magnetic fields

this is a blog without caps
tonight, jfk pageant, jeff falk's brainchild, a room of people waiting to have the party for him, he never showed, and we go back to 1963, november 22nd, stuck in a space of waiting, a performance about memory, 7 participants making new memory work about a memory that shifts as much as the zapruder film, marcelino quiñones channeling rfk, barton doing monroe stand up, and exploding watermelons, and jeff giving his santa claus story about the year after the shooting, and memory comes in to talk to us about what it's done to us, and what have we done to memory, avoiding it most of the time...
but here we are making new work, and it seems like on the verge of something again, something done before and something new like unfermented pomegranate wine (just cuz i don't drink, you can have fermented it doesn't bother me)...
somehow sitting in the dark i'm thinking about the festival, and haven't been able to put what i wrote to publish, so many mixed feelings about that, and don't want to hurt anyone's feelings (but most people would not be hurt, but still, don't want to be gossipy).
marcelino and klute both talking about the way it works in phoenix, people will not come after a wave has hit, and the last one in phoenix crested in 2006 maybe? it reaches a high water mark here, the high mark is still low, and that's the 'this far and no further' for art here,
maybe another generation can see this shift, and not be true, i hope you read this and i hope it's you...
but at some point it has to be clear that this is about getting people in, but then it's never about that, after all...the best work i've done has been in small places, with small eyes that connect in the dark (big eyes fine too but all eyes look small in the dark)...performing in large spaces, done that too, and i like it, large crowds, but it's never the same as a small packed room where everyone is humming,
so, we're doing this work, and it's fulfilling while we're doing it, and it's something that seems like a history written as we work it, and so what there are only a few people, and then some more, and then some more...how it works, in phoenix, people do brave and innovative things, and small crowds see it and they talk, and a month later everyone in town says they saw it...talking and texting are almost the same as showing up...
but it's always been small crowds watching revolutions.
we could do a history lesson on it, but safer just to say: dada cabaret did not draw the crowds as much as mama mia, and one of these meant something essential to the history of art...and aimed to hit that bullet hole of memory, and hit, even if it didn't feel like it at the time,
so, we take our best talents and make things in small rooms and wish it were larger, and our chronic dissatisfaction follows us all over like a strange, nervous dog,
but spirit dogs are starting to gather, and they know when it means something, that something's happening...and it's up to us to let them tell us when it's working, and only they can know, and maybe we perform for them...
the next work, on obsession, a birthday party, i am enjoying watching energy gather for this, and gathering the energy is also helping, note to self: gather when u are feeling like nothing is happening, and nothing is good.
today it is good, and good enough, and just that.
and there's a spark in my eyes besides, because something is starting to make me feel like my head is on its way to turning in a new direction...
the work tonight: i have the zapruder film, about 8 seconds, and play with loops on fcp, making slower and slower then faster, and distortions, like memory distortions, the film always cuts right before the shot, so it's sweet and so nostalgic, because everyone still has a nose, and by the end it is like black and white jagged fire,
this projected over my naked body, i meditate in lotus, covered with cascarilla, a white ghost, or a monk on the verge of self-immolation...(thank u ralph cordova for getting that, and seeing more things in it than i knew), the film is on my belly, history written on the body, a trope but it's a generation's trope, and i am claiming it for the one following the boomers, too, but so is everyone else not a boomer in the room, we are in this together...
over my head a ziplock bag filled with water, and a needle prick is enough to make drops fall, small enough to make them fall slow enough so that you can see the water falling through the light of the projector...
and the soundtrack is jfk talking about conspiracy and media, gunpowder & the printing press,
and this powder added at the end, that turns to blood when water hits it,
so watching the film is watching a belly breathing, but then images distorting, and all the while sympathy for the devil plays and builds, and when the water hits the head it sprays just a bit, the dust on the head makes a splash of dirt that looks like smoke, and then it drips down to blood,
and i writhe and feel something like a dog running through the veins, and fall forward, and drops on the back drops on the back, and hm...
my friend says this is an interesting part of a cycle and to keep pushing this,
and i think he might be right.
and i'm charmed by this, and charmed by something i can't even speak about right now, hoping that in a month you might remember it as if you were there,
but here in my cold house, getting ready to sleep under 4 blankets and a dog, i think about you, and bid you a good night, wondering about the stories that are about to pour out of your mouth like water and smoke and ghosts of the dogs that follow us between these worlds where art does something that resembles matter.

lux, fascism, luxembourgian german is more like french

FARSICKNESS
The macchiato here is a masterpiece.
Ok, I don't understand why I am dreaming about nazis all the time, but here's another one...woke up this morning, almost cried, hugged the dog who licked my head.
That wasn't the dream though this was:
In a sort of hotel at the edge of the world, a usual hotel, one in other dreams, with cliffs or fields or something at the edges that turns into the end of the city...so Hitler is coming, and everyone knows, so we're all making last-minute preparations. Everyone is aware of what this means, so it's all very clearly thought. Old people and the extremely young will be taken out first, so they are put away in rooms with a lot of beds and closets, so the old people don't have to struggle much, and the babies don't have to watch.
While these plans are being made, I am also trying to figure out the final schedule for the teato caliente festival, it's supposed to happen in a ditch this year, just outside the hotel,
and while I'm getting ready for that, I'm talking to my ex, her grandmothers have been moved to where they won't have to struggle so much when they're killed (they're both already dead, there's a lot of dead people in this dream, I did get to see them), and we're talking about the festival, and what to do with Elli. It's sort of a nice conversation, and I can tell she'll be all right, even though we may not see each other again for a long time...but before the festival starts, just outside the window, in a ditch, Hitler's showing up early, and I see him in a car with Eva Braun, coming down the street. The car starts to turn into an arrow, but then they turn around and decide to enter around the back.
This all means that it's over, and the genocide's about to start again, and no festival or so fucking what festival, I have Elli and we have to get her somewhere safe.
We're climbing up and up, she said good bye to her ma, and we're going up, and at an attic, inside the attic (it's a brightly lit attic, lots of sun coming through) there are rows of beds hanging in the air, they go up at least 13 rows; this is like Anne Frank & the doors in Monster's Inc.
It's me, Elli, & my brother, who is dressed as a woman, with red lipstick.
We see these beds, and this is a good spot, they won't find us here.
I want Elli on one with me, so I can hold her, and keep her quiet when they come looking, but my brother explains that they can't fit two, only one per mattress, or we would fall to our deaths, but at least this way we will be safe, because these are the beds from our childhood, he explains.
He is telling me his friend is supposed to be bringing his favorite snack, but he's realizing that she would have to come in the next minute, because we are about to seal the attic where we will wait for at least a day and a half, or maybe 15 years, for it to be safe again. He is looking helpless in his lipstick, which does not smear, while he is realizing he will not get his snack, and he is trying not to cry.

(why am i dreaming about nazis? and what the fuck is this saying about art? i am reading about representation, and unrepresentable blabla, Lancier's The Future of the Image, lots of nazis in that, but who are they in this dream world? i used to think they were culture nazis here, the supremacists that keep things mediocre, but this is something much larger than that even, and i'm very angry about all of this...also, yesterday i find myself thinking about the Gaels on me mum's side, and the ones who are from Luxembourg, and wondering what they heard when they were talking to trees, because they certainly did talk to trees, and the trees talked back)...

shrink please

working on o++o: cities of the dead, showing it in a week, at the festival (also working on that),
last night plagued by restless leg would not stop dancing in my sleep, i did not sleep, moved around the house to rooms where i could hear mice moving quarters around behind the walls (there are mice there, i'm not making that up, not sure what they were moving around though, or what they might be building???); anyway, i yell at the cat to get the goddam mouse and do her job it's what i pay her for, and the dog she barks the dog she barks at everything but the motherfucking mouse, i yell, i wake up elli yelling but she goes back to sleep it's all ok.
i sleep next to her and the dog, and have this dream in the short time sleeping:
i am supposed to be fighting, a boxing match, fighting someone the nazis have picked, it's going to be brutal, and worse, it's almost evenly matched, so every effort i put in will be matched and if i don't put effort in it will be matched with enough beating to get me to fight again, it's a bad situation to be in for someone who does not box, but apparently it's ok, because the nazis are going to make me box and then i am supposed to be cut up into pieces and eaten,
i am in a room like a metro station, and at the foot of a stairway i am saying goodbye to elli, and i don't think she understands, and i tell her i love her and miss her and she says i will miss you too and i look in her eye and see she understands and then i wake up.
maybe this is the last festival?
will take next year off or be somewhere else?
but who are the nazis here, in this dream?
these are the days of the dead, the beginning wave,
i miss you, berlin, and i miss you too more than you will ever know,
xo
c

sad song

from o++o: the land of the dead

New work///selection from otto

This is what I'm working on right now, and tomorrow start with the collaborators.
Fekkin excited is what I am.
This is all from Berlin, where my heart fell out of my backpack on the way to catch the U-Bahn. Worse things can happen.

Graveyard film and new manifesto (short)

Ritual and polish equals magic.
(RPM theorum of art).
Technology, not polished technology, polish in presentation.
Rough technology.
Garage technology.
And poor rituals.
Done w/grace.
& energy.
& a spirit that remembers spirits.
A spirit of memory.
Of longing, longing to forget and unable to remember it in a way that frames the memory to still it.
As if we could remember it for the last time.
Unable to remember it correctly so that we have to keep repeating
keeping
repeating
pressing
play.

we never sleep

Okay so that above is just me walking around with a tiny handheld, it's not steady, and not edited, but to give an idea of what it looks like here (hi Dad! hi Ma!). This is my neighborhood (for now), and some shots of the subway, and other stuff.

And this is a nightclub where it starts up at midnight and goes on until morning, and it's one of the places where they open the slot in the metal door to look at you and see if you can come in or if they should shoot you for crimes against the state (we did not get shot because one of us was the dj). Inside it was very posh, and the room was like a big long tube under a subway track, with lots of mirrors and people who looked like they knew what they were doing. One of the best conversations about the dead I've ever had in my life, I would say.

This is a blurry picture of a church. Pretty stunning to see it.




This is my friend Miranda (interesting and brilliant, feminist art, I would certainly say, manipulates photographs to re-represent, and crosses the line between art and life), doing her performance piece which is a wedding, and that's Leon Johnson who's marrying them (I like this guy, whenever we meet we talk about raising kids and history and memory and it's funny and sad and we want to cry all the time because this is Berlin, and there's memory in the water and the rain, and it's hard not to remember a little bit every day, and some days it's a lot more than others), and then there's Jen Grasso (so cool, so so cool) and the groom (French, nervous).



This is a German thing, I don't know what it's called and I'm not going to go check right now. It's a fucken thing that you put clothes into. It's great, if you're washing clothes by hand, you put them in this, and it spins them around to wring them out. It's like one of those things that stirs atoms around, only it's your clothes, and you can sit there and press the thing down to shut it. Even though your friend told you not to, because it will lock, and it's broken so it won't open again. And your friend left you alone in his apartment while he is out of the country for a few days, so it's all yours and all your fault too. So you might wonder what to do for awhile, and then realize that if you take a butter knife, you can unscrew the 4 screws on the top to pull the thing apart and fix the latch. And you might put it back together and do the same thing all over again. Maybe.

I got mad at the end of this, but the day was lovely, they're nice here, these days, they don't pass like anything else I've ever seen, they go by slow but suddenly it's over and time to go sleep and do it again, 24 hours at a time, just like anywhere else only here there are more Lebenese restaurants.