Saturday, November 21, 2009

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.

Tuesday, November 10, 2009

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)...

Thursday, October 22, 2009

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

Wednesday, September 9, 2009

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.

Wednesday, July 29, 2009

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.

Saturday, July 25, 2009

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.

Thursday, July 23, 2009

A headache on a sunday

19/July NYC is like a headache on a Sunday

Oh this is NYC a layover & internet here (JFK) costs & not sure how long I wil keep my eyes open I smell bad like last night only worse and with cheese. There are texas accents here that make me feel sad, like when it is fall and I have shopping to do. I don’t want to write like Peter Handke. I don’t know whassup and I can’t see a goddam thing far away with my glasses on, my eyes are tired??? So the farsight is stronger??? I wil try not to think important thoughts (multiply that times 100). Oh what is going to be making my head turn next? This is sketching thoughts (not important) 4 project plan 4 next year (it starts in 5 days). I smell bad (cheese) and my stomach hurts. I like NY though (but it is sometimes like a headache on a Sunday).
Next year: the project will not be about Echo again, that was too prophetic, instead it will be about the guy who sleeps with all the women and they all love him and bring him baked pastas (that is a Fellini film already, his film is my film, we are all rome).
No greek no no greek, keep in Lucumi-Yoruba, stories like Ogun & Ochun, Obatala & Olokun.
The texas man is talking about how funny it is that in London they say fag to mean cigarette, and I decide to move.

After fallin asleep:
Make her more uncomfortable, drive out the indecisive, keep then the pure, the transformed. She is the muse, make the muse uncomfortable, because she is awake when she knows you are playing with her.
The secret is to not elevate it to a safe aesthetic, but to make it closer so it is disturbing (to her, and she likes to be disturbed).

Yewa, Oya & Obba, the funerary clan—heatbreaks told from the pov of the young girl in the garden, not innocent here not this story it is not innocent…

Film scenes, images around this not congruent with myth, even opposite?

Shango here is male principle (& Ogun), and here it is work, and fire, no time for contemplation, no time!!!

This would be an end of contemplation, & have to become a reflection (a mirror going on in the representation): end of day, we say MAKE THE WORK.




23/july (merrily merrily for I am come)

the muse is my bride – obsession is my bride
Innocence is sadness & suffering.
I can play w/my bride (but not innocence, you were always too sad, and one foot already in the grave…)
--so the work begins with Cuerpo-Real and next has to be the body, a ritual to end contemplation.
A funeral for innocence!
Innocence died when wanting to DO became wanting to POSSESS//on the ground this is more true than it is metaphorically true.
Union w/the earth ←o/+→ Ownership of the earth
(this is not Newtonian time, but a continuum)
Moving back to Union is always easy then, other movement here would be toward real estate: look…

There is no )
Further over)) union←→ownership←→profit←→accumulation/liver explodes
Here )

I write this on Karl-marx-straße and I remain…
CD 23/july



I am not done yet

In the above structure however, the innocence is in the union and that’s not really the case (the idea that people who live in union with the earth are innocent, is not true)

Innocence died when it became nostalgia. Beginning the story of wanting the girl of your dreams. Like your high school girlfriend. And they got younger and younger until it became stupid, and you found yourself wearing a striped shirt and driving into a tree.

1. →A funeral for Innocence.
2. →A birth into Obsession.
3. →An initiation into Desire
4. →A marriage between the Land & the Water.

A cycle exploring the uses of ritual in technology, and technologies of ritual.
(ritual in technology—use tarot cards for patterns of video)
(technology in ritual—tearing off the clothes using projected clothes on a nude body)

where quicktime pro is covered with honey so we may sweeten our representations.

The text is in process & almost extraneous.
The first versions of Cuerpo-Real – exploring in betweens, before birth and before the worms – is background, with very useful techniques (and very useful pots*)
(* alt title to Santeria aesthetics, very useful pots)








o/+cuerpo-real+/o
3
2 o 4

1

this is an embrace - the divine & the surface & the dead, it is making an offering as an act of acceptance of the offerings that were made to us at the moment/s of our birth/s


1. the city of death
2. birthday
3. desire: an initiation
4. the marriage of the earth and sea

each of these four parts will be approximately ½ hour. At the end of the year, the cycle will all be placed together and performed.

Sept-Oct. 1
Nov-Dec. 2
Jan-Feb. 3
Mar-April 4
May Cuerpo & 1-4


to tell people:
In Berlin, the Mercedes Benz is very cheap, it is like the vw bug in the US 30 years ago.
In Berlin, there are areas where people do not speak any language at all, and they do not remember any words.
In Berlin, time is different. For most Berliners, the future tense is very rarely used, and the past tense has a special, unpronounceable character, that remembers the Holocaust.

My network is Voodoophone,
And I bank at Sparkass.
MM hm.

Sunday, June 14, 2009

Artist statement

My work combines live performance art with media technologies (video, sound, projected text) to make for a combination that is deeply layered. I like complexity, and find that in live performance, complexity can serve to make multiple meanings. The body is a culture, and the computer is a culture, and together they make up a hybrid space for the viewer to reflect (and possibly to see themselves somewhere in the reflection). My latest works investigate the way that video and live performance overlap, in the way that photography and video overlaps, and speak to each other. I am interested in exploring these junctures. I am also very interested in the way time operates in these forms, and this seems to be the next direction in my work.

In my last cycle of works, the xo_ series, I was interested in exploring how Echo works as a mediated presence in a discipline that seems to privilege Narcissus, the act of gazing, and the male gaze itself. Unintentionally finding a philosophical home in Echo's realm, I found a place to iterate and reiterate. It was my first cycle of mediated performance works. One of the primary concerns was, and is, the line between performance and ritual. Coming out of my initiatory year as a priest in the Afro-Cuban Lucumi tradition, I am very curious to explore the notions of secrecy and openness. Politically driven toward an ideology of openness, and spiritually toward secrecy, I am interested in seeing how these speak to each other in performance, and what might escape hiddenness.

In the next phase of my work, I would like to explore time and space more explicitly, and outline a poetics of mediated sacred time. Drawing on the ideas of Maya Deren, Robert Farris Thompson, Lydia Cabrera, and David Byrne, I would like to explore a post-modern aesthetics of ritual time.


SYNOPSIS
This project is to make a trilogy of loosely connected films for performance (live performance, body art, with media), all loosely based on the Narcissus and Echo myth. In each of these, there will be various methodologies of performing subjectivity (and loss of subjectivity in the search for self and other), using different technologies and media. Each film is contained, and can be seen separately, but there are links between them that would make knowledge of each work beneficial for the pleasure of the performance text. The films are, in chronological order: xo_tact (using the myth of Echoing in terms of contemporary border issues between US-Mexico), xo_xx (searching for aspects of the muse in parallel archetypical patterns in Santeria Orisha), xo_xy (search for other through tarot, film, and culture).

3 completed videos (each about one hour long), which can stand by themselves, but much better if they are seen in conjunction with live performance (and here there are also three live performances).


I think the artworks were good and bad; there were some decisions that had to be made in each, that were very hasty. In xo_tact, I decided to throw out the idea of a film on the border and instead shot footage of myself as a narrator promising a film that never surfaces. In xo_xx, instead of mastering vocal recordings, I inserted live vocals where my modulated live voice spoke in place of the female deities. In xo_xy, the footage from the film in Mexico City was not ready so instead I had to use deteriorated and degraded footage from the shoot. In all cases, the accidents tied thematically in with the work, so I would say it was unintentionally successful.
For the research project, I enjoyed going into the works of Lacan and Deleuze to find theoretical frameworks for these artworks. I am not sure if I was successful in writing a coherent academic paper, or a Deluezian stream-of-consciousness work based on connections, so it ended up being somewhere between form and function and not quite either. But useful for future work, when I think I would like to use less European theories to look at my own work.

Monday, April 27, 2009

Excerpted interview

Interview excerpt:

I: Can you please tell us about the trilogy, particularly xo_xx & xo_xy?

CD: Yes, why, yes, that’s such a good question, I would like to answer, but first I would like to take in the question in all its weight, for it bears the weight of history. (Pause while CD takes in the weight of history, and from the way his breathing suddenly changes to the rhythm of one who must bear enormous grief, it is apparent that he has done this so many times before.)

I: Can I please go get some water while you are doing whatever it is that you are doing, I have not had anything to drink all day and I am feeling like I might be getting severely light-headed.

CD: No, now let me just speak a bit on xo_xx; this last piece, the one before the current piece, xo_xy. There is a table. There is a microphone. He speaks into the microphone and an electronically-manipulated voice, like that which would suggest the voice of a woman, comes out of the speaker. We see images of longing and desire, and occasionally, a woman’s face, who will speak to represent the Orishas (see footnote, not included in this document), and when she speaks, he is speaking for her. He speaks, but it looks like she talks. So funny.

I: That is actually very disturbing, because it almost suggests that even in this political economy, where there is some awareness of post-feminisms, the male speaker still speaks in place of her, so that he is still the one who speaks her echoes in a way, and she is erased in a way.

CD: Yes, very uncomfortable. Isn’t it?

I: I don’t think I want to listen to anything else because I am not sure I even trust that you’re who you say you are.

CD: I am not. And I am not Echo, but sure, that's me.

I: Good, interesting. Interesting to me because it's about me. I was going through a period where I was echoing all the time, because I was, you know, uncomfortable, sure, that's me. Now. xo_xy. Is there nudity?

CD: Yes.

I: Good, and tell me the reasons for this, is it to turn the table on the gaze, the Lacan thing, like you’ve done before, almost ad nauseum, is it that?

CD: Yes, it’s that kind of repetition, but a liberatory repetition. And yet. And yet. And still. I have been working out a lot, and working as an artist’s model, to make extra money since they cut all faculty associate positions at the university where I taught unflinchingly and unrealistically compensatedly for so many years (note: I blame myself), and so. I think it would be good to be naked in my living room in a way that other people might witness it, so they can see that when I am naked in my living room, I am also very much in shape, and most important, they know this one simple truth: I do not condone weapons and I do not drink, but when I go somewhere, I am always bringing my guns and a six-pack.

(They laugh and they laugh and they laugh, and she looks at him like she might want to make out with him on the porch, but she does not because suddenly she decides that she will use him to make her boyfriend jealous at a later date.)

(They don’t move.)

Monday, March 9, 2009

phoenix

This is going to sound worse or better than I mean it to, because of the strange sense that Mercury is working on things and either paying too much attention or not enough, to how words mean, and there's a lot of things that could happen when Mercury reads post-structuralism, and I hear he is (she is), and so and so and so, with that in mind, not enough to go on like this, even writing or talking, but listen, this is for me:
I have a love for Phoenix, it's a love for the girl you always felt something for. Not you, by you, I mean me. Phoenix is the girl I always felt something for. It's like that.
And it gets more complicated. On this past Art Detour, when thousands and thousands gather to support local art, and become one with the cultural mess that is this city, the mess I love, I love the mess, when thousands gather upon this downtown and just melt into the galleries and hang out for days and everyone loves everyone, and people drink beer and smoke hash and share hookahs, and people fall in love, and kids make fingerpaintings in the style of Witkiewicz and Giacometti, and everyone releases balloons at the same time, the art detour weekend in my dreams where it's all everyone all doing everything with everyone, and art it's art it's about art it's art; this art detour, I was so ready to open my doors to my house/gallery, and see who might want to wander off grand and follow the map to my place, to see the installations of the brilliant paintings by Tiffinie Greer, check out the carefully laid exhibition of past TIMB production ephemera, see Elli's art on the walls (including one of her recent works where she writes 10 times, "I'm sorry I poked you in the face," which is part of a longer narrative), watch old video work from past productions, see Rebecca Martos' cool video samples, and generally get the vibe or the groove or the atmosphere of who we are: a mystical arts laboratory whose secrets can't be revealed (honestly), and whose work is transgressive and transcultural, and generally thinky and interesting and visceral. You can come and draw chalk on naked bellies during performances where text overwhelms image, and the images are surreal mindscapes that are erotic or disturbing or generally just fuckin funny. I could not wait to see who would wander in, with low expectations.
Phoenix is strange. Is for me that girl in Las Vegas who might have worked out, but I never called her (oh but there's no regret there, really, the things that worked out there were lovely, and I'm only talking about that longing feeling that starts with a "what-if," but really doesn't hit the back of the heart...)..
But somewhere in my heart, the part that has low expectations, holds out a small hope that suddenly suddenly, and the room will spin and she is there, Phoenix, she's come into the room, and she wants to see everything, and know everything, and she wants to see all the dvds, and draw on everyone's belly, and then she wants to ask questions, and ask more questions, and my questions make her swoony, and she has more questions about my questions, and a long night is ahead. It's the hope. But Phoenix always says she's on the way, but never makes it.
She is nearly there, but will get stopped for a drug charge after they check her tags, and suddenly, she's gone for another 3 months, but she's coming back, and she wants to see me when she's back.
It's always like that, except when it's different, and when it's different, it's stranger. Because even like this weekend, where it's obviously time to move to Berlin, where there is no fake glamour, and some of the artists are smart, Phoenix comes in, and she's got a new look, and she's been reading the Situationists, and it's kind of hot.
But then the night begins, and it's always the same, it's so pleasant to talk to her, she's so elusive, but there's a point in the evening, after she starts to get drunk, and it's past midnight, where her make-up starts to fade, and I see something underneath, something much younger than she looked before, something much more innocent and scared, and something much more needy, and I'm being asked for something unclear, and none of the things I can offer seem to make her calm down. And then, when this game starts to feel ok, and we have roles, and places, and moves, and it's working, she starts to talk about her theories of everything, and it's almost interesting, but somehow goes back to why she likes Barry Goldwater.
And I shake my head at Phoenix, and look at the living ghosts and the dead identities of the locals who have been here for generations and don't get shown in galleries, and it's a longing for an elsewhere that's hard to place.
Phoenix can't come back for a month.
I can't open the door for her.
And then another day opens another revelation, in the form and content of an Afro-Cuban deity whose name is Yeggua; she's the beautiful young virgin in the cosmology, who was living in paradise, then was violated, and relegated to the bottom of the grave, where she eats the flesh of the dead. This is a serious and harsh punishment, and lately I am forced to contend with her image and energy, and I wonder, I wonder, if she's the girl on the porch who talks about Barry Goldwater, and wonder if she's got something much deeper, and much more powerful to reveal, and I think that's probably right, it's probably exactly right, Phoenix has more, and it might be endless, like the virgin girl who loves the edge of the beach, it might be elusive, and attractive, and endless, and might open up here, (D.F. is another story, my heart is already there, this time not as a metaphor) or might open up in Berlin, I don't know, but I am chasing rabbits, this is what I do.
xo
CD

Thursday, February 26, 2009

some news

this is a loose weave of new information, this is informative information that is meant for informative purposes only, and will only help to make a contribution to the kafka information files...

thumb

here's a return:
after they shaved off more bone on all sides, to make the end of my thumb-tip-bone a tower with a point rather than a saddle with a hump, it started to heal, and ebbs and flows is how it heals, messy business with blood and bone; my concentration is good, but when it starts to hurt i am prone to go in multiple directions, and when it's working like a line of flight, it's good, and when it's upset thoughts that go toward random associations, it's still a line of flight...

but lately...on february 10th it was swelling and hurting badly (it hasn't stopped hurting yet, with the exception of a few good days, which actually get longer, it is healing, but...), and i went to the surgeon, and the assistant thought it was odd and should be something to look at, and he said it was not odd at all and everything was fine, but ordered an mri...they never made the order, tho, so i am still waiting, and meanwhile, the physical therapy, where they have me play with clay, has caused pressure on the parts that are healing, and now it's swollen again...so, it hurts like it did in november, and i think about medical systems here, and i'm luckier than most...but insurance runs out in may when my job at asu ends...everyone is working less and everything is more expensive...

i complain too much...



home

this, the weirdest part of the year so far, after finishing my yawo year and wearing clothes like people do, and starting to work with spirits, it's a lot of new open doors, and a firework world, entering into the forest and talking and working works, and the forest is thorny and brambly, and there is no love without brambles...

i am smoking a cigar on my porch at 11 at night, and i am struck by how interesting it is to be suddenly talking to a man with a rifle pointed at me, and wondering to him out loud how he would get something from me when i don't have much, which makes him not very happy, and so he wants to see the inside of my house, and of course with the rifle he is allowed in, and i have some money stashed away, and he sees an ipod and takes that too, and when he leaves he wants me to run down the street so he can run in the other direction, and i don't really run, it's more like a fake little jog, but i'm tired, and don't think hes going to shoot me now, not after all we've been through together with the tour of my house and everything, and i'm right on that, not much else, but i remember the number for 911 so get to talk to the police, who pick up someone who's wearing the same clothes as the robber, but it's not him...case unresolved...

and two weeks later i come home after tutoring (for extra money and i hope an extra source of income after the teaching ends, and also working as an artist model too lately, it pays well, and i like being still and the smell of artist studios and the way teachers talk about shapes and colors), and my backyard barricade is broken up and my little girl's pogo stick (it was mine when i was her age, so it's old school rusty and nasty looking, but bouncy and she's good) is sticking out of the gate; my neighbor who is this mystic woman who grows hundreds of prickly pear cactus in her year tells me she saw him in my yard and yelled and the police came and he had my other neighbor's bike, but they couldn't prove it so he left...and two days later i talked with the police and called for extra patrolling in the neighborhood...

and meanwhile my bike is starting to have more problems, like losing juice on the freeway, which is hard to live with comfortably, so it's being discusses while we speak so it might be fixed, and i'm on foot and buses and the rail here, which is lovely, really, and when i get home one day (yesterday), i take a nap but hear a sound, and look out my window and there's a junkie in my yard holding my old brooms, and he explains that he is just stealing them so he can sell them; it's not a big score, and not worth going to jail for, but the police think it's enough, and worth the trouble, and they're right, so i get to meet more police and watch them decide to change a nickname they had for one officer from 'cabbage patch' to 'rain man,' and rain man looks happier with the change...the junkie tho looks unhappy, but he wasn't happy to be in my yard either, he does not look happy being a junkie...and that's a third robbery, so i consider it sealed and maybe done...?

xo_xx (and then xo_xy

i like the way xo_xx is working (it's on youtube, look under xo_xx), and things are occurring to me in performing it that make it more interesting to me...in this, where the icons and images are all female, female people or female orishas, i am speaking in an electronically altered voice that is female, and added an anthropologist named susan blackwoth smith-reynolds as a character to explain santeria, and also i take polls of the audience while it goes on, to mark their level of pain on a scale of 0-10, 0 being no pain and 10 being the worst pain imaginable, and am happy about the quantitative results; but am also pleased with the way gender and the sacred work in this, and how this film for performance is becoming more intimate and more seductive, and looking forward to developing this more while also moving into the creation and continuing collaboration with iris méxico, and got a grant to work with her next month in d.f. and all the rabbits that whispered last year are speaking now, under the surface of the earth, i hear them especially at night, and they sound like the secrets of the depths of the ocean, which of course is true, and the rest of what i know is only accessible through walking, and so, i find myself walking in an enchanted forest just like everybody else.

love,
cd

Monday, February 9, 2009

xo_xxPOST(post)


post post
this isn't done
xo_xx
there will be more, another version, something in the basement, something longer,
o i would like to post the video here, but there is this brief nudity thing and i don't want them to take this down...what can you post that wouldn't offend their nudity regulations (and what's a way to make a public statement about it?) ((because it's sort of like, it is, or sort of like, obscenity laws, it's a new kind of censorship where the nude is no longer allowed in public discourse unless it's explicitly pornographic...))
(((um, there's more to look at on that)))

ok, this is a de-briefing,
from the weekend, the first incarnation of the new piece, xo_xx,
my mentor, violeta luna, came from sf to see it, and conversations with her, and then with her and michele ceballos, and it was lovely and i do not want to forget:


this piece, intention was to make this the second, the in between between xo_tact and xo_xy, and the last would be more with vocal and sound and using sound technologies, but this one, xo_xx, this one suddenly seems suited for that...more than any other...and i want to play with it...
the idea of a male body iterating female deities played/projected by female human beings (performance artists, artists), in context of performing narcissist looking for echo
(here echo is x, is iris meXico) ((repeated)) (((three times)))
and then presenting the findings of the "research" as a visual documentation/tone poem...
and comments to:
inhabit the body while performing (used in performance, useful), and be the male body performing the not performing, performing the body in front of the screen that does not move, and is in front of a microphone, which is not used for the first 6 or 7 minutes...useful...and then only performing speech, literal performance of a speech act...female voice...and then the orishas and world of the orishas--
on that, how much context do they need?
it's a refusal of meaning or explanation, is nice, works, but this is going to be longer, and maybe maybe
perform other voices...
a persona who is an anthropologist,
describe the deities
and get the information all wrong
but obviously wrong
inside and outsider,
and also
with this
perform the body
this orisha is working on this part of the body,
the head,
the eye,
the heart,
the stomach,
the sex,
and draw signs on the body and reveal the body and draw the signs in the color
so there is action on the body and the body is speaking female voices but also drawn on and inscribed on...
and have public draw on the body,
not the usual,
the one most uncomfortable with drawing, the one i'm most uncomfortable with drawing on me...
and so on...
and more on film as script...
keep as idea that this is independent,
and continue to conceive as independent,
and continue with the poetry of the images...
and more,
i will remember more,
but such lovely and perfect collaborators, and am grateful and this is for you...
xoxox

MANIFESTO OF CROSSED ONTOLOGIES Everybody (and by everybody I don ’ t mean everybody I think I mean one person, and I mean you, in par...