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.

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...