small.observations

proportion, #19

Sat, 15 Dec 2012 10:58:51 +0000

proportion, #19

proportion, #18

Sat, 15 Dec 2012 10:58:48 +0000

proportion, #18

proportion, #20

Sat, 15 Dec 2012 10:58:00 +0000

proportion, #20

proportion, #17 Miguel Oriola - Sans Titre, 1974 via...

Fri, 14 Dec 2012 16:19:29 +0000

proportion, #17

Miguel Oriola - Sans Titre, 1974

via regardintemporel

proportion, #16

Fri, 14 Dec 2012 16:19:20 +0000

proportion, #16

children/animals from the exhibition Photography Going to the...

Mon, 12 Sep 2011 17:03:22 +0100

children/animals

from the exhibition Photography Going to the Dogs, at the Kennel Club Art Gallery in Mayfair, London, from 18 July 2011 to 13 January 2012

children/animals from the exhibition Photography Going to the...

Mon, 12 Sep 2011 17:03:18 +0100

children/animals

from the exhibition Photography Going to the Dogs, at the Kennel Club Art Gallery in Mayfair, London, from 18 July 2011 to 13 January 2012

children/animals from the exhibition Photography Going to the...

Mon, 12 Sep 2011 17:03:12 +0100

children/animals

from the exhibition Photography Going to the Dogs, at the Kennel Club Art Gallery in Mayfair, London, from 18 July 2011 to 13 January 2012

children/animals from the exhibition Photography Going to the...

Mon, 12 Sep 2011 17:03:00 +0100

children/animals

from the exhibition Photography Going to the Dogs, at the Kennel Club Art Gallery in Mayfair, London, from 18 July 2011 to 13 January 2012

from Josef von Sternberg, Blonde Venus, 1932 : The angelic...

Wed, 24 Aug 2011 15:26:00 +0100

from Josef von Sternberg, Blonde Venus, 1932 : The angelic music box

via the-asphalt-jungle

1920s Saalfield Charlie Chaplin Paper Dolls the miniature as...

Wed, 24 Aug 2011 12:44:00 +0100

1920s Saalfield Charlie Chaplin Paper Dolls

the miniature as manipulable (all film stars are small on the screen); it offers infinite variety, adaptibility, changeability, possibility; the chance to be but also to be exploited.

via fuckyeahchaplin

tentacular: Such images are never about the animal. They are...

Wed, 24 Aug 2011 12:43:54 +0100

tentacular:

Such images are never about the animal. They are always excuses to depict buildings in the background. A terrible lubriciousness for architecture, zoologically disavowed.

Except where those animals will not stay still. Defy their depicter. Walk right up to that unmentionable and sniff it. The guilt, but oh, the relief.

Of course it would be pigs.

proportion, #15 John C. Higgins, Man Inside Glass Bottle, c....

Wed, 24 Aug 2011 12:43:00 +0100

proportion, #15

John C. Higgins, Man Inside Glass Bottle, c. 1888)

via muscavomitoria

[originally posted Jan 23rd, 2011 5:00am] Jacques-Henri...

Tue, 23 Aug 2011 14:29:00 +0100

[originally posted Jan 23rd, 2011 5:00am]

Jacques-Henri Lartigue, ‘Ma Nounou, Dudu’, c.1904, gelatin-silver print

Why start with this photograph?

Where do you start with this photograph?

Somewhere else…..

Lartigue, when he took it, was ten years old. Four years earlier, before he had a camera, before he even thought of having a camera, he wrote in his diary that

Comme spectateur, je m’amuse bien. Mais, ce matin, tout à coup, une idée s’est mise à me danser dans la tête, une invention féerique, grâce à laquelle plus jamais je ne pourrai être ennuyé ou triste : j’ouvre les yeux, puis je les ferme, puis je les rouvre, je les écarquille, et hop ! J’attrape l’image avec tout : les couleurs ! La vraie taille ! Et ce que je garde, c’est du vivant qui remue et qui sent. Ce matin, j’ai pris beaucoup d’images avec mon piège d’œil.

J. H. Lartigue, Mémoires sans mémoire, éditions Robert Laffont, 1975, p. 32.)

[As a spectator, I have a lot of fun. But this morning, all of sudden, an idea started to dance around in my head, a fairy-tale invention, thanks to which I can never again be bored or sad: I open my eyes, then I shut them, then I open them again, I stretch them wide open and bingo! I capture the image with everything in it complete: the colours! the right size! and what I keep is moving smelling living life. This morning I took a lot of pictures with my eye-trap.]

It sounds like an ideally, hyper-really perfect photograph. ‘L’image avec tout:’ - the way the colon in Lartigue’s phrase, positioned correctly at the beginning of a list, squares up to life in squaring it up; what follows it in the journal (‘les couleurs ! La vraie taille ! […] du vivant qui remue et qui sent’) elongates the two dots : into an equals sign = which matches hoping for ‘everything’ with getting it. That colon (deux-points in French) is a pause and an aperture through which, by syntactic magic, two points correspond, and the intention of ‘I capture’ becomes the success of ‘I keep’. Whereas ‘Ma Nounou, Dudu’, like all of the 250,000 or so photographs Lartigue took during his long life as a photographer (a catalogue which is also looked forward to by that expectant pause in the sentence), can only fall short of this promise. Faced with the same ‘everything’, the photos of 1904 could offer only black and white; a small square of glass, then paper; a static scentless picture. Off the page Lartigue’s deux-points is anything but an equals sign: it’s a tiny pinhole which shrinks the world, Dudu, a garden in Paris, the ball thrown in the air, the smell of the grass and the flowerbeds, the sparrows in the trees, and beyond that high hedge the wide noise of the street: like collapsing a ship to get it into a bottle. The camera (and the photograph) might be eye-traps too, but unlike Lartigue’s magical discovery, which allowed his eyelids to stretch as if to catch and gather in the whole world, the camera and the photograph are traps for the eye, extra eyelids, which narrow and square off the world at the edge of a plate and a snapshot. Photography as the art of shrinking.

Lartigue knows it; ‘Ma Nounou, Dudu’ tells us; this is where to start.

Any photograph will shrink you, it says, but this one does it more than most, which is one reason why it’s so tangled in the growings-up and makings-small of childhood. You can see it in the title, the way ‘Nounou’, French for nanny, and Lartigue’s name for his own nanny, ‘Dudu’, take something big (a grown-up) and give it a baby-name, a diminutive (‘nounou’, short for ‘nourrice’, or nurse; ‘Dudu’, which tucks her in beside the pet-name of Lartigue’s brother, ‘Zissou’). And you can see it in the tricksy perspective, which shrinks Dudu into a tiny doll-like figure underneath a giant balloon-like ball; in her position against that massive hedge which towers above her, dwarfing her; in the foreshortening which as she tilts her head back compresses her long adult face into the short rounded features of a child.

But this is only where to start…Lartigue’s photograph has another game to play: with me, because it also shrinks and enlarges me as I look, every time I look. When my attention is centred on that heavily-shadowed ball, it looms over me, perhaps quite small and alarmingly close (can I catch it? will it hurt me?), thrown by a full-size Dudu-shape receding into the background; when I focus on Dudu, however, the position of the camera means that I look down on her, having thrown a huge ball back to a little bonneted figure in a white apron, with small, helpless hands, peeping upwards with what might be fear, or anxiety (can she catch it? will it hurt her?). Lartigue’s play with this unplaceable ball, an endless game of catch, is an optical illusion a bit like that drawing which toggles between duck and rabbit before our eyes; but whereas I’m always the same onlooker no matter whether I see a duck or a rabbit, Lartigue’s trick is to arrange things so that the shift in perception alters both object (is Dudu adult or child?) and onlooker (am I little or grown up?).

Caught in this photo and this garden - a child, or playing with a child, or a child - you feel like Carroll’s Alice, opening out and shutting up ‘like the largest telescope there ever was’. Or like the tripod of the largest camera you’ve ever seen, which can crouch you down low like a baby on a carpet or a kid in a bath and then stretch up to see things you’re still too little to glimpse: after little Jacques-Henri unwrapped his first appareil-photo, on his seventh birthday, he wrote in his journal that his present included ‘a tripod taller than I’ and ‘all sorts of things too complicated and heavy for a little boy only 1.20 metres tall’. He didn’t know it to begin with, but he did see very soon that their complications were a kind of prosthesis which released him from the ‘eye-trap’ by allowing things to seem everything but their ‘right size’.

[originally posted May 19th, 2011 2:18am] digression #3: on...

Tue, 23 Aug 2011 14:29:00 +0100

[originally posted May 19th, 2011 2:18am]

digression #3: on looking away: Terry Gilliam’s Damnation of Faust (or, Brazil, the opera)

In English National Opera’s trailer for Terry Gilliam’s production of Berlioz’s The Damnation of Faust, the director says he thinks that his film Brazil ‘would make a great opera’. After having seen Gilliam’s Faust, I wonder whether this production may turn out to have been that opera.

What Faust’s story has in common with Orwell’s Nineteen-Eighty Four (on which Brazil was based, and which it brilliantly improved), is that they are both tragedies of inattention. They share this with the Orpheus legend, which is also a tragedy of inattention, but while Orpheus’ inattention is that of the habitual, of the look backwards which shows a preoccupation with the past, inattention in Nineteen Eighty-Four, Brazil and Faust comes in the form of the sideways glance, a look away which betrays a preoccupation with alternative presents and futures: distraction. Berlioz’s bizarre concert-opera, which he called a ‘dramatic legend’, is perfect for this: what is this semi-staged opera, which shifts restlessly from one set piece to another, incorporating hymns, ballads and drinking songs, but a series of picaresque peeks into something else, something different, something new? What Berlioz’s Mephistopheles offers his Faust is a ‘change d’air’: the phrase implies both a change of scene and a fresh tune to play.

Orwell saw the serious potential in this kind of restless evasion of the serious when he made his Winston Smith an employee of the Ministry of Information, engaged in hiding fact behind constantly-updated fiction, and churning out escapist pulp-fantasies for the masses: propaganda consists in getting people to look away. This isn’t the kind of look away from the self which comes from absorption in something outside the self, however, but rather a selfish looking-away from others’ pain to something less distressing. The catastrophe in the tragedy of Nineteen Eighty-Four is a deflection: under torture, Winston wants to divert his tormentors’ attention from himself onto Julia: another way of putting this is that he takes his eyes off her as the object of his care. His moment of carelessness is the exact reverse of Orpheus’s look back.

Brazil got to the heart of this - better than Orwell’s novel - because Gilliam spotted that the focus of the story’s betrayal needs to be, rather than the efforts of various organizations to distract people from unpleasant truths, the shocking eagerness, even desperation, with which people throw themselves on any available distraction. (It’s in this sense, and this sense only, that Channel 4’s Big Brother is aptly named, and performs as an appallingly effective sequel to the work from which its title is drawn.) Orwell, who had worked at the BBC during the war, wanted to indict the manipulation and coercion exercised by wartime and Cold War governments and their agencies; working in 1985, Gilliam could see that, in the post-war West, the role of Big Brother was being fulfilled by big business and not the nanny state, and hinged not so much on The Hidden Persuaders as the all-too-eager persuadees. The state, in Brazil, is sinister in its combination of administrative inefficiency and terrifyingly unwieldy power - the worst sort of official carelessness - but the scenes depicting this are less chilling than the ones which demonstrate how such a situation of negligence is enabled and perpetuated: not, as in Orwell’s imagination, by an underclass made up of pacified proles knowing no better than to consume the trash with which they are supplied by the state, but by an overclass of avid luxury consumers who want to know no more, and care for nothing other, than that the state will ensure the continuation of the supply of goods and services which maintain their lifestyle. The frightening machine of early 20th-century totalitarianism may have been assembled from the deprivations and desperations of the poor and discontented, but mid-to-late-century capitalism, far from offering liberation of the poor and democracy through consumer choice, transforms choice, and the discontents it continually cultivates under the pretence of soothing away, into an impenetrable camouflage which reinforces and defends what amounts to almost identical machinery. It does this through simply deflecting attention away from the serious malfunctions under the surface and into that sideways glance; even when the browser’s open at an article on extraordinary rendition, there are adverts for American Apparel in the sidebar and Net-A-Porter’s on another tab. Distraction is always also neglect.

The comic horror of such a situation is captured by Gilliam in Brazil with delicious succinctness: the grotesquely escalating cosmetic surgery which runs through the film is a motif which, in acting as a symbol to display his dystopia’s wonky priorities, wickedly contradicts the efforts of such attempts to manipulate shiny surfaces over rotting structures; the scene in a restaurant where the customers, under siege and amidst crumbling plaster, merely complain like fretful children about minor discomforts - a scene which surely owes a great deal to the dinner party scene from Carry on Up the Khyber - is a set piece of fiddling while Rome burns.

On the face of it, Gilliam’s Faust is a reluctant subject of such distractions. In the first scene he is a lone wanderer dragged down from his rocky crag into bucolic May Day festivities, which he rejects and flees; he shrugs his shoulders at the Hungarian soldiers’ military march; later, Mephistopheles takes him to a Bierkeller and cabaret, to which he reacts with disgust. At a musical soirée, he is ill at ease, and only has eyes for Marguerite. But what Gilliam manages to do is to show that this isn’t the only kind of distraction. It’s true that his Faust isn’t a fun-seeking reveller; but then neither is he shown as a dedicated seeker after knowledge, led astray only through the desire to delve into deeper mysteries (in this sense, the production’s Prologue, which has Mephistopheles the showman declaring the subject of his lecture to be the good or evil of the search for knowledge, feels, itself, like a dull textbook we soon throw away for Berlioz’s pretty tunes and ENO’s prettier pictures).

This isn’t Gilliam’s manipulation, but his reaction to Gérard de Nerval’s libretto. Berlioz’s Faust, Gilliam comments here, is ‘not a wonderful man with his eyes to the heavens […] the guy’s a selfish bastard, frankly’. In fact, the only point at which we see Berlioz’s Faust deep in contemplation of his work is in Scene 4, after the Hungarian March, when he wanders in despair:

Sans regrets j’ai quitté les riantes campagnes
Où m’a suivi l’ennui;
Sans plaisirs je revois nos altières montagnes;
Dans ma vieille cité je reviens avec lui.
Oh! je souffre! et la nuit sans étoiles,
Qui vient d’étendre au loin son silence et ses voiles,

Ajoute encore à mes sombres douleurs.
Ô terre! pour moi seul tu n’as donc pas de fleurs!
Par le monde, où trouver ce qui manque à ma vie?
Je chercherais en vain, tout fuit mon âpre envie!

And even here, Nerval has him as not so much a despairing scholar as a fin-de-siècle victim of ennui, ‘searching’ rather than researching. Gilliam develops this: singing that the night is ‘without stars’ and the world is ‘devoid of flowers’, his Faust is absolutely correct, but only coincidentally: he is wandering a battlefield in the aftermath of the Great War, gloomily absorbed in scrutinizing and casting aside pages of manuscript. After all, the myopia of declaring that the world is flowerless for me alone (‘pour moi seul’) is no more or less selfish than not noticing that it might have lost its bloom in the largest sense possible, and for many more than me.

This catastrophe has been, in the words of the programme,

a cavalry parade [which] heralds the appearance of the crowned heads of Europe. During an elegant tea party, old alliances are broken and new ones formed as the rulers carve up the map of the world between them. The mounting tension leads to a war in which millions die. Faust attempts to retreat from the chaos of this carnage.

Gilliam’s staging of this is one part Carry On dinner party to two parts James Gillray’s cartoon The Plumb-pudding in Danger: - or, State Epicures taking un Petit Souper (1805).

Hildegard Bechtler’s set and costumes borrow Gillray’s table, chairs, gold braid and plumes for the illustrious guests; Finn Ross’s projections cast them in the light of the map of Europe they covet and gradually obliterate them with film of the trenches they neither see nor foresaw. This aspect of the staging is what takes Faust’s selfishness beyond a point of characterization and lets self-centred distraction seep into the structure of the whole opera: it develops from the insight that Faust’s personal carelessness of the world beyond himself is a microcosm of this much grander negligence of consequences, and that this grander negligence can be brought down to a personal level of egotism, petulance and pig-headedness. When Nerval has Faust unmoved by military music -

Tout cœur frémit à leur chant de victoire;
Le mien seul reste froid, insensible à la gloire.

- it’s a short step from this to seeing such a ‘cold heart’ as one also ‘insensible’ to suffering; but then again the music, the ‘chant de victoire’ of the soldiers, expresses an identical obliviousness to the pain of the conquered.

Music, in fact, is again and again in Berlioz’s opera presented as a means of distraction. Musically, the opera is a series of divertissements: Berlioz began Faust by writing Marguerite’s ballad of the King of Thulé, with which she consoles herself; the opera opens with the peasants’ May Day song; then comes the Hungarian March; an Easter hymn diverts Faust from his attempted suicide; there are drunken tavern songs and student drinking songs; the original (and traditional) balletic interlude is for Berlioz a ballet of sylphs distracting the dreaming Faust on the orders of Mephistopheles, and tweaked by Gilliam into an evening of Wagnerian theatre; the demonic nonsense-chanting which greets Faustus as he descends into Hell muffles his torment, which can only be described in the next scene, once ‘l’enfer se tut’. After all this, Marguerite’s final apotheosis, heralded as it is by a heavenly choir who exhort her to put her worldly pain behind her, ‘Conserve l’espérance / Et souris au bonheur’, just sounds like another invitation to indulge in divertissement.

Brazil took its very title from a song about wanting to be somewhere else, whose weird jam-yesterday-and-jam-tomorrow tenses look first into the past and then the future in an attempt to evade the present:

Brazil, where hearts were entertaining June
We stood beneath an amber moon
And softly murmured “someday soon”
We kissed and clung together
Then, tomorrow was another day
The morning found me miles away
With still a million things to say
Now, when twilight dims the sky above
Recalling thrills of our love
There’s one thing I’m certain of
Return I will to old Brazil

Not just the now but also the here is made uncertain: ‘Then, tomorrow was another day / The morning found me miles away’. It’s the perfect tune to accompany Sam Lowry’s dreams of flying, and, at the happy end of the film, his escape from the nightmare of the city for a pastoral paradise; perfect because it’s the tune he’s humming as the happy ending returns to the torture chamber, and you realize that his evasion is a present but alternative reality, in the face of which his interrogators have to admit a sort of defeat:

MR. HELPMANN: He’s got away from us, Jack.

CUT TO: INT. INFORMATION RETRIEVAL ROOM - DAY

Sam is sitting in the I.R. chair. He is strapped in. His eyes are open but miles away. His face is wreathed in a benign and very happy smile.

JACK: I’m afraid you’re right, Mr. Helpmann. He’s gone.

A WIDE SHOT of the room shows us Helpmann and Lint turn away and leave. Sam is left alone. He is humming…The CAMERA PULLS BACK AND BACK. The Information Retrieval room with Sam in it floats away into the most beautiful glorious sky ever.

Like Marguerite, Sam is lifted up by the closing music to the ‘hauteurs du ciel’, his suffering assuaged.

In an interview published in the ENO’s programme notes to the performance, Gilliam remarks on this ability of music to tell, even impose, an alternative story, and the way it’s central to Berlioz’s opera:

Because of the way it’s written, the narrative is constantly being held up by really lovely musical pieces. Then I thought: what would happen if there were another narrative, one that everybody knew and which propelled the story in a different way. […] I’m a huge fan of German culture so I thought: why not tell that story from German Romanticism through Expression and Fascism at an artistic design level.

The Damnation of Faust, like Sam Lowry’s life, is indeed ‘held up’ by musical interludes, in more than one sense: the ‘really lovely musical pieces’ not only ‘hold up’ or stop and frustrate the drive of the narrative by halting the main action to open up alternative worlds and stories (Brazil; Thulé; heaven), but, in doing so, ‘hold it up’, supporting it and enabling it to continue, both structurally (these interludes of course constitute the fabric of Faust and Brazil; they are what these productions are made of), and psychologically (they are the consolations which keep Faust on the path to damnation and help Lowry to go on with his life). Moments of beauty are in this way shown as ostensibly decorative embellishments which turn out to be essential scaffolding. But this leads to another sense in which such instances of loveliness can ‘hold up’ narrative and, as Gilliam suggests, ‘propel the story in a different way’: stopping it by force, as it goes on its way, they are potentially violent arrests which steal valuable attention and significance away from the main story for their alternative realities. Pleasant dreams take a viewer’s mind off dystopian horror; charming sylphs and plaintive ballads divert the operagoer from the prospects of damnation.

It’s been objected that what Gilliam’s production of Berlioz’s opera has done is a version of this: the Faust legend, a story about the search for knowledge, its temptations and its dangers, has its audience’s attention stolen by the well-known story of modern German history, from the late 19th century to the eve of the Second World War. There are undoubtedly moments when this superimposition is indeed an imposition, and the pictures just don’t match the words: to see a Jewish Marguerite dragged away by brownshirts during Kristallnacht while the chorus sings to her mother about the shame of a man being spotted in the house and the possibility of an unplanned pregnancy is nothing short of bizarre. The ‘artistic design level’ is at such times at cross-purposes with the action, and in being so immediate to the audience - you can’t help but see the huge swastikas and the allusions in set and costumes to George Grosz and Caspar David Friedrich and Otto Dix - they take precedence over the less-well-known story and the more difficult-to-apprehend words. (And as these are most readily understood with the aid of the surtitle screen, you could say that there is a direct competition for our visual attention between the verbal and the pictorial plots.)

But then: what is that pictorial plot, the ‘story […] on an artistic design level’, which leads ‘from German Romanticism through Expression and Fascism’? Retellings of the Faust legend can feel like the revenge of the aesthetic on the hermeneutic, the creative arts making a meal of the misfortunes of academia by producing a beautiful artefact in which the quest for knowledge is depicted as misguided. Gilliam, however, reminds you that art, too, has a recent history of looking the other way, or rather, of other ways of seeing which, in focussing increasingly on the eye and the ‘I’ of the observer, take liberties with the facts observed. This is the visible journey of what Keats termed the ‘wordsworthian or egotistical sublime’, in which the human mind, faced with the immensity of nature, experiences first a check but then discovers and affirms in itself a power greater than nature by seeing the natural world as merely a reflection of something within itself. The Romantic composer, painter and writer don’t get off scot free here, because their engagement with the world, rather than providing an instructive counter-example to the supposedly arrogant and irrelevant questings of science and philosophy, is seen as equally arrogant in its concern with the self, equally led astray from compassion by absorption in its own thoughts, ideas and ideals, even - perhaps especially - when it seems most outward-looking.

As Bechtler’s sets emphasize, this egotism is what links Faust with Caspar David Friedrich’s glowingly immanent landscapes:

and his cloud-chamber-like cell - as well as the chaos of the Berlin cabaret, to which he first escapes - with the twisted realities of Grosz:

The world doesn’t really look like this, except through the eyes of Friedrich or Grosz; the sets’ journey from one artistic pastiche to another stages an argument between visions and interpretations, which echoes the argument in the Bierkeller between Communists and National Socialists. Gilliam reproduces Leonardo’s Vitruvian Man on the frontcloth between scenes, at first showing it in its familiar and orderly configuration, then progressively circling the square until one figure hangs upside down, an image echoed by Faust’s own final appearance in Hell, contorted into the shape of a swastika. Do people look like this? Well, if you make them.

Faust’s rejection of the rest of the world occurs when it fails to correspond to his own feelings, and in this production, Mephistopheles captures his soul not with promises of his wildest dreams and heart’s desires, but with a nice piece of theatre which brings our hero back into seeming control of his surroundings and therefore into alignment with his self-image. As Gilliam remarks in the programme interview, Faust ‘has to be a hero, or he has to think of himself in a heroic way’. The two aren’t the same. Wandering the battlefield, deep in his papers and oblivious to the sufferings around him, Faust finds himself offered a surgeon’s white coat, gloves, and an appearance as hero-healer, to the strains of the choir’s ‘Christ vient de resussciter!’. Dr Faustus’s resuscitating scalpel presents him to himself as a saviour while all the time echoing the knives of the European rulers who have just been seen carving up the map to make it fit their desires (and, more distantly, the constantly-in-demand scalpel of Brazil’s kindly cosmetic surgeon). Seeing the world as a reflection of yourself makes it only natural to impose your will on it.

And, like the mirror in the budgie’s cage, it’s a distraction. This isn’t looking; it’s overlooking; Friedrich’s ‘Wanderer above the Mists’ - the visual archetype of the Romantic Wanderer-thinker-hero, and a painting reproduced in the ENO’s programme - is also, like Faust, ‘not a wonderful man with his eyes to the heavens’, but someone too caught up in his own ideas to glimpse anyone else. As the poster for Brazil reminds you: it’s only a state of mind.

[originally posted May 11th, 2011 1:49am] I love parodies...

Tue, 23 Aug 2011 14:29:00 +0100

[originally posted May 11th, 2011 1:49am]

I love parodies and pastiches: the way they are models of the originals, both deadly accurate and skewed all over the place; both shruggings and intense payings-of-attention. There are plenty of Eliot pastiches out there, but this, from corprewland, is just delicious.

TS Eliot’s The Waste Land, rewritten in the LOLCat of i can has cheezburger.

(Image from blork.org.)

     i seez cumean sybil
     sybil can has bukkit?
     sybil wantz DIE

1. IM IN UR WASTELAND BURYING UR DEAD

april hates u, makes lilacs, u no can has. (1)
april in ur memoriez, making ur desire.
spring rain in ur dull rootzes.

earth in ur winter, covered in snow
can has potato. PO-TA-TO.
INVISIBLE SUMMER! RAININGZES!
im in ur hofgarden, drinking ur coffeez.

at archduke’s haus, invisible sled!
im in ur moutainz, holding on tight.
no can has cheezburger.
oral sex metaphors in ur poem.

in ur stones, whar r treez? (19)
whar r bushez?
ceiling cat cannot say.
im in redrock, hiding from sunz.
commin ze redrock.
im in ur handfull of dust,
showing ur fear.
redrock, redrock.

     whar r wind?
     INVISIBLE IRISH GIRL
   in ur homelandz, freshening ur windz

can has hyacinths,
no can has tongue.
Isolde u down teh rivers.

Sosotris Cat has smartz, (43)
can see bukkit,
dead sailorz in bukkit,
hooked on fonicians.
belladonna in ur rocks,
situating ur situations.
man has three staves,
turning wheelz,
INVISIBLE CARD.
Sosotris Cat no can has hanged man:
avoid bukkit or u drownz.

INVISIBLE CITY (60)
i see dead peoplez under bridge,
i see dead peoplez on der streets,
walrus has clocks, says NEIN.
bodiez in ur garden, sprouting ur zombies
dog no can has zombies!

II. U WANTS TO PLAY A GAME? (79)

She has shiny chair,
with tacky decor.
ornate fornicate apellate,
king in teh philomel,
shoutin up teh desert.

world cries ‘jub jub bird,’
or is diffrent poem?
INVISIBLE BANDERSNATCH!
time killing everythingz,
platos cave wall,
forms in teh cave,
shuffling in teh stairs,
hushing teh room,
ushering teh fatez.

“i has bad nerves.
u can has speeches?
u can has thoughts?
u can has thinkings?”

OMG WTF RAT ALLEY (115)
dead manz no bonez!!!?!

OMG WTF NOISE?
INVISIBLE WIND!
OMG WTF NOISE?
ceiling cat is watching you masturbate.
OMG WTF? WTF U SEE? WHAT U NO?
no see, no know, no remember butt.

o o o o (125)
shakespeare rag is smartness.
im in teh street, walkens.
im in ur schedule,
measuring out ur life in teh coffee spoonz.

LOL hurry.
LOL can has fake teeth?
LOL ur husband back from war,
wants some more.
LOL hurry.
LOL in your bed, makinz teh kiddles.
LOL drugz LOL!
LOL eating lambz.
LOL SPEEDY LOL!
LOL goodnight

III. TEH SERMON, IT BURNZ (173)

if teh river running, why not moving?
INVISIBLE WIND.
nymphoz gone.
river has trash no more.
nymphoz and friends left,
no can find.
shakey bones with big laughs r here!

rat creepin in teh banks, (186)
fisher kingz has no fishies!
rat eatin kingz relatives.
king sees mrs potter, standing in teh bubbles.
potter daughter hotter.

twitter twitter
jub jub bird.
still in rong poemz
TRUE!

INVISIBLE CITY
eugenideez has raisin pockets,
no can parly francay,
wants lunch at cannon,
wants weekend at pole.

teh day is done,
teh crowd is throbbing.
tiresias iz teh hermafrodite!
tiresias sees:

     teh sailor sails home
     teh typist makes tea
     teh house agent feelz typists
     teh house agent can has nookiez
     teh typist no has sensation
     putting teh needle on record
     omg hole in the wall

tiresias in teh thebes (grecian), speeking to deaders, sees on in!

thames has music,
city has shiny decor,
mandoline rains.

     sweaty river
     drifty barges
     turny tides
     it all goes downhill,
     or at least downstream

     hawaiian music

liz and lester
beating ‘ores,
stern, swell, ripple,
all downstream,
big white towers

in teh canoe, (291)
i r laying, begin again.
INVISIBLE ANYTHING.
no can has anything!

carthago can has delenda (307)
fire! fire! fire!

IV: IN TEH WATERS, DYING.

dead fonician,
forgotten bukkit, gulls,
seas, moniez.
fonician hooked on current.
fonician in teh whirlpoolz, spinny
spinny fortunes’ wheel.
in teh fonician, ponder ur fate!

V: U LISTEN THUNDERS OR ELSE!

after torchlight shiny in quiet gardens (322)
after sweaty faces in stony agony:
teh screamz and teh cries!
thunder in teh mountains, shaking all.
if u lives, u dies.
just wait.

u can has bukkit, (331)
no can has water,
ha ha no can has bukkit,
just rock and sand.
no stand, no sit,
no shirt, no shoes, no service,
just thunder shaking moutainzes.
no can has water.
no can has water.
actually, no can has rock either.
no can has water or rock,
or for that matter sand.

ceiling cat is watching you masturbate (360)
u and ur dirty friend.

what r sound?
who r teh hordes?
teh hordes on teh plains rushing.
what r teh cities?
INVISIBLE CITIES.

woman pulls out hairs tight,
and fiddles teh hairs.
teh bats r freaking!
towers ringing bells,
voices singing in wells.

rotten hole in mountains, (385)
moon shining on grass and gravez!
chapel is empty, only with chickens!
cockadoodle doo!
here comez the rains again.

teh metaphorz are thick and fast, (395)
no can has literal translationz.
ganga cat is watching ur fourth wall.
waiting for rainz.
cloudz in teh sky ar far ways.
THUNDERS!
datta means give!
in a moment u lives, transitory,
no can has recording.
dayadham means be compassionate!
u thinks bout prisoner,
thnks ur in prison,
damyata means have self-control!
u r boat on calm seas,
at least on good day

London bridges falling down! (425)
falling down! falling down!
fall down long time!

you get burned clean
or you goes hell!
burny burny burny!
prince at ruined tower,
storing pieces against ruin.
Hieronymo’s goin crazeee cat!
dada dada dada

VISUALIZE WHIRLED PEACE.

© 2007 Corprew Reed, some rights reserved.

[originally posted Apr 20th, 2011 5:08am] on not (quite)...

Tue, 23 Aug 2011 14:29:00 +0100

[originally posted Apr 20th, 2011 5:08am]

on not (quite) looking at children #1: John Berger as sentimental poet

John Berger asks ‘Why look at animals?’ in the title of an essay; Adorno might already have answered him:

In existing without any purpose recognizable to men, animals hold out, as if for expression, their own names, impossible to exchange. This makes them so beloved of children, their contemplation so blissful. I am a rhinoceros, signifies the shape of the rhinoceros.

Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia, translated by E.F.N. Jephcott (London: Verso, 2005), 146, p. 228; a different English translation is online here

Adorno’s remark answers Berger’s question by requiring us first to think about the phrasing of that question, which neatly omits context in the form of persons and moods: ‘why [should/do I/you/he/she/they] look at animals?’. This omission, which acts as an elision, continues through Berger’s essay like a pulled thread, and Adorno’s writing, which introduces at least two kinds of lookers-at-animals, ‘men’ and ‘children’, holds this up to the light.

Although the essay ‘Why look at animals?’ has as its central proposition the notion that we, now look at animals in a way different from that of our ancestors, them, then (or rather, that they, then, could and we, now, can’t), it only dimly recognizes the possibility that different lookings-at might exist alongside one another in the present time and within the same society; that why I do look at animals might not be the same as why he should look at animals, or how we should or they do, and so on. In the absence of these distinctions, the question Why look at animals? hovers in a no-man’s-land between the fully interrogative and the fully rhetorical: or rather, it folds the interrogative sense (as those in pre-industrialized societies could ask it) into the rhetorical one (as, Berger would argue, those in modern capitalist societies must all ask it). His argument conducts you from the first, where the question is possible and operative, to the second, where he will turn and tell you that while you can comprehend it in the first sense, to you, it can only be felt as purely decorative. This journey from the naive to the sentimental is what the hole in the title is designed to accommodate, but in doing so, it leaves a gap; a child-sized gap. Berger’s essay is full of little glances at children, which prop up important parts of his argument, but nowhere does he let his readers get a proper look at them; and given that the child is an important staging-post between the naive and the sentimental, this is something which itself needs looking at.

Looking at, or reflecting upon, is the point here, because it’s reflection which creates the difference between the naive and the sentimental. I’m using those terms as Schiller does in his essay ‘On Naive and Sentimental Poetry’, where the naive poet is defined as one who ‘is nature’ and the sentimental poet as one who ‘seeks the lost nature’; ‘the naive poet merely follows simple nature and feeling and is confined merely to imitation of reality’, whereas the sentimental poet

reflects on the impression, which the objects make in him, and only on this reflection is the emotion grounded, in which he himself is moved and moves us. The object is here connected with an idea, and only in this connection does his poetical force rest.

Berger claims that something is creating an impenetrable glare through which it becomes impossible to look at animals; that something sounds a lot like the reflections of Schiller’s sentimental poet, generated in the gap between the outside world and an idea of it. You couldn’t be sentimental if you didn’t both know about naïveté, and know that you weren’t, yourself, naïve; the rhetorical Why look…? needs to be preceded by the simply interrogative Why look…?, or at least accompanied by the idea that its existence is possible, but always elsewhere or elsewhen.

Gaps, spaces, losses, displacements: the sentimental poet, who is always comparing the world he has with his infinite ideas, is either satirical (when writing about present reality) or elegiac (when writing about ideals). Berger, in this essay, is elegiac; and that’s where - as so often - the children creep in. As Jonathan Burt points out,

with the exception of pets […] the imagery that Berger discusses as symbolising the condition of the modern animal are all examples related to children: Beatrix Potter books, Disney cartoons, stuffed toys, the rocking horse (‘a nineteenth-century invention’ (20)). Even the visit to the zoo is familial, the familiarity of the human-animal look has come to be replaced by the family look: ‘the family visit to the zoo is often a more sentimental occasion’ (21). Such visits are about the recovery of loss, ‘re-finding some of the innocence of that reproduced animal world which they remember from their own childhood’ (21). There are many layers of loss evoked here, from the fakery of childhood toys to the captive animals that are ‘less than I believed’ (21). The zoo is thus the climactic figure, the ‘living monument’ for loss.

Jonathan Burt, ‘John Berger’s “Why Look At Animals?”: A Close Reading’, in World Views: Environment, Culture, Religion, 9:2(2005), pp. 203-218, p. 209

‘Such visits are about the recovery of loss’; they are ‘a more sentimental occasion’ when children are involved. Burt is only wrong in not going far enough, because it isn’t that for Berger ‘the zoo is […] the climactic figure, the “living monument” for loss’: childhood - where the not-good-enough zoos, the faked toys, the pets which aren’t real animals belong - is. The zoo might be the visual climax of ‘Why look at animals?’, but children are its invisible focus, and their presence is all the more keenly felt because they constantly hover just out of the picture. Others have seen photography’s absences mutually reflected in and by the idea of Victorian and fin-de-siècle childhood (for example,Carol Mavor, whose claim that ‘childhood as we now understand it […] was perfected side by side with the development of photography’ I wrote about here); Berger’s essay circles around children as a figure for the losses sustained in Western civilization’s relationship with nature through the nineteenth and into the twentieth century. If ‘public zoos came into existence at the beginning of the period which was to see the disappearance of animals from daily life’ (21), this is also the period which was to see the removal of children from everyday life, and into a separate life called ‘childhood’. The trip to the zoo is part of this removal, both of children and animals. When Berger writes that ‘the zoo to which people go to meet animals, to observe them, to see them, is, in fact, a monument to the impossibility of such encounters’, the piece of writing in which he explores this is also, itself, a testament to a related impossibility: that of meeting, observing, seeing, encountering children. This is why the zoo is so important in ‘Why look at animals?’. Photography and childhood meet one another during their shared infancy in photographs of children which were taken at the time; the corresponding encounter between children and animals (as also between children and adults, who in the family visit are ‘re-finding some of the innocence of that reproduced animal world which they remember from their own childhood’), occurs - either physically or conceptually - at the zoo.

Very frequently, Berger’s essay visits animals, can’t help coming across the children who are hanging around, and then moves on to the next exhibit. As for example when quoting Aristotle, on human qualities personified in animals:

’[…] just as in man we find knowledge, wisdom and sagacity, so in certain animals there exists some other natural potentiality akin to these. The truth of this statement will be more clearly apprehended if we have regard to the the phenomena of childhood: for in children we observe the traces and seeds of what will one day be settled psychological habits, though psychologically a child hardly differs for the time being from an animal…’

To most modern, ‘educated’ readers, this passage, I think, will seem noble but too anthropomorphic. (11)

The suggestive ellipsis is brushed aside by the label on the cage: we are to pay attention to the anthropomorphism, and not its opposite, the way in which children are seen as ‘hardly differing’ from animals. Is this accepted as a given? Ignored as ridiculous? But that the adults in the zoo know that they both come from children, and come from animals, is a necessary condition for the particular sentimentality Berger wants to explore. Aristotle wrote it first, but there was a growing nineteenth-century interest in the idea that the child’s development mirrored that of the species - an interest in what could be learned from close observation of infants if ontogeny really did recapitulate phylogeny - which later in the century combined neatly with still-current but pre-Darwinian ideas that the stages of child development could be viewed as a microcosm of the progress of mankind away from savagery and towards civilization (so, for instance, W.B. Drummond’s very popular Introduction to Child Study (1907), describes the anthropologist, who ‘unable to discover a living specimen of primitive man, turns to the child as his nearest representative’). Manners and language acquisition were already seen as areas in which the individual child could be used as evidence for the human cultural past; Darwinian theories of evolution helped turn similar scrutiny on the child’s bodily development (from single-celled organism, through ‘gilled’ embryo and crawling primate, to homo erectus) in a way which meant that children were being viewed, through a rather uncertain metaphor, as animals. And this in turn means that one of the things the child visitors to the zoo are being taught is difference: you are not an animal. You belong on this side of the fence. Read the labels and the visitors’ guide. Discuss the endangered species. The zoo visit as an educational encounter is designed by educators specifically to remove ‘the innocence of that reproduced animal world which they remember from their own childhood’; the childhood world as ‘reproduced animal world’ (Berger’s ambiguity is telling) is in this way replaced by a reproduction of the adult world, and zoos are silted up with sentiment because what takes place there is not only loss but deliberate disillusionment, and at the same time nostalgia for a time before the disillusionment. (Schiller explains that ‘sentimentality in respect to nature is especially strongly and most universally expressed at the instigation of such objects, which stand in a close connection with us and bring nearer to us the retrospective view of ourselves and the unnatural in us, as for example, with children or childlike nations’.) The children in ‘Why look at animals?’ are so strangely present and absent because they are inhabiting a ghostly half-life: they are there, and looking, but they are learning not to be, and not to look. And they are not, ever, quite, being looked at for and as themselves: they are an animal vestige, a human potentiality, an adult memory.

This is how Adorno answers Berger: by saying: children look at animals, but you can’t look at children looking at animals. There’s a lovely ambiguity in the English translation of Adorno’s sentence ‘this makes [animals] so beloved of children, their contemplation so blissful’ (in another translation: ‘this endears them to children and makes their contemplation a joy’): in both cases it blurs children with animals and entwines the sense ‘it is blissful for everyone to contemplate animals’ with the sense ‘children’s contemplation of everything is blissful’, and in doing so hints that when we contemplate anything blissfully, it is also childlikely. The ambiguity hinges on whether contemplation belongs to the thing contemplated or the contemplator, and in doing so also brings in that contemplation which appears to be undertaken by animals: ‘it is blissful to consider animals when they are in a state of contemplation’. In Adorno’s original formulation - ‘I am a rhinoceros, signifies the shape of the rhinoceros’ - the name and the shape of the animal become a mantra, emanated by the animal, reverberating through the onlooker; this isn’t a moment of distinction, of naming, but of recognition and sharing; it’s a childlike, or in Schiller’s terms, a naïve, encounter: ‘in existing without any purpose recognizable to men, animals hold out, as if for expression, their own names, impossible to exchange. This makes them so beloved of children’. Furthermore, the suggested similarity between childlike contemplation and animal contemplation introduces the animal possibility into the adult activity, with children as the medium: animal contemplation is like childhood contemplation, and therefore accessible to adults in the form of childlike contemplation. The ambiguous, present-absent contemplation of children, which is the point of modern zoos, is what I’m getting at (and what’s getting at me) in Berger’s essay.

It brings out and is brought out by ‘the relation of animals to children’ proposed by Adorno:

The relation of children to animals depends entirely on the fact that Utopia goes disguised in the creatures whom Marx even begrudged the surplus value they contribute as workers.

Animals are Utopian because they are seen as pure play, with no use-value. Marx - who wrote about child labour - could distinguish the child from the animal in an economic sense; but this is no longer true, as Berger notes, with another significant silence:

Although […] nostalgia towards animals was an 18th century invention, countless productive inventions were still necessary - the railway, electricity, the conveyor belt, the canning industry, the motor car, chemical fertilisers - before animals could be marginalised.

During the 20th century, the internal combustion engine displaced draught animals in streets and factories. Cities, growing at an ever increasing rate, transformed the surrounding countryside into suburbs where field animals, wild or domesticated, became rare. […]

In the first stages of the industrial revolution, animals were used as machines. As also were children. Later, in the so-called post-industrial societies, they are treated as raw material. (12-13)

As also are…? There is no parallel suggestion of what children have become, if not ‘raw material’; in the place of the second term of the comparison hovers another unbalanced silence. But the comparison of what happens in the Machine Age to children with what happens to the animals who are not raw material is instructive: they both shed their use-value and become kinds of ornament. Pets become possible when ‘the practice of keeping animals regardless of their usefulness’ can be afforded; childhood, seen as a separate and specially protected phase of life - involving for example different and specialized foods and clothing - comes into being when parents no longer need their children to earn their keep, and can afford to prevent them from working by educating them (this is why the rich in any society gain childhoods sooner than the poor, and continue to have longer childhoods; the eight-year-old watercress-seller interviewed by Henry Mayhew ‘lost all childish ways and was, indeed, in thoughts and manner, a woman’ only four years before Carroll’s Alice was spending her time reciting lessons and playing with kittens). Pets are specialized animals; children are specialized humans. And in both cases, you can replace the word ‘specialized’ with ‘marginalized’. The suburbs are where there are no longer cows, pigs, sheep, and children working in the fields; there are puppies, kittens, caged birds, and boys and girls with rocking-horses and stuffed toys. To Berger’s ‘sites of enforced marginalization - ghettos, shanty towns, prisons, madhouses, concentration camps - [which] have something in common with zoos’, we need to add schools and nurseries.

The similarity becomes even more striking when Berger writes about domestic pets:

The small family unit lacks space, earth, other animals, seasons, natural temperatures, and so on. The pet is either sterilised or sexually isolated, extremely limited in its exercise, deprived of almost all other animal contact, and fed with artificial foods. This is the material process which lies behind the truism that pets come to resemble their masters or mistresses. They are creatures of their owner’s way of life.

Equally important is the way the average owner regards his pet. (Children are, briefly, somewhat different.) The pet completes him, offering responses to aspects of his character which would otherwise remain unconfirmed. (14)

‘(Children are, briefly, somewhat different.)’ From ‘average owners’? Or from pets? This returns to the in-betweenness of children and their existence as a buffer zone between adults and animals, and isn’t just quibbling. Children, after all, are supposed, perhaps specifically brought up ‘to resemble their masters and mistresses’, otherwise known as their parents and teachers; they have been throughout the nineteenth and twentieth and into the twenty-first centuries progressively ‘isolated’ from sex, including their own explorations of it, by adult unease; they are, at least under British law, ‘creatures of their owner’s way of life’; it is considered cosily affectionate to say of them that they ‘complete’ their parents, in particular their mothers: while Berger means to say that ‘for a short time, children treat their pets as adults do not’, his parenthesis cannot avoid pointing out that perhaps children are only ‘somewhat’ different from pets (his description, for instance, fits perfectly the situation of the modern home-schooled child).

This complex relation Berger implies between adults, children and animals means that the disappointingness of zoos he notes is a result not only of the animals failing to fulfil expectations, but of other fallings-short:

The animals seldom live up to the adults’ memories, whilst to the children they appear, for the most part, lethargic and dull. (As frequent as the cries of animals in a zoo, are the cries of children demanding: where is he? Why doesn’t he move? Is he dead?) And so one might summarize the felt, but not necessarily expressed question of most visitors as: Why are these animals less than I believed? (23)

It’s not just that zoo animals bore children by not coming up to the lively technicolor standard of familiar picture-book and cartoon images, they bore adults by not ‘liv[ing] up to the[ir] memories’. (But if zoos always disappoint children, then what are the adults remembering? What the adults who once took them wanted, and wanted them, to remember; and so on: something which never happened.) And so if the animals are ‘less than I believed’, never as good as they used to be, neither are the childhoods the zoo visit adorns and illustrates. Also displays; because adults experiencing the zoo as a place where ‘as frequent as the cries of animals […] are the cries of children’, are there, at the zoo, to look at the children at least as much as the animals. Having domesticated and specialized the animal and the child, adults then look for a temporary, controllable way of experiencing both in more natural surroundings, and of observing the secret world of instinct they are at the same time engaged in suppressing (parks serve a similar function; think of Barrie’s Kew Gardens. Or hidden spaces in houses and gardens, requisitioned and squatted in: Proust’s little Marcel, in his room, thinking about the asparagus-fairies scenting his pee; Saki’s children in attics and up trees. And while those children’s stories which quickly remove the adults undoubtedly please the adventurous child, what’s less often pointed out is that they also satisfy the curious adult that this is real childhood behaviour, seen ‘in the wild’, as it were.) The public zoo, with its family audience, develops out of the menagerie, with its adult audience, at a time when children are disappearing from everyday life into the nursery and the schoolroom; it develops out of this need, now, for a place where you can go to see childhood, tamed, but preserved. This is the other side to the zoo’s educative function, a foil which both thwarts it and shows it off: alongside the instruction/label ‘You are not a beast’ runs the tacit acceptance that you would quite like to be beastly, and are probably beastlier than you should be, or will be quite soon. The zoo is a potentially rich source of such observations because it puts together the uncivilized animal with the only-partially-civilized child, to make a couple who, at moments when circumstances allow, can still exchange fugitive glances; but the richness is for the most part only potential, as the ‘lethargic and dull’ animal behaviour fails to elicit the child’s ‘blissful contemplation’, which in the place of sentimental reflection could refract the animal onto the human.

Schiller writes that

The poets are everywhere, according to their concept, the guardian of nature. Where they can no longer entirely be the latter and already experience in themselves the destructive influence of capricious and artificial forms, or indeed have had to struggle with the same, then will they appear as the witnesses and the avengers of nature.

Berger is a sentimental poet through his role as witness and avenger of nature, and the position of children in ‘Why look at animals?’ - heard but not properly seen, as you might hear the title as one of the plaintive cries of a bored child in front of inert straw - is both his witness and vengeance. Old and young Hamlet all at once, the one who saw and suffered and the one who has it in his head now, having to do something about it. Except that here the ghost is a child, the memory of a child, and the avenger grown up. It was an encounter with a muntjac deer by the roadside which led George Szirtes, in this wonderful blog post, to the ghost of a memory:

There is something in that curious, all but unplacable act of bonding that is hard to describe (I sometimes get it with the cats when our eyes meet, but not quite in this way.) It is as if we had seen a ghost, all of us at once. It is the ghost of the existence we have never led but know to be possible. The muntjack for a moment inhabits us, then, given a good deal of luck, it turns and dives back into the trees to our left and we forget it.

Memory isn’t like a photograph really. It is more a shudder.

‘The existence we have never led but know to be possible’, or to have been possible: Aristotle’s ‘traces and seeds of what will one day be settled psychological habits’. A child, we might not have been this adult; an ape but for a chromosomal twist might not have been this piece of work, man. Memory isn’t a photograph because we can’t see it, we are it, like our childhood selves; and that shudder, gooseflesh, fear, cold, tugs up the traces of those pelts and hackles we don’t have; but, feel, we do.

theme change>formatting disintegrates>4 things from the archive need reposting now as different types of post

Tue, 23 Aug 2011 14:28:51 +0100

proportion, #14 via ladyday

Wed, 17 Aug 2011 14:05:45 +0100

proportion, #14

via ladyday

proportion, #13 Chaplin impersonator Little Freddie Warner...

Wed, 17 Aug 2011 14:04:00 +0100

proportion, #13

Chaplin impersonator Little Freddie Warner (left) and an unknown Chaplin impersonator friend.

via fuckyeahchaplin