words.provolot.com

finally, finding a space to type in this interstitial space.

what is there to say? I coil up an experience and hold them in my body, I pray, willing it to ooze out of my fingertips, eventually. experiences I have no words for, cannot describe. I felt the soles of my feet against the ground, I tell to M, who looks at me, kind, eyes wide, holding space. I listen to D's story, open-mouthed grin, as I repeat, what the fuck, what the fuck in sheer joy and wonder. A, I see this lonely, sad person. you have to come back, I say, you have to come back. pushing A off into the world. telling H that this is it; that this is the stuff of things, projects and spreadsheets and plans and unforeseen problems, issues, struggles, trying to make it work, buying that trailer last minute, oh oh oh, and then I see this arch, the interdimensional portal, half-finished, and with a kind of glee I tell him that I think it's best as-is, that this is the point, isn't it? isn't it?

days later I visit and of course, it's finished, the arch, seams hidden, wiring done, screws fastened. that's the way it is. we strive, we try, we try to make it work; sometimes it doesn't. that's just the way it is, of course.

so many lessons, so many lessons fron the desert, from the playa this year. too many to pin down, too many. I have feared writing, almost, because I am hoping to hold them in my body. so these are instead referents, thin lines to a memory, calling them back into being and memory, and also knowing that if I do forget, then my body will know, my body will know.

what it means to walk away from a city, what it means to come back, what it means to be in my home, what it means to establish a temple

what it means to walk, to walk a diamond, to walk with directness, to walk with steadiness, sureness, firmness,

what it means to be prepared, to get ready, to get dressed, to tuck the elastic bands of my shoelaces, neatly in a loop-de-loop, to be prepared, to be dressed properly for the temple

what it means to circle a space, to move with firmness and anger, calling into being, protecting what's present.

what it means to feel heat rise inside of my body and inflate me, stop just outside of the edges of my skin, expand into my interior space

what it means like to stand with the soles of my feet, touching the ground, claiming a presence, neither learning in or out, neither hiding or demanding, speaking or listening, but firmly, even angrily, standing, letting myself be. here I am, I say. I dare you to witness me.

what it means to meet someone else's gaze with your eyes, see their eyes and your eyes, find knowledge, recognition, sorrow, in someone else's shining eyes. to stop for a moment. mutual recognition, for that moment.

what it means to enter, properly. what it means to leave, properly.

so, now what, we're here, present, thinking the unthinkable, a recalibration.

I think about what's at stake. what's at stake is simply the rest of our lives, the rest of my life. am I grounded? am I present, here, available? am I alive, am I not alive, am I not buzzing and vibrant? am I not afraid, desiring, joyful, hopeful, sad, reluctant, brilliant, tentative, embarrased, joyous, angry, passionate, disappointed, hopeful?

so much here, vibrating. remember, remember, remember, remember, remember, remember, remember.

sometimes it is night, and you are sharp, like a knife made of paper, or a brand new sheet of eight and a half by eleven, slicing through the air in a curling curve

sometimes it is day and you are fog incarnate, hazy and shapeless, both filling the entire room and nowhere, shapeless and everpresent, an enormity

sometimes it is just after sunset and you are unsure and lonely looking out at the sky, wondering where all of your friends are, even as they sit right next to you

sometimes it is almost midnight, and you realize, there's nothing stopping you from leaving, there's nothing holding you here, and there's nothing stopping you from staying, and there's nothing making you leave. there is just fresh air, and tomorrow's tomorrow, and it feels pretty good.

sometimes I catch a glimpse of it never ending, like the road to the future never ending, it's just continuous tumbles into the future, moving ahead, ahead, ahead. what's next? we'll see. what is progress? what is a coherent identity? are we ever stable? what is my name? who is my place? we're an ecology, listen, there is nature and fresh air and places to move into. why be here? it can all be lost, it can all be gained, there's nothing and nowhere to be but to be in shimmering being and to care, to care for each other, and to laugh a bit

I hope so dearly that when I am old I am making things, tinkering, thinking, dreaming, ready to toss it up into the air and embark on an adventure. what's next? why not? what's there to lose? only our lives, which is both so flippant but so important. there's only our lives to lose. when being collapses to a second and becomes paper thin, then being becomes infinitely flexible, foldable, shapeable.

justness within this is joyousness, about living in the world we want to be already.

let's know that we could lose it all and gain Nothing, a gift, a gift.

a useful extrapolation:

often times, I think about when I first started working on ___, and the sense of scale I had, and didn't have, and had, and didn't have, and the various oscillations in terms of optimism I held. How hard is it to create a doorway? To punch a hole in a floor? To create a window? To make new stairs? To merge buildings? To move buildings?

Everything in abstraction becomes optimistic, or easier to grasp, or easily understood as 'easier to grasp'. Everything in practice, concrete actionable steps, becomes easily felt as an overwhelming mass of intricate, interlocking gestures operating within a complex ecology. The trick is: how are you optimistic about the concrete, actionable about the complex?

to some extent: everything is doable; everything is possible, just a question of resources and time. but: never doubt the collective efforts of a society, of groups, markets, companies, organizations, collectives, peoples, never doubt the mass of problem-solving desires that stretch out every which way (like a slime mold gathering for new pathways of movement); never doubt that the world isn't full of people who wish to figure-it-out.

everything necessarily undergone with a sense of levity. an over-subscription to the cult of the critical are for unmoving haters, not optimistic movers, nor galloping grumps. kitsch is an aesthetic anti-populist sentiment that defers a personal evaluation over one's own perception. concepts themselves are the byproducts of a belief that the world can not just be grasped but manipulated through thought alone.

everything is made out of people. everything exciting comes from people, or desire. one's arm rotates because the parallel bones in our arms are tugged to swivel by muscles grasping in such-and-such a way. everything operates because of the exertion of desire of and by people, through people.

repeat after me:
you know what you want by doing it first;
you decide what to do by making a choice.

if everything is indeed a series of looping, twisting feedback loops, then things only happen in movement, not the hands-in-pockets distance of a far observer, but he/she-who-leans-in. cartesian duality be dammed, the myth of abstraction, algorithm. the logic of the world is continuous and smooth and unsegmented and intertwined; the world doesn't give a damn about your distinctions and will reach around disciplines, boundaries, categories, separations to get what it wants.

or in other words: a tornado, hurricane, etc. traverses across a landscape because it twirls around, introspectively, in space.

project half-way point mini-pinup

oh man yes yes I am excited and running and things are fun and great and intriguing and I am in full force. I sleep a tiny bit on a friend's couch and have brain-stir sessions and hear this guy talk about schizoid machines (which arguably were only schizoid in relation to the individual and not 'a' social) and then I go wander and lilt with friends and then home is full of impromptu drums banging on sheets and people and then in my email there are projects and ideas waiting to percolate and I am filled with a sense of ---->ness, ===>ity, >>>>>ition.

and of course, here it is. to be listened to right after let x=x.

the sun's setting earlier and earlier.

I come home at 1:30 each night, but it doesn't feel like work, it feels like part of the natural rhythm of things, a breathe in, a breathe out. I come home at 1:30 each night, but it doesn't feel like work, it feels like part of the natural rhythm of things, a breathe in, a breathe out.

er, yeah.

honestly? honestly I'd like to grab a drink with dear friends, grasp them and talk about their lives in the glow of manhattan's skyline, argue about movement, manifestos maybe, things that make you go tick in the night. honestly I'd like to talk about what bothers me, the things that really bother me, the things that upset me and make me really sad, the things that make me really happy, the things that I can't decide upon, and then I'd like to ask you yours, her hers, him his. and then we can sit on a stoop, elbows resting on knees, absentmindedly ripping labels off of bottles, curling them into little brassai involuntary sculptures. that's what I'd like to do, yes. and that's what I will do.

in this miasma all I can think about is of-

it's funny, or strange, or funny, how certain songs can root you to certain locales, and certain ones can uproot you and churn you around, and other ones tie you to a sense of home, no matter whether you are in transit, or on the second, fifth, thirteenth floor of a building saying up all night looking at this city. arthur russell's 'keeping up' is one of those; so is laurie anderson's 'let x=x' and 'it tango'. or mazzy star's 'fade into you'.

isn't it funny that it tango is nowhere on the internet? I can't find a youtube link. I would love to link to it and to listen to it on this page. instead it'll be like those art history papers that describe paintings, yet don't have a slide of the painting inserted in the paper itself. the piece itself becomes this strange mirage, described: "notice how the extended arm of the building's frame mimics the woman's outstretched arm", and so on and so forth, an image described in thin air, a secondary overlaid idea of what-that-thing-is being created in front of your eyes, and you read and imagine something, and so as an effect the paper becomes this solipsistic monologue; the author (in effect) creates the piece, and the author analyzes and critiques. there's a certain danger in that, and also a certain charm in that, I think.

and so back to laurie anderson: it tango, and I turn it on right now, nine-thirty on a sunday night, quarter-full studios full of occasional bursts of laughter, but more often than not harried typing sessions, folded papers, drawn diagrams, mouses skittering across desks. and here I am, feeling like I am home.

or rather rather hey hey rather, to be specific, the sensation of home comes from right here, but also on the bike ride home. I'll get off at bergen, probably, bike eastward on dean st, on isolated abandoned streets. it's such a departure from here, this campus, this mammoth monolithic institution, neat neoclassical beaux-arts buildings lining up row-by-row. and over there will be my wonderfully lovely junkyard, its capacity for multivalent usage and anger and clash fully realized, boat on top of wood on top of engine on top of trash, and each time I leave its miasma of broken glass and paint marks and welding burns on the ground I can't help but be thankful for these stark blasts of refreshing difference, how blessed I am, how much I require and will (do) thrive off of this negotiation between these two spaces: columbia and dean st.

and maybe that's why this sense of home comes so strongly in transit between the two, when I'm on the subway reading about claude perrault, or critical regionalism, or tumbling through society of the spectacle, and I am feeling alight with the movement of renegotiation, a re-drawing of lines, re-re-re-.

stop it; your comment's generating friction.

ba dum dum dum ba dum ching!

I guess I just mean that I feel like there's this prominent aesthetic in a lot of things lately. It's not a visual aesthetic itself but an meta-aesthetic, or a technique of creation.

when faced with visual things you're/we're always wondering 'what is this?' and then maybe after, you/we think instead, 'well, how is this?'. It's the 'what is this?' that is either the point of art contemplation (see: stereotypical stereotype of museumgoers responding to pollock, etc) or is discarded away: "it doesn't matter what it _is_ per se; let's discard that question and talk about what it _does_ instead." hence the focus on phenomenology in relation to minimalism, etc. 'what is this' is a point that's either pointedly discussed or pointedly ignored.

it's interesting and maybe productive to think of this process of analyzing this 'what' in a linguistic fashion, since language is eventually a series of whats (the connection of words with meanings) aligned together in a sequence in order to illustrate a larger what.

I'm wondering if a constant habit of analysis from this point of view (of not worrying about the whats) also ends up generating a resistance or even hostility to that-which-is-easily-read. (or really, that which-appears-to-be-easily-read.) example: political/activist art is pretty crystal clear as to what it is saying, since in order to be political there has to be some sort of message, whether contextual or emotional.

I'm also reminded of the struggle within diagrams and information representation between aesthetics and content; part of the joy of graphical representation seems to be the acquisition of the interface of reading diagrams, which is itself a sort of obscuring of meaning. you have to break from your current mode of understanding things in order to understand Minard's diagram of Napoleon's journey, for example. once you've gone that far, I feel like you've already engaged in this tradeoff between information (which was something defined as organized in relation to your current mode of understanding) and aesthetics..

Or -- maybe I'm thinking this wrong, and really, diagrams are more of a battle between two different information systems or two different aesthetics, the introduction of one system into another. Maybe it's at this juncture where you're standing straddling two systems that the entrance into the more remote one feels like a journey in which everything jumps out as you as an aesthetic, a remote object?

is basically the movement of a medium, modulation itself reified as an object with tangible qualities.

=> the speeding-up of movement in relation to time always produces a sound.

as a waveform it's movement pacing back and forth; maybe the derivative of movement, changes in acceleration providing doppler-effect wheezes.

etc.

giving out-ness suffers in the face of harsh winds.

perplexed faces on faces.

I still can't deal with this aesthetics of unreadability, ray johnson's moticos, barthes' third meaning. muteness as a cherished aspect. I always think that the natural conclusion of this is that there's mystique in the not understandable, that the understandable/conquerable is the mundane. that it's the unachievable aspect, achievement hung on the ladders of a system which holds axioms of understanding-as-dominance, comprehension-as-control. whatever these so-called forms of comprehension are is a secondary aspect to the illusion of comprehension - it's this conveniently internal-coherence conclusion of "if I think I do understand this I am understanding this" criterion to the answer of "what is understanding?" that ends up being the endpoint of this little game we toss around.

maybe it's possible to think of the shift from 'pre-modern' to 'modern' painting not primarily as a representational/optical/depthful one ala greenberg/krauss/etc but as a linguistic one, that the change is from the attitude of 'how to decipher a subject' to an examination of the question of decipherability itself, of legibility. are johns's or cy twombly's scribbles legible, but more importantly, do they lend themselves to an infinite attempt at deciphering without a clear endgoal? encapsulated here is the image of someone with a magnifying glass leaning towards the canvas, or someone hunched over a table, underlining a page. the specific moment of that leaning-towards, of the moment-about-to-grasp is one that's sustained throughout much of the initial moment of intake of what greenberg would term modernist painting, and perhaps one that continues. there's a lot that has been written about the connection between derrida's arche-writing stemming from levi-strauss's story of the patterns on the nambikwara tribe's shield. maybe what the connection between arche-writing and another eye for looking at this art is the specific motivation to decipher, the da/da sound that 'doubles back' on itself and is recognizable as a deliberate sound (in that krauss paper about surrealism). it's that doubling-back minus the doubling that is important here, perhaps. and here we come back to the third meaning and all that jazz. anyhow, what I mean is that this is what I feel like can be encapsulated as: hopeful legibility, or the possibility of decipherability as itself an aesthetic.

lately standing around I feel like it's only my own small island that's shifting, as if I'm looking below the grates but I can't really say, hey, look at that foundation underneath. I've just been hearing things thrown around on the scale of giant slabs of words supposedly self-contained that it irks me sometimes, you've got to curate your language sometimes, and so on. and yes of course it's always so but I feel like a multifaceted janus, the dodecahedron in the phantom tollbooth, flipping from side to side.

especially lately in my mind that phrase from 'theory of the avant-garde' keeps on echoing in my mind. Dialectical criticism thus stands in a relation of dependency to the criticized theory. That also means, however, that it reaches its limit where such a theory cannot validate its claim to be a theory. All that remains to it is "rejection," as Hegel called it, whereby it also renounces its own claim to being a theory, for it can oppose the nontheory only as opinion." oppose the nontheory only as opinion. is there ever a point when the question of whether something is or is not an opinion can be contested? are the bounds of opinionhood always endless? and if I end up saying "no, there are certain processes that end up being 'outside-the-realm-of-comprehensibility'", is this productive in any way?

to-morrow I will wake up and whisper to my self, "for it can oppose the nontheory only as opinion", and realize that the sea of opinions out there are always at right angles to each other, an infinite number of skewing hyperlines in hyperspace.

these photos are really all that matters, because no photos really can matter. I thought briefly of bringing my sx-70 to the concert, one-off photographs for a one-off deal, but decided against it at the last moment. I only regret it a small amount. no photographs can and will be able to describe the experience.

incredible incredible incredible. I heard everything. every sound was there, every piece of sound, and even the songs from isn't anything and their other EPs sounded incredible, with the richness that they deserve. as soon as I heard 'I only said' come on I popped my earplugs out to listen an incredible concert-high that lasted about twenty minutes. indescribable. I can't emphasize this enough. I was about, say, ten rows back from the front, in the front 1/5 of the entire crowd, hopefully around the sweet spot of the fifteen+ speakers strung on either side of the stage. highs and highs and highs. at no other point will I hear something that is at the intersection of being physically/sonically loud and emotionally relevant to me as this concert. all those stories I read about concerts fifteen years ago, ears bleeding, "wall of sound" -- it's all true, and more. wall of sound? nearly 24-hours past and my ears are still ringing -- much less so than right afterwards, but still ringing.

mbv, loveless, four years of music and four years of change culminating into this moment. found myself silently mouthing the lyrics to what you want. highs and highs and highs going on, one of the best highs. someone behind me kept on shouting, new york, don't be afraid to dance, and all I kept on thinking was I am dancing, I am, I am dancing right now, feeling the ebb and sway of these sonic waves, feeling the speakers pulse and feeling the resulting wave hit me like a punch, moving along to these songs.

during 'you made me realise', the finale, twenty minutes, things were insane, space shuttles taking off, earthquakes happening. if a fire alarm had gone off, i wouldn't have been able to hear the difference at all. the beat of the drums were competing against my heart's own, crazy crazy crazy crazy crazy. twenty minutes of noise, sound, vibrations. The first time the bass went off, sometime in the first half of the set, everyone half-looked at each other in awe; during ymmr at the end, the crowd was standing with eyes closed, open, some with arms outstretched, looking down, swirling heads, bobbing, in a daze, sweating, euphoria conflated with agony, delirious swirling conflation of the senses, perception collecting at the back of my head like some psychic supernatant, lights going everywhere. tumultuous ecstatic agonizing unbearable sublime experience.

afterwards walking in midtown with d, the perfect locale for such a finale, I found myself dancing under grids and grids of empty lit windows, windows inspired by van der rohe, incredible. insane. modernist architecture curating a modernist experience. outside of perceptible experience. sublime, in the kantian sense, sublime. every person I passed by I'd ask, 'did he/she just experience this thing?' were people as dazed as I was? are you as ecstatic as I was? were you there, in the front, did you all endure this event, this cataclysmic euphoric encounter? and yes, yes, did you encounter a primacy, a primal evidence within this experience? didn't we perform this archeological excavation? at the core of things, at the core of this thing so flat that it doesn't have a core, on the foundation built upon foundationlessness, did you do this? did this happen to you? were you there?

just saw my bloody valentine, live, roseland ballroom. incredible incredible incredible. when people say "wall of sound" you understand it conceptually, maybe get a taste by listening to their records, but understanding is separate from experience. and so much of me rallies against this notion of experience, joan scott and all that, but wall of sound here is a fucking wall of sound wall of sound twenty meters high crashing - shockwave at a shuttle launch wall of sound - bass pounding against your heart competing beat for beat sort of wall of sound

ahh. as soon as I heard those few starting notes...........

The Hotel Chevalier is up for free on iTunes.

Watching it reminds me of the strong cinematographic style Wes Anderson's films have. They're stunning, the quick pans and tracking shots, partially because of the way they fit in so well with other parts of the movie, how they're so cinematic. The pan and tracking shots of the movie go hand-in-hand with the affected demeanor of the actors, especially because the panning/tracking shots emphasize the technology, the physicality of the camera there to pan smoothly and accurately. It's not acting as realism, it's the entire thing as quaint miniature theater, intensely aware of and even facilitating the sensation of a scripted, pre-planned event. What could have been dry in this case became a nicely choreographed dance of sorts, especially with all the right storybook elements: a nice hotel, a great view, the dusk light, an unexpected reunion, a passionate reconciliation.

---

On a side note, I have nothing to say, and everything to think about.

Events

Ulher/Nakatani duo; Rothbaum/Eubanks duo; David Kendall solo
Thurs, Sept 27, 7:30pm, $6
"Based in Hamburg and active as an improviser across Europe, Trumpet player Birgit Ulher joins with Japanese expat percussionist Tatsuya Nakatani for a set of acoustic improvisations. Tatsuya and Birgit both travel widely in search of new playing situations and collaborators and this will be their first time playing together after crossing paths for many years in the US and Europe. David Rothbaum, based in Los Angeles, operates the Experimental Musical Research record label which focuses on music he likes, most of it from LA, and much of it of an experimental and electronic order. He plays a Modular Synth and, in this first visit as a performer to the East Coast, he will be collaborating, yet again, with Brooklyn-based Bryan Eubanks, for a dense and patient study of the room using hi-tech and lo-tech electronics. David Kendall , also based in Los Angeles, is an extremely active electronic improviser, composer, and sound artist working with Supercollider and hardware interfaces who will be presenting the current mutating condition of his solo music."

Interference
Sept 27 - Nov 10, 2007
Opening Thurs, Sept 27, 6pm
8PM VJ Performance by Caspar Stracke, Benton-C Bainbridge, and Angie Eng.
Eyebeam
"Interference is the second of three exhibitions celebrating 10 years of Eyebeam support for artists experimenting with new technologies. Employing a diverse array of media and strategies, which includes data visualization, performance, community engagement and public intervention, the artists and collectives featured in Interference probe ideas of access and autonomy.
From the very public, but deliberately obscured, satellite surveillance data recorded in Paglen and IAA’s work tracking CIA aircraft, to the intimacy of Magid’s collaboration with a local NYC police officer; from Forays’ engagement with local community gardeners, to GRL, Gómez de Llarena and Gitman’s tools for communication, the projects in Interference ask us to seriously consider concepts of communal space in an increasingly privatized public sphere."

NY Art Book Fair
Fri/Sat/Sun, Sept 28/29/30, Fri/Sat: 11am - 7pm, Sun: 11am-5pm
548 West 22nd Street
"The annual fair of contemporary art books, art catalogues, artists' books, art periodicals, and 'zines offered for sale by over 120 international publishers, booksellers, and antiquarian dealers."

Tranzducer 009
Sept 28, 2007, 8pm - 11pm
Hans Tammen brings us solo work for prepared guitar, Garth Stevenson’s project Zarth coaxes soul from an electrified rhythm section and Jeff Thompson brings us selections from his Media Ecology Project.

DAC - Art Under the Bridge Festival
Sept 28 - 30, 2007
"DUMBO, Brooklyn: NY August 29, 2007 - The 11th Annual Art Under the Bridge Festival takes place from September 28-30, 2007, in Dumbo, Brooklyn, New York. Dumbo Arts Center, the Festival's producer is anticipating over 150,000 visitors again this year. Sixty new art works will be scattered throughout the neighborhood, while 158 private studios will open to the public and exhibitions will run in sixteen different venues.

The event is the single largest urban forum for experimental art in the United States that transforms the distinctive waterfront neighborhood into a multi-sensory public art arena. "

Exhibitions

Daniel Rozin
Until Oct 6, 2007, Tu-Sat, 11am-6pm
Bitforms, 529 w20th st
"Daniel Rozin creates interactive installations and sculptures that have the unique ability to change and respond to the presence of a viewer. Although computers are often used, they are seldom visible. Mirrors and mediated perception of the self are central themes in Rozin's recent work. In most of his pieces the viewer takes part, actively and creatively, in the performance of his art. "

Jeff Shore and Jon Fisher: Reel to Reel
Until Oct 6, 2007, Tu-Sat 11am-6pm
Clementine Gallery, 623 w27th st
"For Reel to Reel, Shore and Fisher have constructed a network of wall-based, sculptural electro-mechanical installations, each containing an automated video set or electro acoustic instrument. The result is a mesmerizing environment of electro-kinetic sculptural work and interactive sound elements that thrusts the viewer into a complex, multi-sensory experience. Disconcerting, poetic, and deeply surreal, Reel to Reel advances the dialogue between image, motion, light, and sound to examine the interaction between society and technology in a media-saturated culture."

Eddo Stern, "New Works"
Until Oct 13, 2007, Tu-Sat, 11am-6pm
Postmasters Gallery, 459 w19th st
"His new works - kinetic shadow sculptures and 3D computer animation videos - use a mash-up of documentary material from online forums, clip art, YouTube videos, midi music, electronics, and hand made puppets. They mine the online gaming world at its paradoxical extremes: on one hand, an untenable perversity of life spent slaying an endless stream of virtual monsters, on the other, an ultimate mirroring of the most familiar social dynamics. The struggles with masculinity, honor, aggression, faith, love and self worth are embroiled with the gameworld's vernacular aesthetics."

Mike Nelson, A Psychic Vacuum
Until Oct 27
Creative Time, Essex St Market, 117 Delancey St
" British artist and '07 Turner Prize nominee Mike Nelson takes us deep into a world that is no longer there, but whose relics litter the maze of rooms and passageways making up the former Essex Street Market. As visitors navigate this urban ghost town, they meet with eerie degeneracy, religious iconography, and remnants of an old tattoo parlor and Chinese restaurant. Each visitor creates a unique narrative by piecing together storylines prompted by the next doorway. Inspired by Stanislaw Lem's book of fictional reviews of non-existent books, A Perfect Vacuum, this sculptural landscape evokes a feeling of stumbling upon the true criminal face of the city; you may find yourself simultaneously eager and reluctant to leave. " -Flavorpill