Month: May 2010

we leave for Japan this morning… we are bringing our leetle computer… soon this space will be drenched in Japanophilia… stay tooned!

Since 1973, all elderly persons have been covered by government-sponsored insurance. In Ponferrada, PSOE led PP by 51. A checksum character or check digit. In particular, famous groups such as Brings, Fettes Brot and Caught in the Act have also performed. There are also various army helicopters in operation at the German air base in Mazar-i-Sharif and Luftwaffe C-160 Transall conduct air transport sorties into and within Afghanistan.Inflight entertainment is not offered on any short-haul flights. Conditions of Award of Battle Honours for the Great War 1914-1919. The Punjab was a cultural reservoir for the Afghans, and many where attracted to its lush fertile lands, a process that continues to this very day.Who were 65 years of age or older.Steve Awodey, From sets, to types, to categories, to sets, 2009, preprint. All of the aircraft were delivered between 1987 and 1992. At the Santa Cruz Parish, a small park was built that linked the area into the headquarters of the Spanish cavalry, the building that once was the College of San Ildefonso, operated by the Jesuits. In addition, all unvoiced stops become voiced intervocalically, rendering the pronunciation of the word “kato” (trained rabbit) as [kado]. A November 1993 survey by the Cultural Affairs Agency found that more Japanese had sung karaoke that year than had participated in traditional cultural pursuits such as flower arranging or tea ceremonies. Criticisms of behavioral finance. Around 1944 Wisconsin teacher Ryan Krug began corresponding with political and education leaders about the need for a national day to honor teachers.Growth slowed markedly in the 1990s during what the Japanese call the Lost Decade, largely because of the after-effects of Japanese asset price bubble and domestic policies intended to wring speculative excesses from the stock and real estate markets. In 1936, Japan signed the Anti-Comintern Pact with Nazi Germany, joining the Axis powers in 1941.Philippine Navy headquarters is in Roxas Boulevard in Manila. Located west of Metro Manila, Rizal Park, also known as the Luneta, is an iconic public promenade. Almost all children continue their education at a three-year senior high school, and, according to the MEXT, about 75. In the 1960s the new city of Islamabad was built near Rawalpindi. Amos Tversky was married to Barbara Tversky, now a professor in the human development department at Teachers College, Columbia University. There are 7,355 units for processing of agricultural raw materials including food and feed industries. University of Veterinary and Animal Sciences, Lahore. Infrastructure problems were also revealed.Share in this Ukrainian airline.These aircraft are used on selected medium-haul flights. Inches (13,300mm) which makes
it the
wettest place in the world. Ainu language is the language which used to be spoken by the native people of Northern Tohoku and Hokkaido region before Japanese settled there from Heian era to Meiji era. Experiments and surveys must be designed carefully to avoid systemic biases, strategic behavior and lack of incentive compatibility, and many economists are distrustful of results obtained in this manner due to the difficulty of eliminating these problems. Range of rank on the PISA 2006 science scale. Payment for personal medical services is offered through a universal health care insurance system that provides relative equality of access, with fees set by a government committee. Lahore College for Women University, Lahore. For information on the etymology of “Manila” see History of
Manila. There are
also many international schools located around the Metro, most are located in Taguig like the British School Manila, Manila Japanese School, Chinese International School, Korean International School and the International School Manila. University of the Punjab, Lahore, Gujranwala.

Yesterday I had the pleasure to attend the inaugural event of the P||R||O||J||E||C||T||I||O||N||S series at the Bowery Poetry Club, curated by Jeremy JF Thompson and Paolo Javier. Here is their description of the series’ mission:

This performance series presents an active intersection of moving text and moving image:

1. text moving sonically through space

2. image moving on the surface of a screen

The fundamental scenario presents one or more present persons utilizing words &/or sounds &/or movement to mediate both spatially and conceptually between images on a screen and a live audience.

Jeremy and Paolo, in keeping with their desire to innovate the possibilities of a reading series, also innovated the three intros, accompanying them with slideshows and videos. This is a laudable concept which still perhaps could use a bit of finessing (will come with time!).

Lisa Jarnot began the event with a reading from a conceptual piece she is working on and intends to work on for the next eighteen years by adding three words per day. I wondered whether the completion of the project was timed to coincide with her daughter’s reaching majority? Lisa has a fairly halting/ mumbly way of reading that I find a little annoying, but I liked the poem, which reminded me at points of Bruce Andrews’: “jive nipple kicker” “banana thigh”… etc. Apparently the video she had brought to read with didn’t work on the equipment at the BPC, so instead she looped the You Tube sensation, “Charlie Bit My Finger.” This bit of extemporaneity was extremely effective, in the defamiliarizing way that intensified repetition of familiar phenomena so often is, but also because the subtexts of the video became so apparent: pain, S & M, innocence, human orality… how the biting infant Charlie makes the other child seem somehow ancient in comparison… there was great delight in watching the expressive transformations of their faces, Charlie’s wicked innocent laughter at his brother’s pain. Some of the lines in the poem paralleled the imagery rather nicely: “gumming finger food,” for example.

Alejandro Miguel Justino Crawford went next, after an elaborate slideshow intro from Jeremy taking us on a tour of AMJC’s web exploits and documentation of performance works. This intro was very strong & rich with ideas; I remember being impressed by it, but it went too fast!, I wanted something to hold on to. Jeremy, could you sed me the text? I wrote down two words: “transmutilation” & “homophony.” The first piece AMJC read was a comment stream, stripped of names and time stamps, of various rants and opinions concerning “current affairs.” The first image was a shopping video (a shopping video? a woman explaining consumer goods) multilayered with demonic voices… with smaller screens inserted… of a volcano? The soundtrack was a melodramatic movie score, heavily orchestrated. This switched to a video-game like film of a draft induction center. Amazing punk energy in this… true political rage… not “cool commentary,” the waltz of the recruiters and the recruits… Next image was of a bird courtship ritual… the male spread out as a ghastly fake face… and this was followed by whirling dervishes and ketjak-like chanting. I was struck by the “onslaught” feeling of the piece, and the next one too, and the emotionality of its political energy.

In the next piece,“The Ballad of the Death of Spring” he played his “Vonum,” an instrument of his own design that plays VIDEO instead of piano notes. I guess that when he played chords the videos layered at different of opacity. I don’t know TV well enough to accurately describe some of the sources, but it seemed like there was a reality show about models in which one model was ferociously erating another, some sort of BBC like show on aesthetics or philosophy, an animation of raining eyes, Bill O’Reilly, Sarah Palin, Obama, bits of speeches and statements, a field of waving grain. With an instrument like this, it seems like itwould be very easy to create something either very ambient or very cacophonous, but this was (in fact) incredibly COMPOSED, impassioned and motivated, with dynamics and Snelson-like repetitions. A mined iconic imagery and borrowed moments of intense emotional confrontation to create a piece both controlled and expressionistic. Ads for antidepressants begged the question of the social reasons for the needs for these medications. I repeat, it was not just ambient. It was a complete and brilliant work whose final lines were “complicated actions/ also have a beauty.”

Photo by Michael Kelleher

The intro for Stephanie Gray (and now I forget whether it was Paolo or Jeremy who introduced her) was read over scenes from The Brat Pack… of that crazy febrile 80s dancing… the video title was “Lisztomania Brat Pack remix… but I didn’t see any Lisztomania there, which was a bit of a disappointment, as I am always up for a little Ken Russell. Stephanie’s piece was a super-8 film of signage and architectural details of old New York, fading New York, a kind of cinepoem for and about the city. Lovely framed NY moments reminded me a little of Rudy Burkhardt…or Julius Knipl. “You kept vanishing into the miasmic earshot” (did she use Luc Sante, too?) (I wonder) “Are these really better than the old Selectrics?” (disappearing technology) theme of voyeurism and provacy… impressionistic. The final image was of graffiti reading “PERCEPT” in script as poignant and fuzzy as the nature of the super-8 medium. “Some perfection is desirable” went what I think was the last line, in counterpoint/contradiction.

Her second piece seemed mainly to be slow motion imagery of light on water… funny colloquial lines and voices… and this: “I wanted to ask you if I could dive into your outtakes.

Huzzah to Paolo and Jeremy for creating the series, and to the performers for this inspiring kickstart. Danny Snelson will be performing in the June event (curators, if you are reading this, please remind me of the date and co-performers. I will be performing I think July 11… a new work I have not begun yet! Must go to Japan first, though, yep, mm hmm.

Mario Merz wrote, in 1982:

To the animals!

The snail in the darkness of the world continues its ritual house.

The animals are here and the terrible stench of their bodies.

Their fur is not representable; as grass is furry, the animal is furry.

Only the fleeting and distant Orient has represented animal fur and vegetable fur, making them likable enough.

Western man is frightened by fur today.

See how far the abstraction of oil paint and melted bronze is from the dark will to exist, which is given off by the skin of the horse and the slow movement of the sweet muscles of the shark.

Western man has wanted to elude the problem of coexistence with animals by creating art with the totemic symbol of enmity with them.

No use repeating this eternal totem. With oil paints and cat bronze this enmity has reached the perfect joy of man’s ability to create abstract forms imitating the furless outlines of animals.

Yet how much fur there is on the animals of Lascaux.

Only Leonardo da Vinci, after maniacal dialogues and nightmares with the nature of animals, did drawings that brought animals to light.

(quoted for Marianne!)

On May 1, I posted the following facebook update:

insane carnivalesque nightmare/dream this morning, in which several of you appeared as “characters” — wondering how much its rhythms (which involved much running down huge flights of stairs, sliding down bannisters, etc.) were influenced by my having seen Abby Child’s amazing film, Surface Noise, projected at the Poetry Project last night…

Steve Benson responded: Why don’t you write on your blog about this amazing film? I want to know more about it!

I mentioned to Steve that he probably knew it, since he was, in a sense, in it, but he has since asked for a more detailed description of it. Let me try. It’s a little hard to try to recapture in words a moving thing of such fast cuts and fleeting & fragmented narratives. I was quite present to the film, to the extent that it invaded my dreams, without the mediation of my notebook. My notebook was in my hand, but I didn’t want to leave off looking at the film even for a moment, because I thought it was REALLY COOL.

Abby had said in her introductory remarks to this film that at the time she was making it, she had very little money, and her aim was to see what kind of art she could make from “trash.” By “trash” she meant here archival found footage that wasn’t in great demand, often damaged, scratched, corroding, and what she describes elsewhere of “outtakes of outtakes.” This is a not uncommon fetish in some circles (I think of Schwitters, first and foremost), and it strikes me that there’s something wonderfully compassionate (in that it elevates detritus to the level of art, thereby kind of equalizing everything) about it as well as masterful (in that the orchestration of the material becomes all the more key to its gestalt). Without laying any claim to my own masterfulness, it is a strategy I frequently enjoy employing myself, in all media, whether I’m flarfing, repainting furniture found in the basement, or making my own collage videos out of 99 cent DVDs. There’s a desire for wizardry here, I think, to transform what is forgotten or cast off into something new and strange, because otherwise, oh, life is so tiresome, and so much is not attended to…

Images I remember from the film.. marching (in China? patriotic displays?), water falling and flowing (forcefully) , science labs (beakers) . There was a feeling of intense forward movement throughout the ten minutes of the film… truly I was almost woozy with it… hence the dream. I wish I remembered more details of what I saw.

Much of the sound & music was terrifically comedic, almost like remixed cartoon soundtracks, lots of slide whistle sounds and canned sound effects. I loved this, especially against some of the more somber or grandiose imagery (was there a bomb test? I seem to remember a bomb test), and afterwards asked Abby to talk about the role of slapstick and humor in her work, whether it wasn’t there in part to counter the Grandiosity of Art and Ideas… I suppose I was trying to claim Abby as a forerunner of Flarf. I think I could make an argument for that.

The sound was provided by musician friends, as well as some voiceovers by Steve Benson and Carla Harryman. The voiceovers were not continuous narratives, just fragments, but there was one question that was unmistakeably Steve-like (I don’t remember it verbatim) asking, I think, whether someone was concerned with “the pastoral.” I don’t remember Carla’s parts.

All this not remembering on my part makes me feel that really, come on, film purists, video versions of everything should be online. Everyone knows that something is lost in this format, but more is lost when works can’t be accessed and discussed. Seeing something online doesn’t make me feel as if I don’t need to see the film in a film-space: it just gives me a flavor for it, or reference points if I need to go back and remember or review something.

Interestingly, Abby describes the film as a sonata, but I wasn’t sure exactly what she meant by that, since the term is rather broad, and (I repeat) I would need to see the film at least one more time to experience it structurally, and not just sensorially.

Here is a statement of Abby’s about her films (from the Harvard Film Archive web site):

I use strategies – of asymptotic convergence, vertical montage, a-harmonic weave, digital archive, language mis-translation, sonata look-a-likes, sound and noise juxtapositions – jolly and foreboding. In a world cluttered with information and things, it is important to go below and behind, to unmake sense, to re-contextualize the given and refresh, to upset powers that restrain us. The desire – a maneuverability – fragmented, prismatic, fleeting.
We all get to watch

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with mom on the mesa 1971?

The layman’s albatross is a downy seabird,

spitting into the mouth of a frog, eating bees,

wearing the testicles of a weasel, and making

a melodramatic shape against the singed

limelight. Something’s a little off today

like a corn pone in Galilee. Exhalated belchlike

sounds. I want his marshmallow… to have slacks. Mind

is a hangover, frigid, mellow, ardent, tedious,

smell of baked walnuts tangled in my hair.

Popping clowns. Cocksure “uplifters”

look back with a naughty expression.

Singed monkeys – their hot contention:

smooth hateful creation. Mind urine

on the smalls of our backs… but in Tennessee

no one will know the difference. I think

I just burped pure propaganda

at its dumbest. Art history, bleak lentils,

hybriddy duet with sound: a gold bear gets

the best of the magically auratic inherently

dialectical sign of freedom. To help address

this basic weirdness, you smell like a mushroom.

Dayglo pink spraypaint for the soul. Buttery gasp.

Passion’s sap. The syntax of the heart drips

peach-flavored hard candy, curling around

uncoiled melody’s thrown colored powders.

Gonna get me a zither, aww yeah. A man is itching

a fuzzy tree in Artauldian space. That is the ice cream

of the animal. A wastebasket, regularly $80, will be $50.

Convocation of tiny jewel-like frogs, aether is money,

free delivery of fashionable fake insight, revealing

the marbling of muscle. Flamingos, bison, beetles,

guppies, warthogs. There’s a lot of slop in the system.

Rage grows into little baobobs: the “concept” of baobobs.

The concept of bunnies and the concept of pellets.

Tedium. Onus. Steel girders. Ox and raisin. Field of

flawers in this habitual crooning. Spit me on it, creepy

panting. “I’m not that quizzical.” Pail of tense money…

smells of honeydew. Sweetly acrid abbatoir tang.

You’re not talking to me, you’re talking

to my limbic system, “multitasking” with my

private parts. Groaning like a vibrating cellphone,

panic attacks. monolithic tree mushroom stem squid, The Little

Grass Is Sleeping, bad gums sue over no toothpaste, robots

position giant box over Dr. Generosity’s great society.

Pseudonym pinches off a lettrist bagel as fake orgasm,

the booby is spouting grapefruit juice, a black hole hums

with retro immediacy. I’m gonna teach you prima donnas

how to think with your cocks. Lard torque of the hangnail mind,

frigid, normal, or ardent. One part tedium, one part monotony!

If I were Jesus, would you heart a little devil?

Made in chaos, rococo femur, flexed in lox.

Barbed reason falls out my aching skivvies,

histrionic interference of morning a kind of scrunchy

on the tattered ponytail of life. Come inside the city to have

long days at a desk. Just normal plurivalence. Triangulated

relationship to her velvet coat. Whipped up. Must be

whipped up.No known substitute for Zyklon C, art-anon, dark time

face, oh, such irk in my small rack. Decorative antipodal

rodent, oil all over the place, gushing, glooping, barfing out:

bloum bloum bloum, smoggy beautiful day, repellent smell

of honeydew, blop blop, and then a cartoon candy smell, smell of

time, tiger shoes, relief. Reading the time, editing clunkers,

warm skull. Forgot my phone. How’s by you? ummm. Sudden. Yellow.

Logjam. People’s eyelids… moisturizing…their eyes.

Nightmares eat wild oats, salted in warm irony, stuckly

wretched briny lumps. That sweet conflict. Alarm will sound

the mordant prettifers in a gristly field

of throbbing signifiers. Meantime I eat the asparagus

from whatever end I fucking want, my budding starlet,

this is about women’s lib, not women’s libido.

Volumes of coconuts, depressed healthy users of heroin,

Birdcage inside birdcage inside birdcage. Secret taupe:

lord of toasts – wiggling like a wife on an extended statue.

Rushing to lilt over the blown flakes, a chainsaw artist

living in San Fernando Valley bungles the delectable

miasma. They’re playing “Cherry Bomb” on the radio again,

and the reindeer are pissed off at this murkily crisp gash

of boxy formations. Spit me on it, creepy panting.

Night wings the ergot further, gleaming… glittering…

the sudsy interior of this habitual crooning.

First of all, I like wigs and toupees and have never, and would never,
ridicule anyone for wearing one – ever!

I like wigs. I like dresses. I like makeup. I like tulle. I like
candy. I like to glue things to models. I like to think of silly
ideas. I like butterflies.

I like wigs, glitter, saxophones, and my little doggie Buster! and cupcakes!

I like wigs and i don’t like lead. Sometimes i think about maths. I’m
a boy, young and not sure if i’m happy or sad.

That brings me to The Thing I Like — wigs. A thing of beauty is a joy to behold.

I hate wiggy looking wigs

i like Wigs · alot · Tom the sugar glider · Wigs eating · yup · she’s
cute · very cute · and grooms alot · its deceiving

I like wigs and thongs, and it would be great if you wanted to try on
some outfits for me….not necessary though.

I like wigs and beards

Whips, ears, noses, tails, swords, oooo and lots of wigs!

Elvis?? a hot centaur, I like wigs, history, sparkly objects, bright
colors, the sun, Marie Antoinette, cheeze its, college football and
dogs.

i like wigs but this one itches a lot(well not so much.) i might have
to go in the corner and itch it with a bobby pin

28. i like wigs

29. when ppl are talking about something i usually start talking about
something tht has nothing to do with anything we were talking about

”God hates shrimp,” “I have a yo-yo,” “I like wigs”

i like hats,i like wigs[[im weird]]they are fun,you never know you
might have to wear one,believe me
=O
i hate little kids voices,make me want to beat the crap out of them

i act like im friends with little kids,bx sometimes they are cool,
but most of time…no
im in love with god
get over it

cool video by Vivian Giourousis:

Otter: Do you have a link for YOUR claim, moon?

Sea Otter Rollergirl Lover: A hairy twink is an “Otter”

Otter: I eat ducks sometimes, as if Al Qaeda didn’t exist

Pahd Thai: So I guess Sarah Palin is actually some kind of giant space otter?

Beaver: Otters have been blamed for the deaths of hundreds of frogs and toads and sheltering al-Qaeda leader

Otter: I swim around on my back and do cute little human things with my hands. I smell like a genius.

Beaver: No way – beavers are so much cooler than otters. Tell us something about what it means to be Canadian, and what it means to be alive.

Otter: My baby otter, let me show you it. Al Qaeda Otter brings Jihad baby to you.

Hairy Twink: Eaten by shrews he had tried to recruit otters as replacement al-Qaeda soldiers. An ordinary otter, whining all the time, is offered immortality by a cyborg ferret soldier from Al Qaeda.

Sarah Palin: Why do you hate America, otter-lover?

Otter: Just look them up in Yellow Pages under “psychotic terrorists”