palo Alto in 2012. I ran into Gennady Shyner of the Weekly on my way to Zizek and gave him the ad I clipped from Stanford Daily. He said he has caught Karla Kane band several times. I am jealous. Zizek is like a rock star. Or the devil. But the Devil in the Pentatarch is more like an accountant. And we blow the shofar to confuse him. I was confused by the little flyer announcing MCM or someone Haggai Cohen Milo doing Zorn — Palo Alto performances booked by Suzanne Warren had a but not the John Zorn play once. I was moved by the Cantor at Rabbi Michael The Lesbian’s Reform and Reconstruction Afternoon Yom Kippur Service playin Leonard Cohen “Hallelujah” and I some day will learn to spell that or at least remember to search it. See also Steve Bernstein “hosanna”. They are all mensch: the Cantor, Leonard Cohen, Steven Bernstein, maybe this Haggai Cohen Milo — great name! — fellow, a bass player, studied with Danilo Perez; Gennady Shyner, although he is a little repressed –he need Zizek more than I! Mensch, Tzadik, not sure the distinction, demand curve shifts to right. Moral compass. But Zizek, I’m not sure. Agnostic. Isn’t it pretty to think so. Bang.
Do I say in here my construct that “Examined Life” is a brilliant love letter from sister to sister in that when Sunaura Taylor sister of filmmaker Astra Taylor appears in the film, shopping and talking and wandering the Mission with Judith Butler she sort of steals the show ?
this write up is sort of a review of “Examined LIfe” and “Zizek” by Astra Taylor more than a coverage of the talk. And I did get to greet Zizek and ask him about the films. Describing my Zizek adventure to a friend had me recounting the Elephant 6 bands that I worked with (as her husband Jeff Magnum of Neutral Milk Hotel is part of that scene): Apples in Stereo, Creeper Lagoon, Beulah, The Music Tapes, Olivia Tremor Control.
Note: I think I mean
“Margaret Garner” not Errol Garner, which reminds me that my then-girlfriend and I had a happier experience meeting Denyce Graves at a signing at a chain book store in Center City. When I shook her hands she gave a little hoot and called me “Mr. Soft Hands” which I took as a compliment but my girlfriend said it was a slight in that a manlier dude would have rougher hands.
I meant to amend the opening to reference The Bald Soprano and The Hot Chick who is not
Jasmina Bojic.They may have been discussing “
Desdemona” an Othello derived work by Toni Morrison and Rokia Traore.
Ramon Saldivar is the professor of English literature at Stanford.
My professor was James S. Shapiro, whose book I just bought today, and if he got his Phd from University of Chicago in 1982, my Marlowe seminar in 1983 must have been one of his first classes.
I actually
posted somewheres, on Aug. 14, 2011, to be exacting, that Candye Kane, barred or pulled from a gig near Birmingham, AL, that “she should go play where the tusks are looser.”
This is the book that the student next to me, who I suspected of a secret connection with Saldivar — they hoped no idiot like me would actually take that open seat between them — was reading, or at least carrying:
Enrique Chagoya’s art and hopefully his corpo santo will be at Smith Andersen Editions tattoo art show, with a reception Thursday, November 3, 6 to 9 p.m. and it appears that Akira Tana trio will augment that night. McSweeny’s actually has a version of the Lacanian joke about the three guys entering the bar, which I found by search-injuning “etruscan mask” and “jung”. Please don’t tell me that the Stanford Film Studies teacher that I photographed above and I call The Bald Soprano was sitting at his computer the day before Zizek and typed in “lacan jokes” and found the same May, 2008 article by James Warren. What if he did but instead he found first Jen Dziura and then my derivative of hers about vagina and hamburgers and Zimbardo?
Wyndham Lewis was not along of finding Coriolanus the least lovable of Will’s tragic heroes, or so says Frank Kermode, 1392 and all that, down by the Riverside.
Plastic Alto with Mark Weiss 