kvond unmasked

This website is mostly in Dutch, but there’s English at the bottom and in the comments section. This is KVOND, also known as Kevin Von Duuglas-Ittu, one of the previously anonymous blog hecklers of Speculative Realism. He’s a Sagittarius, and wrote a poem about Jerusalem, in case you were interested.

As the web page describes (I do read Dutch), he was also featured in the film “American Losers,” though he doesn’t actually seem like a loser to me– just an overly obsessed Spinozist who holds a grudge because I got ticked off about his excessive “Harman’s theory of withdrawn objects = orientalism” posts. But knowing something about him makes me want to let bygones be bygones too. I’m sorry if I overreacted to your orientalism points, kvond.

He is described in the film as an autodidact and recluse from California who started college at age 40. He’s not in academia, but has received some support from a quasi-mentor at Princeton. Presumably he may be related to the acting family that shares his last name as well (they’re related to Bing Crosby in some way, though I don’t know if he’s actually related to that family). Sounds to me like an interesting person, and I’m not sure why he is so consumed with rage over a minor blog spat we had back in February or March. That’s sort of when the whole venomous P.E. blog scene started to germinate.

“American Losers (2006)
Only in New York is the line between winner and loser less clear, more alive. Who is a winner? What defines a loser? Two unlikely individuals, Kimberle and Kevin, could be viewed as losers in the eyes of some. For director Ada Bligaard Søby, they are her heroes: for daring to stand outside the box, for their ironic view of themselves, for their unique grasp of their place in the world. Ada sees two beautiful people chasing a 21st Century version of the American dream. Kimberle is an aspiring rockstar from the Bible Belt who has come to live the NY experience. She is constantly searching, pushing, relentless in her energy to ‘make it’ and remain true to herself. Kevin is a recluse. An autodidact beginning college at age 40, he spends the bulk of his time reading and writing in search of answers to questions both romantic and philosophical. AMERICAN LOSERS is a reportage diary. It tells a common story within an uncommon collage of images and emotions. It challenges the superficial judgments we place on each other and ourselves, reexamines the American dream, and asks: Why is it so hard to live up one’s own expectations? With music by Devendra Banhart and A Place To Bury Strangers.”

He is a high school dropout who lives in the woods north of New York City, and by now should be roughly 44 years old. Here is THE FILM TRAILER where you can see kvond in person.

All of this stuff is publicly available on the web. One of the problems with the anonymity of the blogosphere is that knowing something about the people you’re dealing with tends to soften your judgments of them. It makes me sad to think of an interesting person like this sitting in the woods in New York, self-taught on Spinoza, and feeling anger and hatred toward me, someone he’d probably find very sympathetic toward someone with his unorthodox life history so far. It also explains why he would tend to view me as a sort of evil academic oppressor from the Ivory Tower, though in fact I was barely more comfortable with academia early on than a self-taught high school dropout would have been. I wish him luck with his projects.

“Mikhail Emelianov” will be unmasked next. He probably has redeeming personal features as well. But I’m going to cheer kvond on from here on out. Not too many recluses in the New York woods are working on Spinoza’s optics.