Seductive Hallucination | E220

The Seductive Hallucination Zoo
An Archive of E220-related documents and links

a band that cecilia polkinhorn, seductive hallucination agent extraordinaire, thinks you might like!

a nice little film from liz minnix, a seductive hallucination ally

A cool letter from a great student and future friend! As for the people it outs--that's ok, at least one of them probably wouldn't care anyway. Cheers, Bill Nericcio

No exaggeration--visit a museum and change your life! A Los Angeles field trip that will blow your hallucinating mind!

An illustrated Seductive Hallucination that blends fantasy, whimsy, and the surreal!

Begin your own photographic seductive hallucination odyssey by using this cool website that allows you to parse the FLICKR universe in a novel fashion!

Here, do please find a Dave Chappelle poetry reading suggested to the zoo by the one and only TREVOR AUSER, obituary-fetishist and ECONOMIST reader! note: it is not really a video, more an audio recording

A link for the free PDF of Oliver Mayer's BLADE TO THE HEAT

A moving recent elegy by Tino Villanueva--pdf version here!

a very cool film on a seductive hallucination of the everyday from one of our class secret agents!

From: "Crystal M" <crysmartin05 at hotmail.com>
To: bnericci@mail.sdsu.edu
Subject: Interesting video on the Hallucination of beauty
Date: Sat, 11 Nov 2006 03:04:11 +0000

Hi!

I was going through the Seduc Halluc introductory page to show my friend the before/after photoshopped pictures website, and he showed me this (and I thought it was really interesting...)

here's the link: http://youtube.com/watch?v=ZquECn6pmWA

Crystal

reminder about the Villanueva lecture--you're the hosts! show up! click for a 772k pdf file!

Your gradesheet in jpg form!

A cool exchange with a student....

dear professor nericcio,

I have been doing an abnormal amount of thinking about your class. I walked
into that huge arts and letters building totally unprepared. But honestly I
don't think any amount of courses could have prepared me for this class. I
guess I am use to the kind of course where the teacher tells you what the
novel is about and you write an essay proving their idea. I have never tried
this hard and felt as though I was failing all of the time.

Anyway I was sitting in my breakout session a few weeks ago discussing
Shainberg's Secretary when the teaching associate posed the question who was
in control Professor Grey or Lee? I chose to say that Grey was in charge and
went on to state the reasons why. I brought up the points that Grey told Lee
what to do throughout the entirety of the film; Grey was god in his Eden. I
went on to say that Lee was the product of Grey. Grey set her free, for
instance when he told her to walk home instead of getting a ride from her
mother, and even Lee expressed this feeling of freedom. The only reason she
was able to stand up to Grey in the end was because he gave her the capacity
to do so and there for if one had to choose, Grey was in control. Lee merely
found ways to initiate this control in order to meet her own needs
(intentionally make mistakes in order to get beat) ....

I seem to remember you also agreeing that this was a love story. I don't
care how many drugs I take professor; to me this film will never be a love
story. At the beginning the woman came out of a mental institution. I don't
care how metaphorically beautiful cutting yourself is; even if it is a
symbolic representation of our internal pain, an attempt to find control in
a twisted world, self-mutilation is wrong.

very very very damn cool--you had me, too, until this
line. it is uncommon, true. painful to witness, true.
a queer choice, true.

but "wrong,"-- i don't know. right and wrong.
beyond good and evil, nietzsche had it.

your arguments are strong, persuasive, cogent,
and, yes, compelling. but the word "wrong" here
slows the train of thought....

let me keep reading!

Grey took away Lee's pain by
telling her to stop cutting herself. She began to substitute Grey's beating
for her self-mutilation; Grey was her new tool to aid in her addiction. Lee
was not at fault she just came out of a mental institute. If I grew up in
house like she did, I probably wouldn't be all there either. I blame Grey. I
don't care how shy the man was, he was in a position of power and he misused
this power. The sad part was he knew he was misusing his power. We see this
when he tried to write that apology letter, he knew there was something
wrong with himself and he knew he had a problem and yet he failed to seek
help. His conscience started to get the better of him but Lee in her sick
mental state convinced him to continue to beat her. Sorry professor but I
can't be brought into this hallucination.

well put. however, when i called it a "love" story
i was not talking schmaltz

it was love, like it or not that drove de Sade and Masoch
to their various pathological excesses. to say so is
not to condone the methodology, merely to remark
that it can exist in different forms.

I also remember when we read Clowes's Eight ball. It was a great
book because it went against everything one would expect from a super hero
comic. I mean scrawny Andy dealing with every day issues, misusing his
powers, everything was not black and white. Especially when Andy tore up the
Odyssey, it got me thinking, I know real life isn't laid out in a great
journey home, a place where there is such a fine line between good and evil.
But little kids need someone to look up to. Messing with comic book land is
like writing a book for adults saying there never was a Santa and we were
stupid for believing. Maybe it's not the fact that Santa Clause isn't real
that is important but rather what Santa stands for. The world is a sick
place and all we have to do is turn on the news every night to be reminded.
There is a reason why those Superman comics are selling for thousands of
dollars on eBay.

Thanks for your time professor, sorry that this letter was much longer than
I had intended. I am going to try and make it to your office hours.

Sincerely,

Tom Henson

come on by! what a cool note! may i post

it in the zoo with my comments?

cheers,

bill

ps: i used to collect superman; here's one of my
first ones!

Emma Peel from TV's AVENGERS program--another one of Marcía Cruz's role models

Professor Trevor Auser weighs in with a clipping from his readings in the UK's stodgy ECONOMIST magazine--that, fortuitously--holds forth in its latest issue on topics broached in lecture today:

Steve Reeves, the Hercules dude/actor described on page 76, the Uncle Tommy passage, in WHAT NIGHT BRINGS.

Page 31 in WHAT NIGHT BRINGS makes more sense when you see these TVstars that fill Marcía's imagination with desire:

A good interview with Carla Trujillo is available from her publisher, Curbstone Books.

More post-halloween hallucination material: here, an artist with his thumb to the pulse of how the dead, and the past in general, still haunt the corridors of our psyche:

The most beautiful meditation on the power of seductive hallucinations!