"Talking like touching. Writing like punching somebody ." ."
—Susan Sontag
ON POSSESSION AND LACK
A “bag lady” is seated next to me at this bus stop. She, archetypally, is marked by her inability to enter into a relationship with the world of consumer goods (i.e. the dimensional limitations of her identity as a capitalist), yet her physicality is huge with ownership, ownership, detritus of an entire life moves with her: she is synchronous in time and space with the act of Possession. Possession. By contrast: vacant, decadent, oiled figures in, say, vodka advertisements (or any nonnecessity or luxury good intended to confer the status of the user) are characterized by their Lack . Minimal clothing, empty poolside scenes rich in concrete, and tonal contrast co ntrast that is
heightened, due in part to the very absence of color…to paraphrase Sut Jally in “Advertising as Religion: The Dialectic of Technology and Magic,” this “emptying out” of meaning within advertising allows the advertiser to introduce a new (often non-sequiter) symbology of
“meaning” through the insertion of an arbitrary, a rbitrary, inherently meaningless product. Therein lies the visual conflict between an endorsement of o f a “non-essential” and the representation of one who does not, ostensibly, “need” anything. This mentality has seeped across the barrier which blurs reality and simulacra, manifesting as comically-small, yet outrageously expensive handbags, extravagant micro -technology, or as the sleek lines of interior décor. Advertising has reengineered our mental associations with wealth in relation to the size
and number of actual possessions: opulence and abundance has been rendered as “kitsch,” while minimalism conveys “class.” The latter also carries with it a certain spiritual purity. The low weight o f models within advertising and the sparseness of their attire communicate a retro Puritan work ethic which
decries consumption as sinful or “dirty”; moreover, purity is derived from one‟s on e‟s restraint, or con tradicts this idea his/her control his/her control over over consumption (while the ad‟s true message, of course, contradicts entirely.) This linking of spiritual elevation and material lack becomes more ironic when
considering that significant movements within the tradition of a more brutal, linear, or “reduced” aesthetic — from from the Bauhaus to Rothko to Ikea or Apple — stemmed stemmed from the gaping spiritual void endemic to the postwar, industrialized environment. Details were abased as craftsmen were made redundant. So, it is apt that this anti-human advertising/manufacturing praxis should serve as the theoretical template for neo-elegance and modern conspicuous consumption. By extending this tradition, the absence of the human is seen as normal and aesthetically-pleasing, rather than a calculated choice with deleterious social implications. Advertising, in the past two decades or so, has cleansed the aforementioned aesthetic of its bleakness and cynical social commentary. This theft and re-appropriation of these movements‟ meanings arrive at a cultural moment when mass-production and consumption have effectively supplanted effectively supplanted organic, original “spirits” or identities: we are but walking amalgams of consumer choice and [sub]cultural representation. In a time when we are increasingly “possessed” by inanimate objects, vis-à-vis the credit system, we must physically make them more remote — put spatial and psychological distance between us and them — in a vain attempt to subvert subv ert this threatening dynamic. To be, in short, less like the
“bag lady.” She is a shadow-figure in our psyches, a haunting specter of capitalism‟s devastating consequences, as well as a terrifyingly human reminder that our role in this society could be renegotiated, against our will, at any moment. As the human-object relationship becomes more damaging on a national scale, in a time of economic econom ic collapse, advertisers use the silent language
of goods to playfully abstract from the causal “need “nee d product to fulfill need” sequence. The ad‟s success is contingent upon the viewer‟s (consumer‟s) adroitness at interpreting its discursive wit within the object-based (rather than language-based) social voc abulary. At the same time, the minimalism, the Lack, communicated by these ads adheres to the aforementioned tenet of contemporary design: reduction and essentialism are reworked as v isual tropes unto themselves, which signify “hip,” “chic,” “classy,” et al.
Blackly ironic too is, again, the theft of these goods‟ (for example, imported fruit or artisanal coffee) actual meanings actual meanings — a history of colonization, unfair trading practices, and worker exploitation — which which are subsequently reworked and represented as mere, innocuous punctuation in a quirky narration of the consumer‟s daily life. — detachment Through cognitive — and and visual — detachment from Possessions within advertising, corporations are better able to insert whatever meaning or value they deem appropriate. app ropriate. Advertisers depict fulfillment through its inverse, the Lack, and offer possessions to satisfy unrelated needs.
After “Damini”
One of the articles in this morning‟s UN Wire carried the title, “Gang rape in India sparks debate on women‟s rights,” concerning the woman now referred to only as “Damini.” I‟m trying to assess the headline critically, chiefly due to the odious reality that women are always potential victims of rape, even in the wake of an institutional acknowledgement of their “rights” (such
as…driving, appearing in public without a male escort, wearing pants, et al.) And despite this, we can agree that the certain (unfortunate) inevitability of violent crime
a ll across genders shouldn‟t preclude loud, intelligent discourse on how to protect all people in all countries. Yet: the locus of the problem, and the proposed solutions, are completely off-base. Not only does some of the “western” coverage of the incident read as blatantly ethnocentric (“„The (“„The brutal rape shook Indians out of their usual apathy,‟ the Washington Post said, citing analysts” NB: who the fuck are „analysts‟?) It‟s as though the US media would rather explicate this gang-rape — horrific as it was — in India, rather than routinely interrogate conditions of sexual slavery (and the prismatic problems which attend to it), misogynistic advertising, and all other manifestations of sexism in the United States. This is not news.
But the media‟s tendency towards myopia and naiveté (or rather, an insulting assumption of these traits among the general public) does h ave a neat parallel in this specific context. Says
Seema Sirohi, of the Indian Council on Global Relations: “There are a lot of reasons why wh y this happens, but the patriarchal system is one, a lack of policing is another.” …RIGHT. Because the police system doesn‟t uphold the patriarchal principles by which it was conceived…? Because rape isn‟t isn‟t under-reported under-reported and unpunished in police-states…? Obviously, in the immediate sense, a rape is far less likely to occur in the presence of a cop (unless it‟s he who is committing the rape…) yet encouraging authoritarian praxes has never and will never be a solution. Are we to assume that rates of rape have decreased de creased in Saudi Arabia since the increase of institutional surveillance measures, such as electronic tracking for women?
I‟m not suggesting that the attacks and her subsequent death — as well as the ensuing protests — are not worthy of global journalistic attention, flawed though it is (naturally.) Nor am I trying to detract from the effect this may have o n Indian social politics.
Perhaps the real conundrum is: why haven‟t the disgusting statistics of rape/sexual violence mobilized the masses here here,, in the same way*? Who has been a counterpart to a Rodney King or an Oscar Grant? All resultant expressions of unrest at the latter two‟s deaths were directed toward a corrupt and racist police force — which emphasizes the deeper point: we appear more inclined to rally against state-sanctioned violence (especially when directed towards men) than we are able to identify the insidious ways in which these same institutions have debased and reoriented our
interpersonal modes of relation. And these are what keep rape victims silent, and what allow rape culture to thrive.
It‟s as though, unless we are able to establish a legible binary (i.e. “uniformed appendage append age of the state vs. citizen”), we don‟t know kno w who to fight. We must dispense with the reliance upon these easy signifiers of power in our discerning of the enemy. It‟s broader and deeper: a parallel, systematic subjugation of men and women by a complex of patriarchal ideologies. The former group becomes inculcated with the notion that they are no better than basal animalism; the latter learns to expect and tolerate expressions exp ressions of it. So, logically, the people of India can‟t ever ev er expect governmental institutions to truly protect them, and neither can the people of the United States.
*”SlutWalk,” while conceptually interesting, doesn‟t totally apply here. Much of it was culturally-exclusionary; it quickly devolved into Spectacle; its impetus wasn‟t necessarily legislative reform.
CHAINSAW VS. THE VOID: THE ANARCHIC TEXTURES OF GORDON MATTA-CLARK
Auto-destructive art demonstrates man's man's power to accelerate accelerate disintegrative processes processes of nature and to order them. Auto-destructive art art mirrors the compulsive compulsive perfectionism of arms manufacture - polishing to destruction point. Auto-destructive art is the transformation transformation of technology into public art. The immense productive capacity, capacity, the chaos of capitalism capitalism and of Soviet communism, communism, the co-existence of surplus and starvation; the increasing stock-piling of nuclear weapons - more than enough to destroy technological societies; the disintegrative effect of machinery and of life in vast built-up areas on the person,...
--Gustav
Metzger, “Manifesto of Auto-Destructive Art”
"AN ARK KIT PUNCTURE, ANARCHY TORTURE, AN ARCTIC LECTURE, AN ORCHID TEXTURE, AN ART COLLECTOR..." --Gordon Matta Clark
(excerpt) Axonometric lives, spliced by a gnawing, mechanized parabola: our geometries undone, eaten. But the built environment has no n o tolerance for absence. Its dedication to sprawl mirrors
our species‟ own unrelenting existential projects, biological and otherwise. Any An y barren space
seems to haunt the urban developer develope r as a specter of our eventual nonbeing. n onbeing. The site-specific work (or un (or un-work, -work, or deor de-work…) of Gordon Matta Clark, then, was more an extension of Situationist Theory than of architectural modernism: Clark “turned expressions ex pressions of the capitalist system against itself.” His anti -architectural gesture was a type of vertigo, brought on by the dizzying experience of runaway capitalism made manifest in buildings. — Many literary and documentarian efforts that concern New York scenes in the 1970s — emphasize, through a haze among them, Clark‟s SoHo- based based “Food” restaurant and its patrons — emphasize, of romanticism and drug-addled memory, the frenetic energy of a culture‟s thousand deconstructionists (punk wastoids, denizens of no wave, Afrobeat scenes, who co-mingled with neo-classical composers, whose metallic repetitions complemented the more private burnt out dirges of Junk, singing in the veins of strung-out miscellany, all unremembered now…) But in more concrete terms, this time/space was ground zero for commodity fetishism. Matta-Clark collaborator and sculptor Richard Nonas states, “We were the gentrification! It's our fault and our glory. All the changes chan ges were predicated on the artists creating situations that brought c oalesce as mutated nouveau riche pathogens people to SoHo.” Yet that new class would later coalesce riche pathogens
that would multiply and attack the city‟s cit y‟s integumentary system of confrontational arts. Ironically, Clark‟s studiously carved spaces predate this literal destruction literal destruction of urbanized communities (vis-à-vis divestment in civic centers) in a metaphorical way: he injected pockets of
anarchy into an otherwise coherent and commercialized architectural grid — nodes nodes of negative space that concatenated throughout the city and created forced, artful blight in a city of looming excess. His “Anarchitecture,” one could posit, was a response to environs described thusly, in
Austrian architectural theorist Adolf Loos‟ essay “Ornament and Crime,” over 60 years before:
bourgeoisie opulence had effectively ransacked the domesticated built landscape, as suburban genesis coaxed many families from urban centers. Clark de-contextualized these casualties of urban growth: one site evoked a modern triptych — a tri-segmented dwelling that had been rescued by Clark minutes before the remaining structure was demolished. But where triptychs convey meaning through a linear, logical process, Clark‟s
displacement of form subverted a space‟s dimensional and narratorial n arratorial authority. He wielded of apparatuses of industry in order to destabilize it from a con ceptual and a literal perspective; his employment of “anti-mediums” (acid, chainsaws) contoured structural energy sites that were at once Chaos and Void.
Train: Train: prison of heterospeed: with steel‟s efficiency. outisde, plumes of fragile toxins hang, suspended in exterior, rank oxygen; varying tones of slate. fellow transients regress back to sleep‟s purgatory, breath all Delta and lightly swaying… our routines may outlive us…like a suiciding Fibonacci sequ ence, with all the wisdom and hindsight of its former iterations…i feel like a 19th-century 19th-century Andean, ripped from some eternal rainforest, thrown into an uprising against a system which i cannot possibly understand, my rebellious blood cauterized by the heat of radio air. i am en route to the Tenderloin to recover what was described to me vaguel y as a „stolen‟ „feminist‟ „dissertation,‟ which an old comrade left in a Victorian hotel ov er the weekend.
outside, on the street corner, a man told me to smile. he felt that i wasn‟t smiling, because “a man” should [have been] “holding [my] hand.” (“…YES, IF ONLY TO KEEP ME FROM RUNNING INTO ONCOMING TRAFFIC.”) later, i unveiled the tube‟s secret contents on the train. perhaps unwise, but it made the ride back more interesting:
“THE ARTIST IS PRESENT”: Abramović transmuted a Nothing into Spectacle. “She slows us down.” Yet they ran to her en masse. The ran to stare into her monochrome, her blank slate, desperate for vindication from a gaze which has stared into extremes of self-depriva self-deprivation tion — they they wanted to indulge in this, be cured by by it. “She slows us down,” down,” yet a man got a tattoo (“21”) to mark the number of times he sat with her. To aggregate and concretize the ephemeral; scarification of the unseen. She wanted to become a mirror, 750,000 times: like a distorted shop window which one passes and fails to instantly recognize himself — a stab of terror which one immediately displaces. You could be a bank teller, a Malian child; you are the sum of all vicious narratives which society‟s lack of empathy permits. 1. “Tell them that they cannot touch her; cannot do anything.” 2. “I did not know that there were rules,” the patron sobbed. The real tragedy, being, of course, that she would forget how THE RULES wall-off and enclose and choke the psychic exchange; THE RULES are there for the third eye, the camera through which I receive her story; THE RULES are what allow a stare to be PERFORMED; they are what made her cry in shame (for having broken them): and, most importantly, THE RULES are secretly what made the others cry, mistakenly believing it was their Reverence.
“2001”: Obsidian mass of geometric secrets in time‟s interstice—like Trumbull‟s slit-scan Trumbull‟s slit-scan psychedelia undone and de-processed back to Original Object. Magic was returned to form and curated for the vaguely interested eye… on the wall, a lineage of clapboards, line of asynchronous guillotines: “Lolita”; “Barry Lyndon”; “Paths of Glory”; “A Clockwork Orange,” mounted, made meaningless— all the once-palpable pressure to execute these scenes flawlessly has now been neutralized into a collapsed history (an eloquent metaphor for Trumbull‟s visual effects[?]) And in death, human anxiety and perfectionism (Kubrick‟s) were transmogrified into a totalized, beautiful legacy.
Film still: underground Prohibition-era tunnels of Los Angeles. September 2012.
“The Unbuilt City.” a romantic paradox, ontologically confused. civilization‟s concrete arcades, filled with sempiternal winter and major symptoms of volume, atmospheric pressure, and hyphenated, masculine names of corporations, that act as bellows to
Industry‟s grid. freeways are numbers; streets bear names of old colonizers. the proximity of these nomenclatures to one another magnifies the brutality of each. here, below: opportunities for
a less prescribed insanity. you become an organism with perverse tropisms…orienting itself
towards boardroom fluorescence, and degrading in sunlight. for the first time i am alone in a known place. a city that had before seemed grossly abstract and mythical; it could be activated only through d etails observed by a loved one, so it was easy to bypass everything. and geographies, like people, grow ugly when ignored.
Car stereo: “AS IF IT HAD A CAUSE TO LIVE FOR…” complex city pulses reprogram the brain, like a shift from jacked-up nighttime sidewalk cadence to forced easiness when you happen upon an old friend. tension remains palpable under the thin membrane of normalcy. a
billboard streaks past, “New. And Always Will Be.” Elsewhere, another sign: “Open [ORACLE] [ORACLE] World.” An attempt to liberate ourselves from these tangible, mundane realities — that that is poetry.
Hunter‟s Point: ghost monoliths of policy, and other memorials to the displaced. Buildings here are perversely linked (figuratively) to the brutalist abstraction of Soviet war monuments — both both types of structures are belabored metaphors for the monstrous acts which engendered them. Ironically, the vernacular architecture of the SFHA domiciles speaks to how the barrack — with with its taut visual vocabulary of “discipline”— has has been culturally reified. Specifically, the Youth Center (now closed) carries with it a militaristic aura of masochistic recreation.* Architecture and siting undergird larger, behavioralist societal projects. The whole district is plagued with blight; the decay of these infrastructural elements speaks to the planned obsolescence of a population, at the behest of an indifferent city government.
*Its presence obliquely references the gleaming C atholic church, half a block away (as the latter perfectly encapsulates an even more aggressive S&M aesthetic…)
This is an image that ran in a local newspaper. Compare this scene — and and the social dynamics therein — to to war-photography. Not war itself, but the manner in which it is portrayed; photography, specifically. How certain images become normatized. How it makes the boundaries between real, instantaneous tragedy and its filmic representations increasingly porous. porous. Industrialized life IS a war; the ostensible level of detachment that responds to an actual Death on the battlefield (suicide-by-train: using the very mechanisms of destructive industry to expedite one‟s own elimination, I suppose…) indicates how removed we‟ve become b ecome from the war itself. What did the photographer catch, which the subway security camera may have missed? Look at how blasé she is. Look at her body language. The articles she keeps in close proximity to her, the trajectory of her gaze — a vector of Solipsism — reveal reveal a world. A value system. We cannot see her eyes, but can infer that they speak to much of the same. Here, the victim sits at the nexus of sterility (the uniformed official) and disconnect [the wellheeled urbanite, commuting to perhaps work or o r shop (either way, it doesn‟t matter.)] I fantasized that the person under the sheet was a relative of the girl. Or, in a more desperately cinematic explosion of compassion, she would rip off the sh eet and would be greeted by her own face.
II.
C OM P UT E R, D AT I NG
(excerpt) Dear __ __ -__ __ _ _____ i look like...well, i am ugly, i would like to get that out there straight away. A billion pores like irises, though, ironically, i realize that mine are normally contracted, contracted, like some violent muscle memorizing light--but a little hazy; the the material data of those times is eroding quickly. i have not seen actual sun in a long time. in the beginning Utopie had a script written into my X-P13 gene, which interpreted reactions to simulated weather and corresponding cardio-rhythms — and and would select a song from an index according to my stress levels...status of wakefulness, irritability, irritability, and so on. Holding one's breath while screaming internally creates a self-contained, isochronic low pass filter. They hate that. Sends EKGs blitzing into a mandala of neutral: [ {+,+} | {+.0} | {+,-}] [ {0,+} | {0,0} | {0,-}] [ {-,+} | {-,0} | {-,-}] { -,-}]
Cipher fluoresces red They attempt to kill my instant history of fire by revoking the privilege of air, as it were. --but --but I‟m not at not at that part yet.
Inside a room, there occurs a drop d rop in atmospheric tension as the electricity momentarily heaves and collapses. The Andro-PSR reader is now active. Attached to it is a woman. It registers sighs emitted by actresses inside a TV, a breathing breat hing Hermeneutic Circle; she has trained her heart to race with theirs. One of the daily Integrafeed messages briefly interrupts the hum of MUSIC MUSIC FOR SELFSHATTERING INFINITY WINDOW (third WINDOW (third movement) throughout the closed system; comes brains of all the complex‟s residents, to mostly across like an old folk song and calms the back- brains positive response. Afterwards she fits herself with a codpiece made from reconstituted gel casings of Thorazine capsules. A hole has been bored through the head to allow for controlled secretions of urine, a liquid pharmaceutical milieu of birth control residue. Her husband is in the next room. Because she is deaf, he transcribes violent monologues as 3D sound sculptures: digitally automated via computer numerical control, on fiberboard (medium-density). She fingers
the linguistic topography…expletive plateaus, valleys of pause…
“SD, BRKN BL D MOZK SPL NTR FKNZ V AJD NTTI R N N LSD N J R DNZ, WT F R B G GRB W N W F K ND PSML S LJLR DT Z J R T LRNT LRNT WM, HJMN P TRI TRI D , SPT NT , HWZ
P RS RS TK, T DI AND WHEN Z FNT PK P K M RKRZ RKRZ M M R K, COAGULANT B DI RD, J RZ Z LTR, PPL W L K MNT, , SGOT J R PTR N N NZ, ND J R SK PTK SEYES, PTK SEYES, ND J R T- T GR N LI..” BUTNONE V T Z HRZ, N T R LI..” ( pulls pulls hand away) away)
— yet — always, Raw pink habits of her face open up to another mirror yet another mirror always, endless, for no one could survive this room‟s size; spatial illusions must be created through impossible labyrinths of vision; it is the most direct mode of self-awareness — ideally ideally executed in silence. Reflective, sinister TV eye, now dead, offers a glass echo of her physical anxieties. She only makes movements which are reinforced by commercials — Tilt the head back, arch the spine, stomach held back towards the kidneys — but something, uncontrolled and interior, speaks: she remembers an edu-Integrafeed which
described conceptions of eugenics, the Fascists‟ cult of the body, streamlined deco 1930s ideal; racing trajectory of the fast Modern, embodied by the aesthetic of scarcity… A spark generated by the thought seems to flicker, as though across an axon connecting the cyanograph cells of her eyes. But, no: only a controlled deadness which belongs to the human bell curve, those who desire only memories of weather, sports scoreboards. She applies a
lipstick, translucent as semen and called “Zoopraxography Degree Zero.” Designer.
“TO CHANGE THE WORLD WITHOUT TAKING POWER …” …” (NOVEMBER 4, 2O12)
Fireside chats, politicians are interlopers within air. air. present-subjunctives. suits: recombinant fibers of a dark interface, one that cannot be programmed to accept requests. we are listening to algorithm radio and someone says “Delta 5.” “what are you writing” “don‟t worry about it. i am still paying attention.” i seek, from the moment of public appearance, to accept my struggle as one among many. we‟ve designed a contestable territory of anemic aesthetics…fashion, transmateriality [CUE: “Disappearing Music for Face”], and all that which constitutes an hour-long disguise. the length of a debate, the length of a party. (To wit: on this table someone has carved the phrase „WTF‟ in the well -known -known arrow-pierced heart…a classic reclaimed; a self-reflexive enshrining of our comic confusion towards everything/nothing…‟what the fuck‟ has transcended its ontologically inquisitive posture; is now an actual PRAXIS actual PRAXIS — — the the irony of this idea being represented as a captured heart is not lost, here… we all live south of power; candles narrate the genealogies of interior shadow-war, a nd hold tired vigil over our very old slogans…Preguntado caminamos. (“Asking, we walk.”) And I have learned more through walking than through anything spoken, anything printed — though, of course, none of o f that is mutually-exclusive. All proper ghosts of neon, forgive me my numbness; your gaze coats communist lapel p araphernalia in a guilt too severe to discuss openly, like a demon‟s name we cannot say. The photons of those nocturnal lives form an arc (circle? maybe i am only aware by half; not privileged with 360-degree sight), under which all else is measured or understood, rebranding waking-life as more surreal, like a solarized print of nightmares. Th eir authority, though, is capricious as paroxysms of stars — a cosmology, too, built upon the failures of urbanity. Truth becomes fatigued by light pollutants of all kinds. Tomorrow we will hear the brains of a nation that spends the day watching television naked, with the shade s drawn, palming a revolver to feel less alone. Whatever the outcome, Holzer‟s philosophy remains: “MEN DON‟T PROTECT YOU ANYMORE.”
“CAREERING”
I jam his life into my blade subtly the tiered metal takes on the dark anatomy of the elemental Talud-tablero serrates our avenue of the moon and, as erosion is chained to mountains, so grows a spacious wound: we invent new skin as defense against memory. — Warring wraiths of dead introspection: the Numerical, combating sinister with the word „Natural,‟ carved in neon: ether-code infant, progeny of two numbers, or, a Nothingness and its minor increase, which together comprise everything else; and it all wants your money. a grand summary of all death plots on the grid. (i consider the possibility of integrated, randomized
“graves”: the dead comically poised in civic installations; under boardwalks; behind movie — personally, i do not want to be screens; behind the plastic panes of embedded ceiling lights — among others, even when dead.) Here, a hunched army jacket reads Man reads Man Vs. Markets. Markets. i am in here only because i am hiding from cops. it is 5:15 in the morning. another long story. Reflective picture-glass interprets the oncoming squad car on Lakeshore Avenue, backwards; an instant of rorschach: terror. anxiety crawls through well-decorated bodies like lightning through topiary
branches…sculptures of a dehydrated beauty that read as xrays that make the Ephemeral visible instead of bone.
earlier today i held in my hand the feeling when you hear the word “ancient.” held a field of spectrum & phosphorescence with my eyes.
“Will that be all? Just the coffee?” “Yes. yeah. but, I don‟t even want it.” Confused. “You…don‟t want it?” “No…but, I mean, yes. thank you, so much.”
DO ANDROIDS DREAM OF A TOTAL CESSATION OF INTERPERSONAL CONTACT? (A MICRO-PLAY)
I am wearing an inverted “Avant Garde* for Obama” pin on my trench coat. Similar to displaying an American flag turned upside-down. I also find it to be more aesthetically pleasing from this angle (the letters more closely resemble resemble Cyrillic.) *the publication Shop-keeper, gesturing to it: “You need to,
uhh, turn that around.”
Me: “No. It‟s intentional.” “Oh? You‟re anti-Obama?” “I‟m anti-politician. And corporatized avant-gardism.” (Observing me filling out a check): “MY GOD, WHAT grade did you receive in penmanship?” “Depends what year you‟re referring to.” “ANY year…I can hardly read that.” “Best defense against forgery. You want me to write out another one?” “No, no, I‟m only teasing you…” I then flared my nostrils and said menacingly, “PRETTY SOON HUMAN TEXT WILL BE
OBSOLETE, THOUGH, AND WE‟LL HAVE ROBOTS WRITING ALL OUR CHECKS. RIGHT?” “…Well Here are your books, have a nice day” (…AND SCENE.)
“24-HOUR ARTY PEOPLE”
sometimes certain people will surprise you by pulling out a copy of Rilke and then you wonder why you even care. “time does not control us,” said the young father to his son. two nights ago P. and i were lying on his bed watching youtube videos of Ariana Reines reading her poems (weird: just read today in BOMB that she did the translation for Jeune-Fille for Jeune-Fille…) …) and he said “she‟s so… birdlike birdlike” ” and then i wonder if self -confidence and charm mitigates one‟s intellectualism (she does not suffer from these). but i am worried abou t this. i know what he means, of course. she‟s she‟s nervous, eliding all punctuation; the modern, clipped cadence of one revisiting the Self ( that self, that self, an Other) …so that your performance becomes a double-layered doublelayered moment of narcissism which you‟re A) horrified by, and B) a prisoner of, because you know the work is „good‟ and people who went to college like it and you can stretch your arms across the surface of the lectern and clasp your hands around its edges because it‟s material signification of an exalted artist versus the audience…you make a plaything plaything out of it instead, like „isn‟t it wild how what just happened makes me better than you?‟ (it doesn‟t.) if i were to verbalize this i would be „cutting another woman down,‟ maybe, but i‟m not. she is nebbish, wears glasses, looks like someone i would get a get a crush on. “bird -like”— is is that an endemic condition? can we be born into the wrong species, like some people are born as the wrong gender? but i just roll over and an d say, “eh. i identify more with sloths.” i ask if she‟s the lady whom richard hell is all nuts nuts for, and M. tells me that people are often comparing him to richard hell (aesthetically.) later he asks me if i‟m on “anything groovy” (like pills) and i answer “bad vibes only.” get quiet and consider this for a future memoir title. title. the next day i walked to the university wearing a fake hijab looking thing and a jumpsuit with oversized shoes, igor-limping igor-limping for fun past a tour group of „international students‟ who literally cowered cowered.. wow. waded in trash and salvaged some microfilm rolls…”HOW CAN PEOPLE TH ROW THIS SHIT AWAY?” i asked to no one. thought of “This Dust of Words”; everyone just thought she was really eccentric and smart and didn‟t notice her going madder and madder, then her skeleton ske leton was found in a forest amongst a pile of leaves. i don‟t know why i write, except to make „real‟ the otherwise unintelligible situations within a single evening: a basement conversation about Canyon Cinema and film communities, between me and two fifty- somethings somethings and a crazed german woman…attempting to walk every san franciscan hill…midnight Baker Beach trespassing/stripping trespassing/stripping alone…walking down fog -shrouded -shrouded hills of the Presidio and coming upon an incredibly unlikely couple (Ian Brady/Myra Bra dy/Myra Hindley proteges, in my head)…through a restaurant window, seeing someone flip over over a table during an after-hours, afterhours, backroom poker game between Chinese business men…across the street, an
Orthodox Russian church intermittently illuminated by the silent flashing of squad car lights, while an on-duty cop stood nearby, embracing and kissing a woman in a floor-length pink gown…i rode the bus home around 4am, next to a man with a Microeconomics textbook and a He was insane — copy of How of How to Pray Effectively (Vol. I.) He you could tell, because he licked the screen of his iphone, which displayed the wikipedia entry for Glorified Rice.
“I LIVE ON THE EDGE OF THE UNIVERSE AND I DON’T NEED TO FEEL SECURE,” PT. I
1. Mindless production is devotion to death. We must project as we produce: future selves using future product, and, more implicitly, the abstracted „future self‟ which will be created through this use. This psychic projection entails a displacement of reality (breaths, thoughts, immediate holding concrete reality in abeyance — ensures ensures reactions to one‟s environment) and this mode— holding the false-consciousness which engenders these product-consumer d ynamics. Moreover, it estranges us from ideas of agency in the present moment.
philosophic rhetoric deals so much in the language of “stopping.” Not just 2. Our society‟s pop- philosophic an ordinary suspension of activity, but total cessations o f the will. We pathologize it. Our human tendency to Quit the System (as it is unnatural) un natural) becomes expressed idiomatically, so we come to view others‟ apathy or disinterest or full-stop quitting as abnormal and morally wrong. “HANG IN THERE.” “STAY THE COURSE.” To my mind, it‟s all an unqualified argument a rgument against the diametrically-opposed impulse (suicide.)
PT. II
I can see gridlock from my window, yet I am experiencing a different type of immobility. Weighted by extraneous forces: I do not even have the option of moving. It is a prolonged wait, and I do not think I will ever really go really go anywhere. So really, because waiting implies some inevitable arrival at a destination, some k ind of temporal release, I can say sa y that “this” is not that. “This” is just endless stillness. If it wasn't so cold, I could have gone somewhere else. I thought about San Francisco. I thought about going any number of places. In about 12 hours I am leaving for the ocean. I often think about the massive m assive number of products utilized and variously a pplied; the different raw elements that are transmuted into the material foundation of my daily experiences…something as monumental as a lake‟s skyline or as common as the fading — these effervescence of beer. I‟ve come to no conclusion as to why organic instruments — these dumb automatons, walking around, tethered to their b easts and vices of differing size, bu ying food, consciously keeping themselves alive, keeping Structure alive — are are placed higher on the existential strata, simply by virtue of their sentience. To me, the functions of both the inorganic and the animate are equal. We are all programmed and live as machines. Machines exist in order to accomplish tasks. I, a machine, am currently using a machine, to accomplish a meager and
pointless task, but I feel (“feel”) as though I am mediating its its actions. But there are multiple forms of activity being played ou t, that I do not control, but b ut rather, control me: me: the tacit implication that writing even matters; the ph ysical act of writing; the acknowledgment of acknowledgment of the physical act of writing; the recognizance of the disconnect between
thought and page (the medium‟s me dium‟s inability to communicate all that my mind contains); appealing to an unknown reader; the th e proscribed formalism of text-based communication itself; an obligation to think outside think outside of that form…so, there is no real agency within even this, this pale autobiography. It is only a dense network of reactions, set off by external forces and given shape by my interiority. From within interiority, too, I drive myself, inexplicably, across planes of interaction and th consumption. Likewise, writing is the n degree of commodity signification — it it fetishizes and teases out all my value systems, my language, my sense(s) of humor, the way that I think, and solidifies them into a product. A coherent, intellectual package. But it‟s mere cultural capital, thrown into the void separating Ego and Validation. You don‟t know me any more now than you did before you read this, because the writing (a manifestation of one‟s persona) is ineluctably detached from the writer (person). That is another function of a machine: to understand controls and commands and to reject what does not fall within pre-determined parameters. If one‟s logic dictates that the Face which one
presents to the world is wholly constitutive of his or her “self,” (“person [equals] persona”) then this same rule would negate our present reality of “person [equals] perception [plus] persona.”
And that gaze of the other is what so many lives hinge upon, now. Ironically, I write this to you (“you”) with the knowledge that I am so much less than a person. I have no incentive to engineer a persona that could be beneficial or useful to me, to theme my selfhood in a way that is tenable with the cultural, moral, or comedic standards to which I am held. I have no incentive to exist.
(TWO FOUND POEMS)
I.
II. A monk asked, asked, “Since “Since all things return return to One, One, where does this One One return to?” to?” “When I was in Tsing-chou, I had a r obe made whi ch weigh weigh ed se seve ven n chin [ pound s]” replied the M as aste terr . - logic co conditi nditi on in which rationali ty The answer is a perfect example of “no - thought,” the anti -logic thought,” i s di dis sengaged. To atte att empt to subje subj ect it to anal ys ysii s woul d be to mi ss the ent entir ir e poin poin t.
… post-Qigong, polyvalent intensities of emotional concrete, broken like the weather; they reveal themselves in the taupe light like Edo parchment. All the moons have been hollowed, which used to indicate when harvest would be b e easiest. Eyes are diagonal‟d into a chiasmus of understanding: the phenotype of wind that moved the
hand that moved the ink into a tense phobia of error. Bus stop. Girl‟s Keffiyeh signals it (wind), but also: tribes. Black and white feudal legacy, as is the skin it hides. Her newspaper reads, “Few Concrete Answers Provided.” Neck is the site of confluence: of the geographies geo graphies of its raw materials, and the destinations to which our heroine will escape to next. “…if we transposed the weave…i mean, what if we reconfigured the matrices of fibers to represent modules of a QR code; what object or data do you think it would represent?” No. do not ask her that. Earth, post-Smithson; Mendieta: the void of human materiality urges an intense facsimile of layered presences/absences that we call „art‟: tonight i am wearing we aring a shirt of my own design (Zen
circle/chaos/void) and that‟s why he approached me; that‟s how that conversation happened. it‟s a recent familiar. Smithson and Mendieta. Earth works (earth, works.) Manifest. „Textile‟ was originally implemented in PHP. a “humane web text t ext generator.” if such a thing th ing could exist. face begins to itch under fluorescent rapier. An earth away, a child deduces patterns in the urban grid of uncanny rock; for her, mysterious like oxleaze copse — tough tough habit to kick.
E(CH[A]O[E]S) // WALKING A LABYRINTH))))))
In the crying place there‟s a suite over ov er the leveled mind-bomb shelter where the Bravo 20 bombing range in Nevada quaked skeletal with the deliverance of fish corpses, scene lifted from the brain of Bosch. Sugar economics was big b ig then, a ColdWarTulipCrisis of institutions and
instances and the artillery‟s insides were flat and inverted like railroad pennies. The metals metastasized in the crying place and so 50 years later you‟re still talking about yourself. Yes, a tattoo. An interesting stopping point for interest. Syntax is reduced to a sequence of frames.
Scream to those walking the other side of the lake, “YOU ARE IN MY FUCKING PERSONAL SPACE,” whisper of vox populi carried on a trade wind, “…Visa….American Express” and other poems. The seven spheres of the seven elements of the seven paths to divine perfection all begin with Friday and end in drowning. i walk away and find other people. a punk couple talking about acupressure; an amicably argumentative artist; a girl with white paint for eyelashes and another girl walking around with a plate full of grapes; we talk about a director/soon devolves into a monologue (mine); witty, witty, weird, ambiguous young man and a tall European to whom i give loaded answers to benign questions. in the 7/11 there are now big screen TVs that talk about buying a coffee in a blue cup,
which is Obama, or in a red cup, which is Romney. so you can enjoy your “steaming cup of democracy.” that happened. SELF-PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG ORGAN BANK, home of fearful chemicals that can be broken down like infants retracing their steps b ack to the factory.
edit: [“DEAR MR. OR MS. CURSE. THIS IS THE ATTORNEY OF _______. *REDACTED* *R EDACTED* __________ REAPPROPRIATION…WITHOUT PERMISSION PERMISSION *REDACTED*”] “yes i do that a lot. sincerely,
The Future.” (“dude, is this about Bravo 20? You still mad about that? A fucking photograph? private Psy-Op; you ain‟t immune.”)
it‟s my own
We arrive at the Four Corners; you can barely see his tattoo for the sweat. I‟m drawn and quartered (Unilever/Clear Channel/News Corp/Monsanto) and my world falls apart like a demolished parlour that recoils from entertainment. Humphrey Bogart wears a Houphouët-
Boigny mask underneath an executioner‟s ex ecutioner‟s hood and pantomimes the firing of a[n] (e)motionsensitive glass rifle which uncoils slapstick, a banner reading “YOU CAN‟T SCREAM HAPPY ON ATLANTIS.” the ocean sash whips around my violet v iolet time and its syntax is reduced to a sequence of frames. my face is like an advertisement just waiting for graffiti. as all decoration is that: massive and natural like Fulani; department store autumns got d ressed in a cave; the conveyor belt of National Geographics destroy shadowy ignorance and you have this glossy
intellect now, like, „yeah, i‟m super into Culture.‟
Train window: cipher of neon angles an gles fraught with tensile nerves; our westbound likenesses shred the air apart and we are tropisms in a broken physic, aching in currency. brushed metal is decoded into mol ecule, into
enantiomers of its own reflection. train window: sky is emptied of the romantic anarchy of animals. circular demise of time-manacle becomes sphere of absence; eclipse urges on that discord: we are orbs in the Hermann grid matrix; and i live within that fading, a modern illusion. the primitive self is the one who cries when the eagle consumes his spleen; the one who misses six other sisters; the one whose belt binds a world — the sun is an overheated mass of quartz, sublimating this silver collage of narrative. n arrative. sky is now full of radar and secret war: death‟s parabola glows a violent algorithm, arcs, recirculates back to Genesis, and goes black. you apprehend the image before it can become poetry and it dies inside the Vague. on the wall, phone lines intersect with psalm tree verticals, creating a geometry of faux stasis in
an endless electric…quadrants of Still, but, made moving now, as they the y are projected (photons). outside a gallery someone says to me, NEVER EDIT YOURSELF! JUST HAVE BETTER AND BETTER IDEAS! and my red ink and self-loathing and laughter responds:
INSIDE-RIGHT (A NIGHT OUT.)
[Scene: empty street/ad for dating website, website, the target demographic of which is mid-30s corporate assholes/image: white, yuppie woman at bar with clenched teeth/caption: “She bu t wehave i t doesn’t give out her number— but .”] I deface (decode) it with graffiti:
“MY CULTURE COMPLEMENTS MY NEUROSIS-MANIFESTED-AS-DELUSIONS-OFHEIGHTENED-SELF-WORTH AND BASELESS TRUST IN A NETWORK‟S TOPOLOGY, RATHER THAN THAT OF AN UNFAMILIAR HUMAN FACE. IT VIEWS MY SOLITUDE NOT AS A PERSONAL CHOICE, BUT AS A FORM OF NONNEGOTIABLE SOCIAL DISSENT WHICH MUST BE QUASHED. I AM WHITE-KNUCKLING THIS GLASS, SOLE ANCHOR IN AN EXISTENTIAL ABYSS; A MUSCLE-RELAXANT FOR TH IS TENSION CARRIED CONSTANTLY IN MY FACE, A FIXED MASK OF E ITHER SHEER DEC IDE.” HAPPINESS OR TERROR, AND IT IS NOT FOR ME TO DECIDE.” We are constantly under siege. RESIST.
Later: Derbyshire wails — disembodied disembodied — and and all Real Life larynx contorts with engrained pleasantries that wear empathy masks. [Stare [Stare down a person with whom you ostensibly have nothing in common — imagine imagine yourself into yourself into him or her —it is the most terrifying exercise…as exercise…as though your false superiority is only a gargoyle g argoyle guarding your own (___) “less”-ness. “less”-ness. No real noun exists for it.] it.] We each own an impoverished alphabet of discreet units of signification, which we feebl y amalgamate into passably unique images and meanings. Yet that Mobius strip of colloids can be unfolded and laid out, appearing ap pearing as a finite segment of code. We are all intrinsically pre-
language, at the scared, orgasmic, unconscious heart of existence. Throat‟s brittle technology is just a cluster of accessory nerves. “The Rosetta Stone was the most mo st viewed object in the British Museum.” Millions stare upon Original Glyph, enshrined in a monumental form; the great antagonist, embedded in a poetry reduced. “When the Spaniards discovered this land, their lead er asked the Indians how it was called; as they did not understand him, they said “ said “uic athan,” which means, what do you say or what do you speak, that we do not understand you.” ----(next morning: A woman in front of me in line at the depot for creative reuse is holding a 1,000 piece jigsaw puzzle depicting the Rosetta Stone. Pure serendipity.) I am holding a microscope
and a Super 8 camera. Instances magnified and preserved; the medium‟s inevitable erosion ensures the fragility of memory itself. When is an image no long er an image? : “The Paradox of the Heap.”
“UNDER THE PAVING STONES”*
ECUADOR, ANGOLA, NIGERIA, RICHMOND. Is this Plague Summer? if this is meaning, as a swarm of locusts encircling our jewel-encrusted faces, then the sky is overripe with biotic weapons. Are we atrophy? Teeth, hair, cells, that could fill Kutna Hora. Topology of palm lines form a tributary of razors in two dimensions, intersecting vertices of illegible blood. Uncoded ; coursing with narcotic stealth. The blades alchemize, become a key. SCENE: -Image of origami crane, printed with 3D printer p rinter -Analog clock, the numbers substituted for swatches of their HTML color-co de equivalences -iphone displaying e-text of the bible, bookmarking a page of Information Information Graphics Score navigates the sprockets that I recognize a s Eno. Riemannien manifolds manifolds adrift… It takes on its own unique property on the third echo:
ENO = At the museum, he becomes a declaration of an architecture inspired by algorithms, by morphogenesis . No human could ever possibly build it. Like trying to plot discreet poi nts in
a hand‟s passage through her hair. GIRL: “Polyp colonies have been doing that for millennia…” Limbs of the Rodin sculpture garden are flying buttresses which support some obscure function of the sky. She She writes ξενία over the Chianti label. Xenia: “hospitality towards strangers.” Last name of Zeus, a Word always obstructed by the God. Near to them is a copy of A.D.
p alm of hand palming her other COVER: Black-and-white image of a woman‟s photosphere‟d palm hand; very pained symmetry. We are always the least forgiving towards our own bodies. “Hospitable to strangers.” “…I thought you were Russian?” (He doesn‟t understand humor like she doesn‟t understand seriousness.) smile. “The generalized pantomime for „communication‟ is now two curled, suspended hands attached to mobilized thumbs. Ten years ago it was represented by a spread index-finger and
thumb, next to one‟s mouth and a nd ear, respectively. In ten more years, all of this will cease to exist. Guerre Mondiale (III)iterate (III)iterate.” they are approached by ELDERLY WOMAN: “Where did did you you get your coat? Probably Europe —or some place like that?”
smile. ”Yes, actually. Poland. September. 1939.” Shot of her military watch: (she was born at 3:03am. Born into a palindrome . Her watch stopped at this exact time. She never repaired it. Fixed and viewable from either end of time. Anachron. Taxidermy.) Currently locked within a subtle realm of Decrease, propelled by her own wasting (refutation of it) into various Markets. Tubes of bio logical and social hazard. Their architectural language, a collage of NYSE NY SE printouts from 1929 to present day. Our tokens bruise in weak hands. This building was a chimera before it was Dead. The windows are being made larger, with thinner glass. PAN TO WATER . VIBRATION. As that is of what we are mostly made, in every movement you are a Cymatic vehicle, attenuating the amplitude of your own woven sine waves that create an actual, though invisible, landscape: connecting points „A‟ and „B‟ (A and Ω). No human could ever possibly build it. But a bicycle still has two wheels, and the split, bleeding hide of the parking p arking structure spews pale yellow flowers. a Future flag: RODAUCE, ALOGNA, AIREGIN, DNOMHCIR.
*auto[/]bio, Situationism, sites of Chevron disasters, Maya Deren, &&&+
alex cruse is a writer/editor/multi-media artist. she lives in Oakland, California. contact:
[email protected]
