Consecration (2025)

Amos Poe died on Christmas day. The obituary I found called his work intentionally slapdash. It’s ragged. Choppy. Broken. So with Television, early Blondie, the Ramones. But whether the song or the image hit, the aesthetic made sense. We didn’t see it as slapdash or unfinished or poorly edited or amateurishly recorded. Rightly or wrongly, we saw intention in the lack of tact, the same wounded phenomenology that flowed through Pasolini, Cassavetes, Godard, and Deren. The edges of their prints bled through. 

Peirce says reality is, primarily, a feeling. So I start from subjective preference. The simulacra of perfection bore me. The imperfect, the imprecise, the ambiguous, and the angular, draw me out of my center, produce the vertiginous breaker that foams in thought. I don’t mean thought as some cold, analytical, disembodied, Kantian formula. But that burning presence forcing words out of your belly like vomit in prelude to Psilocybin patterns. 

Begin with the force of things. Reality is cracked, and our stories about it, yellow tape, peeling and brittle with age. From there, justifications, for what they’re worth. Perfection is always a lie. And always ideology. Beautiful bodies aren’t cut, and photoshopped, and botoxed, and sanded, until not a cheek has edge. Beauty is the tensed muscle below sagging flesh, the wrinkle at the corner of a sparkling eye, the belly whose bulge suggests desire and hidden passion, the vagrant storefront, artifact and evidence, a last trace of life. These are the things we hide. But shame is revolt. And reality is revolting. 

Our categories, imposed for comfort, stability, and for the prerogatives of the powerful, no longer suture our doubts. Structures crumble. Even spectacle fails. And the demand is made—no, imposed—that we collectively pretend. The hypocrisy might be bothersome. But the boredom is intolerable. 

The Communists were wrong. It’s not the disenfranchised, the disinherited, the marginalized, and the immiserated who make revolution. True, the masses are angry, and miserable, and discontented, and the usual delusions no longer function with mechanical reliability. But more than that, we are bored. Mystification depends upon distraction. Without it, boredom rips the veil, revealing the corruption that pocks our flesh. Revolution from ennui. But even with the ancient regime gone to the gallows, new categories, new systems, new certainties, compete for hegemony. No less deceptive. No less insufficient. No less boring. And, thus, no revolution at all. 

Genuine revolution resists narrative cohesion (Godard), replaces the mythology of categories with jagged materiality (Cassavetes), reviles the conformity enforced by spectacle (Pasolini), and reveals perception’s inescapable imprecision (Deren). In short, genuine revolution may be terrifying, but it is never boring.

Graham Cassano

January 2026