Friday, September 30, 2011

kinmaya

reflections of an art model (1)

this might be a new series.
(we'll have to see)
we have to see the sea, it's out my window, they're falling in the streets, they're bleeding in the streets, and i have cow blood on my heart and on my groin, the mornings are cool and lovely and perfect, and the birds that turned into bats are turning back to birds again, and i am seeing white feathers everywhere.

they say, in a kinmaya way, that i am un lazador de mundos (with white tones)  ((baba fururu, u pwn me)) (xo x 8 plus +o in the 4 movements of the sun)

i just want to sleep.  i am staring at a fox wrapped in bubble wrap, this isn't the first fox today, there's something about these foxes that will keep me up, but not yet.  i am staring at the fox until it turns into a gun and this is part of the counter-revolution on wall street, where people trade guns in bubble wrap, but eventually the bubble wrap becomes the gun, an act of sympathetic capitalist magic where the container becomes the thing itself.  but it's fake, and we've all been cheated, i kick at the walls with my punk motorcycle boots and ask simply that we wake up after i nap, but i am already napping, being drawn in charcoal and pencil and already napping, and the french girls are trying to kill the boys with their stares but no one is dying, it's frustrating, it's not the french girls' fault, it never is, and my daughter tells me to stop interrupting because she has something important to tell me about how her friend was talking just as fast as she was.

this is the week of fast-talking children, making something out of all of this.

but i am already dreaming, i am already so far asleep, and the smell of the blood is starting to turn on, and someone tells me something about someone moving away and she's living somewhere with someone and honestly, i don't want to know, i really don't want to know any more about that.  i am dreaming, but it's obvious that i am half-awake, but these objects in my hands are turning long again, and this is not my dream, i am not alone, suddenly, at the fringes of a hot summer about to turn mystic, i am not alone, and this could be the best news i have heard all day.  love is shades of blue and chrome brown eyes that i won't forget as long as she's gone, and it comes haunting in shades of blue against sheets of rain, there is a scene there, inside the sheets there is a scene, and i can't quite make out the figures but i think one of them is me and one of them is not.

and before i can go through the rain, there are teenage boys asking for things, and there are sad girls wishing the noise would just stop, and there are curious boys and girls eating ice cream somewhere on the fringes of the world.  everyone wants to get past the sheets of rain to where the magic is starting to move things, but we have to wait, because we have sheets to fold and other people's dreams to dream, and there are foxes gathering at the edges of this forest, this african forest that is always so strangely inflected with slavic teeth, and my ancestors are moving in the blood in my jaw, they keep telling me to look at the nine of cups, and when i finally talk in my sleep loud enough to let them know that i am listening to the nine of cups, something starts to catch fire, and this is going to be another long night, one that could last nine months if we're lucky. 

Tuesday, September 27, 2011

twitch notes/faux(r)eal

Twitch is a project that came from various contradictory impulses, the same kinds of conditions that cause us to twitch in our corporeal forms.  First, there is the impulse to connect selected histories, with the intention of looking for common threads that might tell a story that makes sense.  Next, there is the impulse to investigate those particular feelings that scatter in the air like angry birds when love starts to go in impossible and untenable directions.  And last, there is the impulse to find a suitable form through which we might be able to enter into the moment directly.  To throw off the loose strands of histories that no longer sing in pretty tones and enter into a historical moment voluntarily.

It's impossible not to talk about love when thinking of this work, then, and perhaps that's how it should be.  Looking at the more ridiculous things that all lovers do, get jealous, act out, or withdraw, and then finding the core of these reactions through direct and indirect relationships with the material of relationships.  We found, through the course of developing this work, that most of us tend toward certain hyper states of consciousness when the thrill is no longer as thrilling as we'd once hoped.  We also tend to try desperately to make up versions of ourselves, new identities, that can open spaces for new directions of thought, hoping the heart might follow.

When the heart is stuck between two places, there is a twitch.  When impossible histories of gender expectations meet with the possibility of writing new gender situations, there is also a twitch.  This piece takes place in that in-between state, before consciousness decides to follow the directions the body has already chosen. 

The images on the screen are rooted in Marie's pre-real place, where dreams are waiting to form, making perfect reflections of moments that play themselves over until they become like the best sad songs.  The scenes are two versions of Marie with two versions of impossible and ridiculous loves.  The live performance actions are where the heart of the myth is enacted, Little Red Riding Hood embracing and becoming her own wolf.  It's not meant to be a clear narrative, otherwise we would wear our hearts on our sleeves, rather than strapping them to our chests for a peculiarly vulnerable offering, with hopes of a transformation that will lead us into sustained movements in time. 

hybrid installation rhizomatic performance work

this is the seminal work, this is the ovarian work, this is the work that crosses all the borders and barriers, this is the only thing worth seeing at the end of the 20th century, and it is already too late.  because the 20th century ended a few years ago or more, and we're still doing the same things.  no one will know this is a repetition, without a revision, this is hiphop from the days before garage band, and it sounds much worse than we think it does.

begin with a white room, a latin man is sitting on a white chair, with a white piece of cloth over his head.  a caucasarian man is standing behind him, pouring three different colors of syrup over the same head, lime, vanilla, and cherry.  in a bold move that represents the evils of the northamerican empire, the lime is replaced with blueberry, and history is erased and eaten, like a cloth on the head (note to self: do not eat heads).



next section: oh my god this gets just so much worse and there is much more blood now than in the first part, because ohoho, the past is prologue...he is lying face down on the floor, on a pile of various chicken organs.  there is a lot of visceral response expected from the part of the audience, and some disturbingly unexpected colors from the organs mixing, only no one can see it because he is lying on it and so the performance fails. 

more

Friday, September 23, 2011

cgs/y too far to rest

This is a turn, one that came on unsuspected.  Everything worth following comes unexpectedly, Alice didn't expect the rabbit, and didn't expect that he was part of the Spanish Inquisition.  With whatever drops or ounces of Spanish blood in my veins, I'm mustering up the courage to stop pushing, to smoke a lovely cigar in a night that is a little cooler than the last one. 

There was a moment, just a short one, on a night when I couldn't get away from the heat from the cement or the anger that was playing darts in my own head, one of those nights where all the lovers seem just stupid, but the body is still too connected to the pulse of the last time in a bed with hotel sheets to be out of love, or out of reach of its peculiar spells.  I'm sitting in front of a room full of people who are trying to draw my head, and it was draped like a pirate if I remember this right, and it was the worst night of my porous memory because they could see through the pores in my head and see traces of her, like a palimpsest of her face over my face.  I couldn't leave it like that, as much as it seemed romantic and true at the time, because my head is my own head, and no one can see in to tell me about the things that are there, not when they are that obvious, because obvious statements make me bored.

I remembered what it was like being sixteen years old, when these things didn't matter, because there was always something else around the corner, and it was easy because it was all acting.

And I spent the next twenty or so years trying to take apart that very thing, the impulse to represent something in an accurate reflection, the impulse to reflect something in an accurate representation.  Because art could do more than that, and the art that I loved the most was capable of much, much more.

And I spent hours in spaces with other people who felt the same way I did, but didn't know exactly how to get there, and we fed each other with an energy and a presence that suggested that this was not only not real, but that there was no real to reflect, and the idea of reflection was an insult to history, that re-creating any event with an accurate portrayal of its reality was condescending to reality.  And we found that there were other realities that could be represented, and that by exploring these and making plans to present these in a public way would give the spectator just enough of a glimpse into themselves that they would have a hint at the real that lay just out of reach.  Our symbolic worlds were ways of speaking of the real without trying to touch it directly, because that always struck me as a poor reflection, or a roadmap to a kind of madness that says we can know what there is to know.

Dada became a goddess or a god, before I knew that there was a Dada I would meet someday, after I'd been initiated into the forest and had gone to the river. 

In another moment, I'm in a room full of actors who are trying to portray someone who's just received news that a family member had cancer.  The idea was to create a standardized performance so that we could present the same character with the same emotions every time.  Somewhere between a mirror exercise and an improv, I found out that I could enter into this kind of representation, even though it was raw and absolutely present, no sense memory required, and it didn't insult the people or the events that I was going through.

And my blood was running in my veins, and I felt sixteen years old, and angrier than I had ever been in my life.  This was an uncomfortable revelation, because all the things that I'd spent so much time rejecting seemed to still have a place, and that their place was still very useful in the things that I was trying to do.

And I learned that my stories that are told in the dark are not stories I am telling myself out of an incomprehensible sense of loneliness or loss, but from a loneliness and loss that made me angry because we all share these stories.  Or we have the capacity to relate to them in a significant way, and that some assumptions I had made were very wrong.

I rejected the western forms because I imagined that not everyone in the world shares the same capacity to understanding reality through these methods of reflection, that there are still people in the world who see a horse with only two dimensions, and that there are places where the goddesses and gods are so loud and clear that they infect everything, and it's impossible to create a world that does not include everything.  So I included everything, knowing I was leaving some things out, and also knowing that there was no method for this at all, and the old method would not work at all. 

After spending three years or more living with African goddesses and gods in my head in my house, I can still talk to someone about being afraid of losing my father, and they can still seem to know what that might be like. 

It's not that important then to recreate everything, to throw out all of the things of cultures I don't naturally respect, because I am learning that there is freedom in pretending that we understand each other, even though I am uncomfortable when this is sometimes shown to be true.  I am not tired.  This is not about throwing something away because it is too exhausting, but it is about taking the things that worked, and picking up the threads of the ones who came before us, like they were fleece left on the bushes for me to find, at this particular moment, making things turn gold when I had given up hope that this particular journey would be something other than darkness. 

Like a lover who is possessed by the soul of someone you lost and need desperately, these traces are threads that point to something inexplicably real, and simple, and easier to carry.  These things might be this and not this, this lover might actually be her and not her, and it will all probably change at some point in the near future, but I can pretend for now, and this might be better than wondering how to make worlds out of shadows that have never been real.  Because we do touch source, I've been there, and I can look in your eyes, or the memory of your eyes, and I can see that you have been there too. 

Wednesday, September 21, 2011

cgs/y por que nosotros somos ustedes

this is not the worst thing that could have happened after a few days with a little food, and a little sleep, and a lot of coffee.  riding madly thru the streets of phoenix to get a little girl home after her bedtime, bouncing between cars because i am faster than sound when my head is cool, white lightning in my head, and i am not confused.  this is different than yesterday. 

a short man in a hat gives me hope for the place i live, and troy davis leaving the world gives me doubt and too much sadness for that same world.  but not so much the city, which is also different than yesterday.  tonight i want to sweat on september nights in phoenix, i want to sweat next to the steroid drunks who bumped my little girl (they didn't know, they didn't understand, we were there with fucking helmets, this is not supposed to be a war, but we are clearly in a war, class and race and gender warfare, and everyone i love has something at stake).  i want to be sweating in phoenix right now, loving and working and making art with these people.  there's hope here, and some of the ones who have given up hope are doing very interesting things with their time.

but listen, i am terribly choked up tonight, and it's hard to see as straight as i would like.  and i keep getting reminded that my eyes are so much worse than they were at the beginning of the year...i have the eyes of the father (and i don't mean dad)...but that dad, the biological one, is where i start to stammer and can't speak as well as i think i should.  these things come back, and while there are things that can be done, the same lightning that flashes through my tongue flashes through the surgical steel and i hope it can surge through his body without taking it off the surface of the waking world.  i am too tired to want to think about the things that he gave me when i was the child on the couch when he was trying to take away the pain on so many sleepless nights.  children are sleepless in my family, and when we are adults, our hearts are anxious, and they twitch and murmur, and it always makes me think about lost love. 

so tonight i have a stammering stuttering song that can't quite make it to my lips, like the bird in my throat is too fluttery to make a clear sound, so it just sounds like this. 

bells come to wake me up, nothing better than waking up to a bell that comes, and the sweetest bell in the world is a bell, is still a bell, and all these miles have done nothing to erase that cool silver lightning love that flowed and flowered in my veins when i was captured into knowing you. 

tonight i can see that there are more mountains and more rain, and more stories to sing about the things that happen on the floor of the desert and on the stairwell at the lips of the sea, and it doesn't matter how much i put my anxious heart on my altars and ask it to stop singing about you, it doesn't stop singing.  and it shouldn't make me choke as much as it does when the cards tell me clearly that you're still there in the center, that you never did leave the home that i built for you there, and there's a fire that still burns.

and it burns my veins, and it burns my skin, and it burns my eyes until everything small becomes blurry, and the larger details are all that i can really focus on.  i am all forest and no trees, but i do know that when i enter into new forests, i do get lost there, and i like being lost, because my heart knows where to go.

this is a song about lost love, about losing something i can't ever really lose, and finding things, small traces of things that i want to know.  let the fire in my veins guide me, then, since no external gods will show me how to leave with any kind of grace, or hyper-phallogocentric finality, let the things that burn in me take me forward and move me through the world like a machine that knows the channels of these concrete rivers that line the floor of my sweat-soaked home.  this is where european and latin and native bloods have to either fight or mix, and on some nights, a bit of both is how we learn to invent a fiercely local tango, one that dances around the home in our heart.  the endless longing is not the conquistador, and not the inappropriate appropriation, the longing is not the colonist, and when i surrender, i am not colonized, i am born here, this is the night where i am born here, on the edges of this equinox, with fallen victims and falling fathers and mothers whose hearts are relentless and exhausted.  i'm making things, and i'm not letting you become the muse this time, but i'll let the muses lead me forward, because they infected me through the veins every time i fell in love.  i'm not looking for your twin or your distant cousin, because your incarnation is the first of its kind, and keeping my house in order will keep things warm, prepared for another night of sweating deep in the desert, my throat intact, and my blood running like a river, taking aim like an archer, for the moment when i can speak without stammering, and without regretting a single thing we never said. 

Wednesday, September 14, 2011

muses

this is more important than forgetting to expect the things i thought i was waiting to expect.
the table below is from wikipedia, of course, where the Greeks always posted thoughtful blogs about their favorite goddesses.  i would never stoop to it.  there are too many wolves at the door, too many howls against the moon getting small again.  that's the last chance we ever had to make a wish, and it will never come around again until the next one, and then there won't be any chances after that until the next one.  the howling makes me nervous, but if i tell you here that i can hear it, maybe just maybe you will stop? or maybe just maybe it's me.  there's nothing more nervous than casting a spell that you just know is going to work.  watch for signs of light outside your window, we're woken up, it's not a dream, and it's not just the wind and the rain this time.
idea for this next work, making connections between these and the local versions in the americas...so far we can syncretize:
calliope-olokun (our story is an epic story, only she knows all of the details)
clio-yewa (history as story of humans, she holds all the bodies and knows all the stories on the body)
erato-oshun (easy match)
euterpe-oya (knows the songs of the dead because she hears them as they enter the cemetery)
melpomene-obba (no one knows tragedy better, longing for an impossible lover is the greatest tragedy)
polyhymnia-yemaya (songs of the tongues of the living on the water of the world)
terpischore-yemu (the first dance, the one that started it all)
thalia-nana buruku (comedy is born of tragedy; yemu gave birth to them all but she nurtured them all)
urania-ochanla (marked and marking the sky)

the heart of this is to start something larger than before, something deeper than before, more baffling and lyrical and even accessible than before...putting identity at the mercy of these muses for 9 months, spending one month on each to make a short film/performance...some will have more media than others, some will be bare of any media at all, some will be a new song or series of songs, and some will have to be invented as we go along.  i think i need to ask a lot of people to help on this one, it's going to be a long work...

and at the end of this day, my heart still goes out to the ones who have to suffer pains that they did not expect, hoping that the time spent on their particular roads will give them endurance and inspiration to keep going, because something good is coming of all of this, tonight i am sure, because it happened to me that way.
ache.


Emblems of the Muses

Muse Domain Emblem
Calliope Epic poetry Writing tablet
Clio History Scrolls
Erato Love poetry Cithara (an ancient Greek musical instrument in the lyre family)
Euterpe Song and Elegiac poetry Aulos (an ancient Greek musical instrument like a flute)
Melpomene Tragedy Tragic mask
Polyhymnia Hymns Veil
Terpsichore Dance Lyre
Thalia Comedy Comic mask
Urania Astronomy Globe and compass  

Monday, September 12, 2011

Cgs/the politics of despair

Every situation in the v.a. is complicated, and everything refers back to an originary idea of what it means to be a soldier (sometimes a warrior), and every originary is a cipher or an asterisk that leads to something else.  Not enough footnotes in the world to unpack these identities, some are still carrying proof of themselves in vinyl covered folders.  We all want to get confirmation that we are, that we really are, but we also suspect that every situation is temporary.

She asks him, "Why are you here?" (Always a good question)
He tells her, "Cancer came back." (Never a good answer)
It's a peculiar thing to be floating like this.  Shards of black glass that the Coyote pulled from my heart before she went off to howl, they got lost outside my doorframe, and should have made things hurt less by the morning.  But you don't know our mother does when you are not around.  Since you left she has taught me so many things, and one in the morning is her favorite time to teach.  I rolled over too quickly, she was dragging me to get out of bed and go outside to listen to her.  Black shards flying out of the edges of the moon, they look silver when the ocean is under my tongue.  This is going to be a long war.

It's more peculiar to watch how things grow when you stop fighting.  I change my sobriety date to St Patrick's day last year.  17s are important but I don't know what they want yet, like I need another place to feel the sting of the edges of the blade.  I don't know what any of this is for.  I see you disappearing when you leave, I say it's not magic, you never said you were coming back.  But it becomes up to me to seal the doors and windows to keep you out, because when I open my tongue to your salt water, I grow haunted and so very grey. 

I don't know what any of this is for.  You're coming back, but another mask and another name and I won't remember it's you until your hair falls over me somewhere where it is already one in the morning.  I don't know what this is for.  But I love the sea.  It's where my father came from, and where we all go. 

Wednesday, September 7, 2011

cgs/& why i never drank over you

This thing is coming to light, this thing is coming to pass, hiding in the cupboards, making furtive moves behind a chair that I still don't have, moving through the stolen milk crates and the beds that make up the furniture (and a lost bed that got taken away in the night when no one was looking), crawling across the floor and disguising itself like a rubber ball that contains all the colors of the rainbow.  But it won't reveal itself yet, it's a chapter of a story that hasn't started yet, and I'm not in any hurry to open the book.

There was this exchange.  The daughter is doing math projects, and the father is doing yoga on the floor.  They're both on the floor, really, on the floor with the dog who is unable to contain just how happy she is that this is all happening on her floor.  The daughter says, "I am going to put glitter on your stomach, is that all right?"  The father says, "Yes, of course."  She says, "It's body glitter, so it will probably stick for awhile."

It's a good thing, a very good thing.  He forgot to cover himself with chalk after reading cards for a stranger that afternoon, and there were some lingering things that needed to be neutralized, and body glitter is some of the best voodoo on the market, but hard to do this ritual exactly.  Tonight, this is done exactly the right way, and even the ancestors are pounding their fists on the floor at the way these things tend to arrange themselves.

His stomach is sinking lately, really, upset at itself for worrying about things as mundane as money.  Spending money lately on frivolous things, like trips to old west towns, fried things in restaurants where the waitresses all have brown eyes, and keychains for remembering the places she's been.  It's important to remember, he thinks, but even more important to build a list of places, and to keep going.

This is a family disease, old Gypsy spirits in the bloodline, a constant restlessness to seek and to wander to feed the seeking.  "And outside in the cold distance, a wildcat did growl..."  It was very clear that there were things in all these moments that were suddenly terribly important.

Not the least of these came when, surrounded by hippies disguised as cowboys, or the other way around, he was struck by how this place was fed by ideas of masculinity and femininity that no one in their right mind could possibly live up to, and these days, could want to live up to.  He was thinking about her again, not the daughter, another her, a too young for him her, and a string of old friends who grew up on border towns, but on the wrong side.  On this side, they sell everything like crazy, but all the coolness is removed, and there is only a cynical celebration of muscle and glands, the kind that wear themselves on the bars of motorcycles so that there's no question about anyone's intentions.  On the other side, there are other things worth paying attention to, not least of which is that there is better music over there.

Over there is so far away, though, because they forgot their passports, and are stuck in a place where the only decent thing to do is to honor the dead.  During a short visit to the cemetery, she tells the father that she wants to be a saloon girl, half zombie, half living, and all history.  This is a history that every generation wants to recover, but no one really knows how, because the courage has been burned off all the residents, or at least as far as he can see.  He wants to tell her about real Cowboys and real Coyotes, ones she knows, but she has a look in her eye when she talks about these things that makes him stop.  Maybe she can figure out the trick to this particular lock, his generation fucked it all up.  This generation might have better ideas, but right now they all seem too wounded.  Maybe patriarchy does ravage us all, or maybe it's these old ghosts wanting to set the record straight, or maybe it's the same thing.  Better to pay attention only to those ghosts who want to live through acts of fearlessness, the ones who know that at that terrible dividing line between life and death, gender as we know it ceases to matter.  But it's also likely that in times of crisis, it's all that most of us are aware of, so we try to take it with us like a shield, and we crash into things that make us entirely different.  Usually entirely different means much stupider, because we don't know how to let go of the things we no longer require.

Sorely disappointed there were no Gypsy fortune tellers in any direction, he knew that he had become one somewhere along the line.

This is what the cards said.

Whatever plans had been underway, with cups and chariots and lovers and fools, everything had been interrupted by swords.  It seems so far away, but it could have happened yesterday, because it probably did.  There would be more illness all around, and death all around, and the old lovers were declining any entrance, but some offered blessings to look further down the road, and some were holding on behind curtains that he wouldn't recognize as familiar.  He didn't want to believe any of it, because there was an urge to build something beautiful out of all this heat, there were gardens that hadn't come yet, and they were visible by doing tricks with eyes and light. 

Then there was news, an aunt with an emergency that needed her heart opened up, and the father of the father with new growth inside the thing that just housed cancer, and a boy who was starting to choke, and the brother of the father who was starting to inject insulin.

The daughter complains that she broke her wrist, but she can move it, so she does math projects on the floor and pours glitter over his stomach.  This would be all right.  There would be suffering and there would be pain, but there was magic here, reflected in lights that came from her hands.  That's how you heal, he thought, that's how it's done.  The thing that hurts you becomes the thing you learn how to use.

That girl was there, too, the one who guided him through endless nights that turned from cold to unbearably hot until they broke in half, she was there, too, and she was saying that she could never be all that he thought she would be.  But she was wrong, because she became something so much more, like an idol, or an amulet, something to carry around the neck like a beautiful scar, like a beautiful jewel that didn't try to hide the scar underneath. 

This was the place, then, where men were looking at the kinds of suffering that opens doors to the next world, and wounded women were preparing to heal things.  He knew that he'd taken his place in things, become the father and started to live in its myths, but he'd also learned how to become that other thing, and there was something in that shapeshifting that made it suddenly very urgent to tell his daughter about these things, and he couldn't tell her directly because she might miss it if it was too direct, but it was something that could be unfolded, like a dress, or a paper fortune-teller, or a life. 

Tuesday, September 6, 2011

cgs/today i am fragmented

So when I walked in and saw her sitting on the couch and eating a pickle for breakfast, I put my tongue between my forefinger and thumb.  She was on the verge of so many things.  I felt like I was on the verge, but that may or may not be true.  In her case, every structure I had tried to throw off in the course of a life was there to announce that she was on the verge, and there was very little I could do.  I thought about sugar and spice, and the way she always chose pickles, or hot peppers, or black nail polish, over anything sweet, and understood that the only thing left for me to understand was that some things are worth forgetting about, and others are very important.  At this moment, it seemed like it was necessary to be in the room with the pickle smell and not react in any direction, because in this case, it was about sugar and spice or something much more original and interesting, and I didn't want her to think I was encouraging or disapointed, but I knew, I understood for certain, that the last thing the world needed at this moment, was another disappointed father.  

cgs/&the bells

Like a kid on Christmas morning, or like a kid who's been staring out the window by himself for too long and just realized that they were marching in, that the soldiers were marching into the town, I woke up feeling like it was up to me to wake up all the grown-ups in the world, finding them asleep at the wheel, in charge of things, making things and breaking things, and pretending to be things they couldn't possibly live up to, and shake them, saying, "It's time to wake up, it's time to wake up, we have to wake up now, it's time to wake up."

cgs/&slowly to autumn

It was happening all around me.  The season was starting to change, and I was no longer in love with anyone any more.  And everything was just starting to hurt.  But I'd never been more excited about smelling things in the air that were starting to turn green, like a season of dying had come to an end, and I knew that this had something to do with me. 

Friday, September 2, 2011

cgs/y why i am not a cartesian apologist

(oh but unfortunately, as much as i hate to admit it, i do know that is)...
this is getting ridiculous, this thread that keeps showing up everywhere...the black one that looked like your hair, and i remember eating it, and then two years later i ate it again, and in all that time, in between those times, you turned into so many people, so many different people, and none of them reminded me of you after a month or two, enough so that i don't know what they did to you, and i don't really understand what happened to them, either.

something on the way to becoming something that i already was or they already were, something on the way between here and there, and when i recognized that they were no longer you, it was like something coming true, like they were coming true...she was like a wish that came true.

so i swallow my breath in tunnels, and hair flies into my mouth because it sometimes doesn't matter what things are shut or locked tightly, persistence is rewarded by nature, and bravery is so very rare these days that no one can remember if nature rewards it or not.  there is a woman in berlin who told me that it is, and i would believe her if i can find her.

look.  i'm not talking about the versions of you that i can find here, the versions through which you like to paint your own representations, this is more like plato's cave than the waking world, even, and that's already a cave.  this is a cave within a cave, once removed, and dressed up to look like it isn't a cousin.  we're all going to dress up and pretend that we are not related, but you might recognize me by my tattoos when the clothes start to come off.  they never do come off all the way.  i'm not talking about you like that and i'm not looking at you talking about me like that.  there were real people once, i remember, on a porch or in a bed or under a borrowed blanket or finding the skin of priests in graveyards, there were real people once, and i am trying to find my way back to them.

but there is more thread and more hair, and whenever i think i've eaten the right strand, the one that has your taste and smell, you go away and become someone else, and i don't know what i'm eating any more.  i am the cow by the side of the road, remembering the time when it was once sacred.  this is the wrong time and the wrong place for any of these things, but the pieces are all in view, they just haven't found their way to the table yet, because we lost track of the table.  

Thursday, September 1, 2011

this is not a new post

and not urgent at all, listen, this next thing...oh i have no idea why i have to tell you these things and tell you right now...
the ocean, the sea, el mar (and her brother lamar), and all that those 7 sea things out there yes those...project new project based on my love is the sea, a fictitious project that happened once (note to self, do i even have the script for this any more, and if i do, can i please remind myself what the hell it was about? i think i liked it very much but it reminds me of the national, it is sweet and sad but it all kind of sounds like everything else)...ok so we'll find that...based on that then, only so i remember it, a new version that has nothing to do with the original and entirely recycled but not in the least at the same time...cuz i don't want to get over you, oh this is a love song about the sea...and suddenly there is nothing more to say until we get to part two.

part ii
that came up too quickly, that part.  reverse the route of che, or trace it exactly, and begin at the tip of the continent and work my way up, performing performance with nothing but a motorcycle.  and a projector.  and 35,000 dollars.  it will be just like a revolution in the beginning, except there will be more money, better transportation, and a lot less love, because although che was great he was also too co-dependent, and in the end, that's why he became insane and started walking by people just so they would shake and pee in their boots...
part ii is the real artificial meat in this, where we plan the geography...it's not a tour of latin america, but a long line of flight that investigates something about love and longing, something about missing the sea, and something about how we might or might not know how to talk to each other any more.

part iii is too late but it's already time for it but i am not there i'm gone.

cgs and september

and i miss so many people these days, and wonder if anyone was ever here, or if it all took place elsewhere, and if it only can happen elsewhere, in another time and another skin, and if it has to happen there, then i will leave here this morning and won't stop until i get there, and i can't call to let you know i'm on the way, because i can't send messages when i'm on the way, and maybe it doesn't even matter except it does matter that i know that i am on the way (i'm surrounded by friendly fools here, and none of them look a thing like you, but i don't know how i'd even recognize you, hot as it is, my head as hot as it is)

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...