Data Fragments

Peace on a New Year's Day

2012-01-01T14:56:00.001+01:00

The rain falls as if bored.

The cobbled streets andstoned sidewalks littered

with thousands of spentexplosives.

The City is a brickhangover.

The kitchen shelves are wipedclean.

The laundry room walls arewashed,

window frames paint now freeof smoke stains.

Coal in the furnace keepsthe chill outside

where it watches, wanting tocome in

and be free of itself.

Intricate patterns ofswirling, droning guitar

pick up speed and slow downagain,

played by a dead man. (thanks, Jack!)

Imperial sadness shimmersthrough the rooms.

War, famine, flood andsickness are children

just now sleeping on theirmother's cold lap.

She spins, waiting forbetter days.

Can there be a City ifeveryone has gone?

Every film, in every homeand cinema is on endless loop

as the City tries toremember.

Peace now, convulsive world!

Drift to sleep with a smileon your face.

Remembering the festivitiesof last night;

theimage of dancing through a laced window curtain.

A Story, Fragments and Art, Christmas 2011

2011-12-12T20:24:00.001+01:00

Whencertain conditions are met, and are agreeable to History, tales are often told.

The Man and very Young Woman traveled by night, and thecalmness of the clear, temperate air seemed a contradiction to the fear thatseeped into everything once folks had gone indoors for the evening. It waspeople that were to be avoided, as the fear was everywhere, like water or air.With the foreign army very recently in control, its own concerns were with thesmall Pockets of Resistance, which by turn gave the local, indigenous ReligiousCouncils the fuel they needed to turn over folk who appeared in any way athreat to the promise of power they hoped to gain by collaboration with theforeigners.

TheYoung Woman wore the clothing required by the local council, covering hergender that was by nature deemed tainted in sin. This homespun fabric alsoconcealed the sin of her rape, which had resulted in her pregnancy. The Man andYoung Woman traveled under the fabric of night into farther towns, in fear ofthe Man of Good Council, who wished to gain power by helping the foreigners.They passed stones that would be thrown at her, lethal stones to be stumbledupon more safely at night. The Man of Good Council had raped her, and upon hisword local stones could fly. The Man with her now she may have called brother,or cousin, or uncle. Stepping quietly and softly, now she called him Husband.

Littleis known of her because she was just barely more than a child when a child shewas given. Because of her circumstance what little education she may have beenawarded was halted, as were any child dreams. But loved she was by her familyand neighbors, and wanted as a thing to take, to have and to destroy by the Manof the Good Council. One imagines her fecundity would have been a problem forhim, most easily buried under stones that would bring her silence. The Husbandwas known as a kind man who would repair houses. All of his neighbors loved himfor his gentleness in speech and song. When the situation of the girl was madeclear to him, he agreed to deliver her through the night, away from thesilencing stones.

Theneighborhood they walked away from that night, from which they were born, wascomprised of simple dwellings and Sturdy Folk. They told stories that unfoldedfrom the land. Stories they knew well, stories that had happened to them. Thisland of simple dwellings and of stories had been pushed and pulled by whateveroccupying force happened to command the roads that ran to and from it. Thepeople who populated this region had slowly been trained in Punishment andReward, and were judged by the degree that they helped foreigners take commandof the roads that went to and from this stony homeland. The folk that refusedto play the game, Punishment and Reward learned that to survive they had toform Pockets of Resistance. The Young Woman and Husband were from a long lineof such people, and in their movement they began to trace a new story on theland.

TheGood Council had agreed that the Young Woman was an adulteress, as she was withchild and in the company of a man gentle of voice and song who was calledHusband, but was probably brother, uncle or cousin. This agreement of the GoodCouncil meant that the woman was to be silenced with hurtful stones, as it wasthe most likely activity to protect the Man within the Council who in leisureraped young girls. The Husband and Woman in homespun fabric went from house tosimple house along the fearful road looking for a place where the child couldbe born away from things that could not be seen in the temperate night air. Allthe dwellings feigned sleep, tightly shut.

Somethings that could not be seen were Those Who Lived Apart. These were people whohad been cast out by the Sturdy Folk, afraid as they were of those who suffereddisease, or affliction of thought and spirit. Those Who Lived Apart wanderedinto the towns and villages at night seeking scraps of food, or helpful thingsthat had been discarded by the villagers. One Who Lived Apart called himself Shepard.He had forgotten his name. He called himself Shepard because he gathered andprotected things.

Fearof what could not be seen in the temperate night was erased by the fear thatpreceded the birth of the child. A body experiences pain, convulses andcontracts, looses fluids. The Husband of gentle voice felt helpless andresponsible for a safety he knew nothing about, the Young Woman felt only herbody. Her fear had been abstracted, that is, removed from language and thought.The Husband sang her a simple song, softly.

Shepardcrouched silently at the edge of a small grove of olive trees. The starlightdanced within the branches and leaves, approving of this One Who Gathered andProtected Things. This Shepard. He heard a gentle voice singing softly in thenight. The simple song was accompanied by sharp sounds of pain that were tooloud for the temperate night air. Shepard watched and saw the silhouetted formsof Husband and Young Woman. Because he was invisible, Shepard could see whatcould not be seen, but was there anyway. Because of what Shepard saw, he knewthat this strange vision should be gathered and protected.

WhenHusband and Young Woman saw Shepard walking towards them they were not afraid.They could see he was invisible and meant no harm. Away from the dwellings thatfeigned sleep and into the branches and leaves, Shepard led them to a safeplace where he gathered and protected things. It was a place for Those WhoLived Apart. Long ago it was a simple dwelling for Sturdy Folk who had long sincevanished. The walls still stood erect, and over them Shepard had stretchedseveral blankets and animal skins to keep the warm air inside. Already therewas a small fire tended by the Wise Three, friends of Shepard’s who werevisiting from a distant place. A Place Apart.

TheWise Three had been cast out by the Sturdy Folk because of their knowledge ofthe stars. They spoke of the stars as a light that was the True Home, and ofstars that traced paths across the heavens, paths that could be followed to aplace of knowledge and belonging. The Wise Three were cast out of their villagebecause they believed all laws and rules of men to be false. They would notplay Punishment and Reward, nor would they form Pockets of Resistance. Theyonly followed the paths traced by stars. Sometimes they would visit Shepard togive him things to protect.

Inthe remains of the simple dwelling the Young Woman could only feel her body. Itconvulsed and contracted with concentration. With intent. She was near the small fire, which spread warmthacross her concentrating skin. The Child was near. The Man gentle of voice andsong remained so. He sang softly to diminish the tension revolving around theremains of the small room like a spirit. The Three Wise soaked in the stars thatflickered and danced through the smoke, which drifted up to the heavens. Asthey listened to the stars Shepard spoke protection spells. Protecting theChild, who was soon born. And the tension stopped revolving, drifted upwardswith smoke. The Husband gently stroked the hair of the young Woman, who inbody, relaxed. Shepard cleaned the newborn boy, protecting him from the shockof the temperate night air. The Wise Three looked carefully at the tiny palmsof the newborn, reading the maps engraved upon them by the stars.

WiseOne;

TheChild will not live to see an old age.

NoShepard can protect him

TheChild will die by the will of The Good Council

NoDemon will sway him

TheChild will be loved by Those Who Live Apart

WiseTwo;

TheChild will say many things that will be remembered for thousands of years

NoStone will he throw

TheChild will have kingdoms rise, fall and make war in his name

Kindnessbegat Kindness

TheChild will be greatly misunderstood by all

WiseThree;

TheChild will not be remembered laughing

ViolenceBegat Violence

TheChild will remember gentle songs

TheUnclean and the Tainted in Sin will he adore

TheChild will repair houses

Andmorning came. Things were visible. Stones held still. The Child knew nothing.

DataFragment;

Asfar back into my life as when language itself was finding a home within me Ihave been compelled towards the fragment; that detail of a larger entity thatonce separate from that event, place or thing begins to describe its history.The namesake of this collection of fragments takes itself from a book I onceowned. The book consisted of nothing but photographs taken in New York City andarranged thematically without text or commentary. The pages were laid outgraphically very much identical to one another, photos being very much the samesize, and often with a white border that formed a sort of grid. There was asection of objects taped with silver duct tape, sections of bicycles, of signsof windows. These pages read as data that may as well have come out of a study,a journal, a computer. Only together did they form a complete portrait of thisgreat city. It was this book, whose title I now forget, this collection ofbanal, everyday objects that made me want to make a second movie.

Ihad given up hope before this of making another, in part because the complexityof my first subject took me nearly ten years to complete in a way I foundsatisfying. I then did not see how I could possibly make a film that I couldlike until seeing this book. The opportunity came for me when I heard that theSan Francisco Museum of Natural history was due to be destroyed due to damageit had sustained in the earthquake of 1989. The building was very near myapartment, and I went there on a rainy day at the end of the year with a tripodand my camera to film the dioramas that were constructed mostly in the late 19^thcentury, fearing that a rebuilt museum would find them out of date,unfashionable or in too bad a shape to reconstruct. While I was there I also filmedthe aquarium which was housed in the same building, knowing that stylesdesigned to maximize profit utilized in the building of new aquariums wouldalso mean that this quaint (by 21^st century standards) form ofpresentation would be as extinct as some of the neighboring dinosaurs whosebones, polished and laced together with steel, stood collecting dust in thiscondemned structure.

Ifilmed mostly static shots, as the museum was very crowded in its last days.Soon I noticed that in addition to getting images of the exhibits, anotherelement, the only active element in the frame were the reflections of peopleupon the glass that housed the individual dioramas. This glass became a skin, amembrane that separated sections of time. My purpose in filming these thingswas mainly to get images just as a reminder of this place I loved, but soon thereflections became crucial in deciding how to frame each shot. I was veryexcited about the resulting images, but having not set out to make a film, Iwondered just how to edit them together. Later that evening I had to go to myjob at a bar in the East Bay. I brought the camera with the tapes, and thoughtthat when it was slow, I could look at the footage and write out some ideas.Watching the footage, it stuck me that the transparent images of people madethem seem ghosted as they superimposed themselves over the dioramas and thecitizens of the doomed aquarium, as if the exhibits were evoking a longforgotten dream of the race of men. It occurred to me that the exhibits and thereflections were parts of an incomplete story, data. And only by examining bothas series of fragments could the story be complete.

CyntiaLahti is an Alchemist. With her hands and her imagination she readies figuresfor the fire. After a period of time when all she can do is hope that thisprocess of transformative fire accepts her experiments in form, space, colorand light. Fire, it seems loves her as much as she loves it, and her work, herofferings are given back to her as marvels of this magic. Like the alchemistsof old, what once was visible has vanished and what once could not be seendazzles like an incantation before the viewer.

Forover thirty years Cynthia’s work has always taken the human form as itssubject, but whereas much representative work begins and ends with this form,our bodies, her work materially and essentially lays bare the contradictions that our form existswithin, and that exist within us. Many of her figures can be seen in a positionof vulnerability or pain, yet seldom are they depicted as suffering, insteadappearing to be in a profound state of peace or even ecstatic. Glorified theyare not, luminous they are.

Inthe series, Vault Alarm, fragments of the human body exist only to describewhat is not there. A pair of hands resting upon a knee in some way gives bothform and reason to what is not there, the rest of the body. Elsewhere Iremember seeing figures Cynthia had once made of glass. They were dresses posedby absent bodies, carefully reflecting light from their own emptiness. Morerecently she made a series titled, Nurse. One of these figures has the entireback of the woman removed, inside her body she is a soft rose color, the standfor the sculpture itself has replaced the woman’s spine. Another beautifulpiece sees two figures in an embrace, the fronts of their bodies colored alsoin a rose that could be coming from love as much as from blood that warms thebody. The title, Nurse tells us that it could be both love and blood.Compassion.

Fashionis important to her work as well. While their bodies might often seemcompromised and their spirits in a state of grace, they are often seen wearingglamorous clothing; long gloves, the full, formal skirts of the 1950s or chicraingear from the mid 1960s. What the subjects are wearing when consideringtheir poses, what they seem to be doing, as well as the state of their completeness comments on nostalgia. The gaiety of these fashionscould be seen as a longing for something that never has been.

Ifidentifying with her beatific forms comes easy, it is because Cynthia showsthem as both welcoming and normal. By this I mean that it is their world thatis central. It is ours where they become marginalized, or victimized. Existingin fragments, being opened up, or made out of absence does not solicit from ourgaze pity or sorrow, but in giving yourself to them, a sort of healing cancommence.

miscellanea, by Heinz Emigholz

Afilm can be seen not as an object; a spool of celluloid, heavy in hands, woundonto a reel, but a film can also be seen as a duration of time where variousfragments related to a certain theme come together, presenting themselves insuccession that form a unified whole. When the film is over, this duration oftime spent, these fragments settle into the soft matter of our minds, oftenmerging with our own memories, and then becoming something unique from theoriginal film itself. Just as a film can be these fragments carefully piecedtogether, in the making of a film several fragments are left out, either notwilling to participate, or demanding fuller attention and exploration atanother time.

RecentlyI have watched a film I had seen earlier this year at the Berlinale, and was somoved by that I could not finish watching it. This happens to me sometimes whena piece of art rushes into me with an exhilarating speed, as if it has found meafter a long time. A memory that I did not know I had that knows it has found ahome, a person to whom it belongs. This film is called, A Series of Thoughts,by Heinz Emigholz. Now on DVD, I could watch it at home, pausing now and againto let the fragments settle, to find their place inside me.

Thefilm itself exists from fragments that often came from other films made byEmighoz, that here he has expanded or developed into this amazing film. It getsto me for several reasons. One of them is my own interest in Architecture.Segments of this film are studies of buildings without comment, letting thestone, brick and glass tell their own poetry. Absent from these images are alsopeople. The buildings can be seen as headstones that mark previous eras andtimes, and contain the residue of tales, now reduced to a quiet murmuring, to afeeling. There is also the feeling of a road trip to this series of thoughts,coming from many places the film maker has visited. One gets the feeling not ofa post card, but actual and real memory. The places we see in this film seem tostand as they would in our minds when recalling certain places.

Partsof this film that do have commentary are wonderfully unique. El Greco in Toledoexamines both a painting by El Greco, but also the history of the city throughthat painting, and through the design of the city. The way that Emigholz pullsthe story out of the painting we see in a museum shows us how to look at artitself. Removed from discussions about painting and form, we are taken back toa historical incident, placed there as witness. It reminds me of the skillwielded by W.G. Sebald in a passage he wrote about a painting where a criminalis dissected. What we end up seeing is a crime. The sadness and weight of thehistorical is often buried under heaps of paintings, masquerading as art safelyhung on walls. In searching carefully the face of power, we are taught to seeand hear its victims. Heinz Emigholz teaches us how to speak with ghosts.

Anothersegment titled Leonardo’s Tears shows us endless perspectives of a footballgame set to a tragic tale of an unlikely father and son. Seemingly by chancedoes this relationship happen, and also by chance at times the image synchswith the text, and we are not watching a football game, but a grippingmelodrama, the players transformed into actors transformed into the subjectswhose story they tell. In the accompanying booklet this text is described as acollage. More fragments recombined eternally into tales of loss, tales ofdesire, tales of humanity.

This series, Miscellanea I-VII is a sad and inspiring work, taking us through thegrand heights of our achievements and into the darkness of our failures, itneither exalts or diminishes us humans. We simply are existing in thecontradictions we house and multiply. This DVD is put out by Filmgalerie 451.Thank you Heinz.

Oneof the most important tasks of the artist is to honestly and accuratelydescribe; I was here, with these people. The stuff of our lives is so crammedwith memories, events, people, and the artist takes the debris of thesefragments and makes things that tell alternate versions of history, of life andof time. Artists Wilhelm Hein and Annette Frick have been presenting life andtime here in Berlin for several years in many forms; films, paintings,photography, writings. One thing they produce is an irregular journalconsisting of photographs and texts that are arranged around certain events.The most recent two volumes of Jenseits Der Trampelpfade were centered aroundthe Jack Smith retrospective, and commissioning of new work, Live Film. Curatedby Stefanie Schulte Strathaus, Marc Siegel and Susanne Saschsse, this was amassive event that brought three generations of underground artists, performersand scholars to take a fresh look at the work of the late, great, Jack Smith.

BothHein and Frick have made this journal a work of love that shows artisticpractice and life in Berlin in all its complexity from a very personalperspective. Taking the format of the Zine, these books are delightful documentsof life, of what art means and what community can be. Utopian in nature, theymake the statement, “I was Here”, not in some circle of the famous or infamous,but in the larger sense of life and living. Each book is specific to the timeit took to make it, many of the photos taken by Frick herself, and many haveaccompanying texts collected by Hein. Fragments of letters and e-mails,manifestos, reviews, obituaries. Often there is also a DVD or CD with a greataudio piece, or short film. The Smith centered issues are full of photographsof Mario Montez, the superstar to both Warhol and Smith that were taken onMario’s recent visits to this city. That both Hein and Frick are committed to anunderground means that these moments are contextualized in an aesthetic that ispolitical. In these times of art as career, of institutional darlings and pets,these books are refreshing reminders of just what art can be and mean.

Ancestor Worship

2011-12-06T17:08:00.001+01:00

Click to enlarge

I was looking for my rent contract and my tax number, and found this. On the back was written;

Animism-The love of distance as it is experienced by moving through it. Non hierarchical. Persons are events one is the result of.

Baltic Sea

2011-11-25T19:40:00.001+01:00

A walk on the Baltic Sea made me think of the quiet unease in the characters populating the books of WG Sebald

Unica Zürn

2011-11-25T18:12:00.001+01:00

Unica Zürn was a writer and artist. Her work is beautiful, and sadly not so well known. She was lover of Surrealist artist Hans Bellmer, with whom she collaborated on his famous dolls. Much of her life was spent in and out of mental institutions. I began this video several years ago, filming for the most part only in my apartment. Some movies are very planned before they are executed, others like this took a couple years, only working when a certain mood would come over me. It took a bad dream to unite all the ideas. The first and last titles are written by Unica.

American Mythologies 1

2011-11-20T15:01:00.001+01:00

A Nomad Becomes All Men

2011-11-20T14:51:00.001+01:00

Genet’scommunity is always impermanent. Never in his writings does he describe a placecalled home in which he bases himself. He goes to great lengths and personalpain in order to distance himself with any group that lays claim to the conceptof home. When he does ally himself to any group that has a recognizableidentity, it is always on his terms and often counter to the aims of the group.Genet demands to be the center of the universe. In fact, in one passage hetells us that he cannot bear the fact that people make love without him, and inanother that nothing could ever console him for the fact that he, himself couldnot contain the world.

ThoughI have only browsed Sartre’s book, I agree with him as to the sainthood of JeanGenet. Genet, like the sorcerer’s apprentice, demands that the sacred manifestitself everywhere. By the sacred what I mean is what exists for it’s own beautyand glory, beyond all usefulness. Sartre was correct in saying that for Genet,what seems fact takes on the vastness of myth, and what appears as events arereally rites played out in this mythology. This mythology was by no meanshomogeneous. Always shifting, the myths serve as the vehicle for a vagabond ina daydream, with never a goal, aim, or end in sight. This tailored cosmos did,however undergo a drastic change in nature at one point, but first let usexamine his Journal.

From page one of first of Jean Genet’smost autobiographical books, the Thief’s journal, he takes us headfirst intohis daydream, and similar to a warning that Lautremont had prefaced his famouschants, Genet makes it clear that by no means is this to be a book for themoralistic or lighthearted. “Lovingly pursued what is called evil” is how hedescribes his own life up to that point. He also clarifies that what he livesis not to be mistaken for rebellion, he seeks no such close relationship with aworld that he despises. “Your world”, is how he addresses the reader, seeminglyspeaking to the reader from the page the way that Alice would from the otherside of the looking glass. He is not speaking to us, but at us. From the firstpage he calls what he is about to submerge us in as a forbidden universe. Andindeed it is a forbidden and consciously alien world to that of most personswho would buy this book. It is here that objects wholly lose meaning, personsare endowed with divinity, and for the author, the more humiliation he feels,the more abjectness he owns, the more he betrays everything or one who ties himto “our” planet, the more freedom he acquires. “You feel yourself living”, ishow he describes his life. With each step away from us, his world assumes formand meaning, yet when his immediate world is entirely constructed, and theterms for its existence fully plundered (and fixed), he abandons or destroys it.

Thesituation of the Self within the self, as opposed to the situation of the selfwithin an external, or given context recalls what Henry Corbin calls visionaryspace, a space created between, or rather born from personal mythology andgiven realities. This space cannot be situated as a “place”, because it’s verynature is such that it is situative, reality falls into place around that whichperceives it. He calls spaces of this quality imaginal.

Inthis book that is rather difficult to follow (as are all of Genet’s books,Kathy Acker states that one must dream it to read it.), the author oftenportrays persons who he respect or admires. One such person is Rene, the queerbasher, who is queer himself, though outside the world and socialization ofqueers. Genet sees Rene as victim and criminal, self contained, thereforeisolated and autonomous, an act that contains it’s own consequence. Anotherperson to be the object of his meditations is an old woman arrested for dousingboth her deformed daughter and their house with gasoline and setting themaflame. He sees this woman as cultivating a monster upon which a new moralitywould be based. This monster is both the deformed child and the love of it, alove that the world is not allowed to touch or see. The woman raised the childin secret. Genet notes, “She was saved, that is, brought to trial.” As if thepublic condemnation of a criminal is the equivalent of canonization. Thevarious thieves and pimps with whom he finds himself, along with his isolatedheroes become for him an imagined, or dreamed community, a conspiratorial one.He says, “The invisibility we needed.” There are others whom he admires butdoes not ally himself with. For instance, in discussing soldiers he makes itclear that he shares with them a certain marginalization but that theirs doesnot go far enough. In them, Genet sees a group that exists on the fringes ofsociety, still sits within society’s context and in need of interaction withit.

It is as a soldier that Genet firstbegins to practice betrayal. In this company he says that he felt welcomed tothe world of men for the first time. Though this is said with a certain amountof affection, maybe a bit of nostalgia as well, he soon situates himself as athief among this fraternity, speaks of it as betrayal, cutting ties with thosewho welcomed him and ensuring that he does not become one with those who enjoycommerce with society. In another example of a limited solidarity he sees aprocession of Drag Queens at dawn, solemnly walking through the town to layflowers upon the rusted and twisted remains of public restroom destroyed bycitizens presumably intolerant of it’s transformation into a temple ofprostitution. Genet tells us of one of his criteria for solidarity, which heclearly divorces from sexuality, “I followed them not because I belonged tothem, but because their cries pierced the shell of the world’s contempt”.

Everyday objects in the Thief’s Journalserve as a kind of mantra, or door that opens Genet’s imaginal. One suchinstance has him observing a soldier play with a ball. He exchanges a glancewith the soldier. In this glance Genet first becomes the glance, then the spacebetween the soldier and the ball, next the foot of the soldier, the ballitself, and finally the idea between them, purifying all into archetypalimages. There are two ways to go with a thing, the center of which is the thingitself. In one way we have the representation of a thing, the arena ofobjectification and use value, the other being taking a thing to it’s source,or essence, archetypal images that assume life within who imagines them. Genettakes the latter a step further by becoming the thing itself in its essentialform. A result in this process is the destruction of linear time, which hecalls, “caught in the ice flow of being”. Each moment extinguishes itself uponmanifestation, leading nowhere. Genet is himself is unstable, subject to whathe imagines each autonomous moment is in essence.

Thismetamorphosis is accelerated by what he described as the birth of intelligence,where the fundamental relationships between actions and things begin tofragment. Up to this point in the narration Genet had shared a common languagewith the world, that of common relationships based upon use value, but hisaggressive divorce from morality seems to have the by-product of thedecomposition of meaning. It is value itself that is rotting. He now perceivesthe nature of things as opposed to their function, and begins to base his loveupon this perceived autonomy.

The author’s life was intensely nomadic,yet highly social. The socialization he experienced took place withinalliances, very temporary, with others who laid no claim to territory orproperty. Affection within those communities was fiercely loyal, but loyal tothat affection, not to the objects that it represented. When that affectionbecame too established, or taken for granted, life would become empty gestureand habit. It is here that I think betrayal enters. Genet describes friendshipas a bond that is needed to break. What I see in this is that it is not lovethat is betrayed here at all. Friendship posits people as objects related toand defined by one another. What transcends objects is the love one feels forthem, and in order for this love to remain sacred, all objectification, use, orneed must be severed. In his early years we have the blueprints for Genet’sconspiratorial community. The integrity of this community cannot be separatedfrom its ability to negate definition.

It is Genet’s ease in flow, toperpetually shift and shed according to a myriad of self-willed contexts thatbrings him to an ultimate test to which his way of being in the world willfail. A record of this crisis is detailed in the small book, “What remains of aRembrandt torn into four equal pieces and flushed down the toilet”. In thesepages he narrates an experience on a train where his absent-minded gazeaccidentally meets that of another passenger. The momentary meeting of the eyesbecomes the vehicle for a complete loss of identity. This loss begins as Genetfeels his identity and that of the passenger flow into one another throughtheir eyes, with the conclusion being the knowledge that he was the other, orthat all people other and of thesame value as himself. Rather than experience this universal oneness as theliberal/humanist experience of a beautiful universal Brotherhood, thisdiscovery fills the author with revulsion and panic. His conspiracy of thieves,thugs and whores was finished with a glance, the distance between Genet’s imaginal and “our” world had instantly evaporated.

Whena world collapses, the person who lives it, in most instances will run in everypossible direction in order to escape a personal apocalypse, yet owing to hisentirely sovereign experience of subjectivity, Genet tells us sadly that thereis no way of unknowing what is known, and that he must pursue this revelationas far as it will go, in spite of whatever catastrophic consequence.

Genetconfesses that certain situations had forced him into poetry. It is oftenfreedom of readily recognized structure that distinguishes poetry from otherforms, and the poetry that he speaks of is a poetry that is lived. It was thisway of living and composing poetry that eeventually pushed him to a wall, forhe could no longer be any man, but was obliged to be every man. Differencebetween people was extinguished, or confined to the superfluous. With all ofhumanity reduced to a singularity, Genet tells us, “I was already bidding thema nostalgic farewell, and it was not without sadness or disgust that I wasentering ways that would become increasingly lonely” When he stepped off thattrain, he was the only person in the world and every person in the world.

Thislittle book has a Paris publication date of 1958. For a time beginning in theearly 60’s Genet had stopped writing as well as having denounced his one film.We don’t hear from him again until the early 70’s, and within the interim was areputed suicide attempt. Now, while specific causes for this can be attributedto one “fact” or another, I see a mind set and personal vision demolished, orflushed down the toilet, as perhaps a crucial background to Genet’srenunciation of poetic work and life. When we do hear his voice again it isallied to political causes, and though his politic is still supremely personal,the thief and whore poet is reluctantly among us.

An apparent change in vocabularydistinguishes Jean Genet’s later writings from his more prolific days as awriter when he begins to speak for certain political groups in the early1970’s. Most prominent is the substitution of the word, “real” for when hewould have formerly used the word, “your” in addressing the reader’s world. Hesays in the preface to the letters of George Jackson that Mr. Jackson is in a real prison, or that the Panthers are armed with real weapons. Reality seems not just the common groundthat the war over ideas, injustices, rights etc. are waged upon, but that whichis loaded with the power of mortal consequence. The value is not placed on the contextthat power determines, but on the consequence of power’s use. Power seems tohave punched a hole in the subjective and war declared not because powerexists, but because through that hole its fist grasps for and seizes anythingpersonal to destroy it.

Genetmentions his change in vocabulary when noticing that prior to his time with thePanthers and the Palestinians he would have avoided such words as hero, martyr,struggle, resistance, liberation and courage, but remains repelled by thewords, homeland and fraternity. He is politicized to the extent that it is thepersonal at stake, and his heroes and martyrs are people he knows or admireswho are willing to fight a power much stronger than themselves on that power’sterms, (with weapons that end life). But a politic that presupposes anynationalism or exclusive membership keeps Genet from wholly identifying with.He says of the Palestinians that his body, mind and soul belonged, but neverall of him.

“Everythingin the world was waiting for me to wake up to the world...by staying with themI was staying with my memory...their revolt was eternal, uncreated andconsubstantial with me” Could he be speaking of what was formerly “our” world?And if so, in order to find a perfect expression in that world, how had hefound the Panthers and Palestinians as a people that was always in him?

Ratherearly in the book, Prisoner of Love, Genet gives a comparison in theconstruction of pottery as made by a Tunisian and a Japanese potter. If theTunisian makes a mistake at the wheel he lumps the clay together and starts anew vase, while the Japanese potter will use a flaw as a departure point for amore private expression of themselves. The Tunisian vase will supposedlywithstand a millennium, having been created without flaw so complete as toremain unmovable, rigid and anonymous. The other, while not permanent, allowschance to enter the composition as a reflection of it’s author. This could helpsee how Genet sees himself in relation to both groups he now allied himselfwith. Both groups had concrete and determined goals within history, both aform, a vase. Not without affection he uses them as would a Japanese potter.

Thoughone in the United States and the other in the middle east, both the Panthersand the PLO are denied a physical place either to be called home or to wage warfrom. Since they lack a place the war they wage surges forth from theimagination. It is the idea and dream that form the borders of their countries.In the geography of these dreams Genet wanders his later years, and though histraces are difficult to follow, he does in his last book chart out a place forus to read or seek. “A border is where a human personality expresses itselfmost fully...it might be a good idea to extend borders indefinitely without, ofcourse, destroying their centers, since it is them that make a borderpossible.”

Aperson as a place. The center, the seat of identity, alone is an isolated,amputated, and mute thing. It needs a body, or place from which to move, and isactivated socially by what moves it to other things. To extend what moves athing, or animates it, indefinitely, would contain the possibility of infiniteinclusiveness. Because Genet sees a blurring of border rather than the frictionand tension of borders colliding, he is able to see the overlapping ofimaginary lines of territory, and deep inside those lines the thing that is anew country, world, or new map. The other night I was on a roof, drinking withsome friends. I noticed how falling stars are most always born and die on theperiphery of a night sky. Stupidly I asked, or wondered aloud why this was so.The answer I received was burdened with fact, mathematical and scientific,while the answer that I preferred was that the falling star is what gave voiceto the sky, made it express itself more fully.

WhatGenet calls the material vagrancy of Islam, the wandering through space andtime, he sees reflected in their calendar. This cosmic drifting of the starsand on the earth, without goal and open to change is a strong tie for him toIslam. In a paragraph about this material vagrancy, he seems to, word for word,describe himself. It recalls again that pre-Islamic theology of visionary spacewhich sees geography as event rather than thing described by Corbin. The onewho lives within it wanders through event, not space. The nomadism of Genet hasan affinity with the caravans of old, which I would say were driven less by trade,resources or politics than by a view of life as event within event. What thisgeography calls for is an end to nouns, a vocabulary of verbs.

If the Palestinians and the Panthersoperated from a terrain contained within a dream, they themselves were envelopedby that Real that Genet speaks ofwith caution, respect and contempt at once. The dream implies a dreamer, who inturn is subject to this Real, with whom it wages war.

An interesting bit of conversationbetween Genet and his friend, Mubarak, an African officer in the PLO.

“Are you an Arab or a Negro?”

Genet asks him in the sort of friendlyjostling, or provocative conversation that is characteristic of theirrelationship.

“I suppose I need a perspective and Idon’t have one.”

Politicalidentity operates on borders, with other borders, often contrary to theintentions of the center, true identity. It is an attempt at communication thattakes place externally from one’s own place of situation. Communication couldbe an example of a border’s extension as it is a movement away from the center.What, or whom Mubarak sees himself as is irrelevant to how he is perceived. Inorder to serve the ends of his truest self, his center, a political identity isdonned in this attempt at communication. Being Arab or Negro is a politicalchoice, and when I say that such a thing may be contrary to it’s center, it isto the extent that one cannot say everything at once, and being black or Arabis but one word in a sentence spoken in a conversation always to be seen incontext. Despite all this, when a dreamer is in conversation with a fully awakepower, trying to communicate or even preserve the dream, he risks having hisskull crushed. While still dreaming the dreamer must remain fully awake becausethe pitfalls of sleep are many. There is a way of action Genet sees, or ofconducting oneself while sleepwalking that is just as true to the dream as itis sure-footed in physical, actual geography.

“Whensomeone makes a political choice they ought to be quite clear, but when someoneenters a revolutionary trance, he ought to leave it quite vague, above all heshould not try to understand”

There is a tension in how to treat therevolution, or dream, and how to articulate it by the choices one makes. Thistension is the high wire of the sleepwalker. Step one way and lose your life,another and you lose the dream. In both cases it is forever.

“When the persecuted begin to resemblethe persecutors what is called for is a super-human challenge to the rest ofthe world.”

Rational pragmatism sells the dream tologic in order to succeed. The revolutionaries become the tyrants, and this isthe price of selling dreams. Here Genet sees the challenge as two choices,“impossible heroism or a tolerance of an all too human behavior, sublimechallenge or spinelessness.” Just some of the risks in dreaming.

As a dreamer dreaming within a dream,Genet observes the qualities of these revolutionaries that draw him to them,the qualities that permit him to speak through them. In a passage about thePanthers he discusses their tactics in terms of strong vs. weak. He admits thatthe weaknesses are what brought the Panthers down as far as political goals, orin the terms of Power. He mentions the squandering of money, lack of rigor inthe face of image, and slogans as replacing ideology. But above all, theseweaknesses seem entwined with their honesty, transforming them into strengths,much in the way a Japanese potter will turn a flaw into a personal expression.Perhaps if the Panthers were to have made themselves in the fashion of aTunisian vase they would have triumphed historically. Genet says the only waythe Panthers could wage war was through the spectacular with the danger beingthat they would dissolve in this spectacular, which is in effect what happened.He goes on to say that they won as poetry, or survived through poetic gesturein spite of their own spectacle. (The Panther movie would have changed his mindas it finally absorbed the myth and poetry into a larger spectacle).

Ofthe Panthers he says that they were torn between a rejection of marginality anddrawn to it’s ecstasies, that they were a people who had to “gash their way”through white society in order to be heard, “complete with murdered cops, holdups and open arms”. By any means this is marginal, but it is marginalitydesperate to be heard. In the Palestinian case, he sees that their revolutionmay not necessarily be for territory, which was only a pretext, but for acomplete metamorphosis of Islam. Here Israel was the obvious enemy, but withinthe Arab nations the Palestinians were cast out and looked upon with contemptas well. Genet stayed with the feyadeen encampments his five years among them,the feyadeen being the young fighters, the lowest on the ladder of PLOhierarchy. It was how they conducted themselves, without a hierarchy of theirown, and always seemingly cheerful in spite of constant risk to their livesthat kept him with them.

Hesays that they risked the “martyrdom of habit” if fears lead them to defeat,and because altruism and good intentions were not compatible with the realitiesof war. His deepest affection is with the feyadeen, and most of the book is ahymn to this affection.

Withboth the Black Panthers and the Palestinians what draws him is the joy in thelives of those people that the world called and treated as terrorists, and hesays that we must by no means underestimate their intelligence, that they knewthat they were just a spark in history, likening them to tracer bullets, a lineof light that sears the night sky. (Falling stars on the borders of the sky).But as bullets they also are weapons. Genet the poet/spokesman says of them,“The sorrow in their lives requires a joy and mirth that will cauterize it’sown source.” The cheerfulness of those who have ceased to hope.

At points he calls himself to task,pinch himself to awaken to his own dream. He reprimands himself for fallingunder the spell of the poetic allurements of rebellion, as he sees an almostinvisible call to conformity in most rebellion. Genet has to keep with thedream, but in his own.

“Moreand more I believe that I exist in order to be the terrain and proof whichshows other men that life consists in the uninterrupted emotions that flowthrough all creation.” Back to flow. “With a naked gaze more lively thanprofound, I sought in other people’s eyes the thin, silk thread that ought tolink us all, the sign of a continuity of being that two gazes intertwiningwithout desire would be able to detect.”

Near the last pages of this book, an oldman, quite near death, has a desire for a house. He builds a garden, furnishesit sparsely, and moves from room to room in order to see the garden, or to viewthe sea. One day this old man sees a house identical to the one he has built inhis mind, and he mentions to his companion how lovely it is. His companionmentions that the PLO can rent it to him, whereupon he sees how determined washis dream by the forces that control or destroy imagination. The house in questionbecomes a tomb, and the old man must find a way to abandon both it and its twinin his mind. The sea they overlook is full of floating corpses, and the gardenstended by slaves. In order to live, he turns from the houses and wanders intothe desert.

180 years ago, the Problem of Slavery was Addressed. On November 11, the Question was Terminated

2011-11-11T13:10:00.000+01:00

These Waters

It is thought that these waters once covered a much broader expanse. In man’s never slaked thirst for servitude he strips nature first of adornment, then removes her own need for motion by tearing and cutting at her swaying trees. Gone is the flickering shade. Next he burdens and yokes her with crops and scars her with roads. Finally he buries her in buildings made of her own flesh. But we are not there yet, and that is only a fraction of the story. At the time this photo was taken the waters had just begun to be drained and diverted into the nearby fields, and the swamp provided a cloak for conspiracy. Yes, it seemed nature was taking sides.

Morality is a flexible and supple creature. Born and raised by man, morality serves his needs and tends to his whims. Nature has no such child, but the children soon to be born of her waters are known as Hero and Monster, depending on need or whim. One thing for certain is that these children were quick. They moved in the fashion and manner of a storm.

Land Use

Prevailing white culture saw a need to end the native’s status of existing on reservations, which were receiving state funds. The full force of a one-sided legal infrastructure forced the natives into agreeing to subdivide their reservations into private property. Suffering the destruction of collectivity, individual property owners succumbed to the nearly inescapable cycle of poverty. Most sold their parcels to the white landowners, who were waiting in the wings. Furthermore, laws were passed restricting the rights of natives to travel, to appear in court, or to inherit land, making it nearly impossible for those who would want to retain their land to do so. It is upon these lands the story remains imprinted.

As for the African Diaspora, they were categorized as livestock, as animals to work the land, and were often appraised at the same value as a nice sofa.

A palpable fear of loosing not only all that had been acquired by tyranny, but of punishment for profiting off this cruel construction resided in the hearts of masters. This fear was quiet at times, and at others flooded the heart. One white landowner was in the habit of gathering his slaves around him during lightning storms, having a superstition that God did not strike blacks with these heavenly bolts.

A contemporary described the weather;

Scarcely a breath of air stirred, and clouds of an inky blackness began to rise from the distant uplands.

Collective Amnesia

Through such mechanisms as eradicating a native language through repression, forbidding the worship of ancestral gods, holding and using the power to not only separate family or community, outlawing literacy, always having the specter and threat of violence as a feature of everyday life, the oppressor creates a state of collective amnesia for everyone, the ruling class included. No one could remember a time of freedom. By institutionalizing a profound injustice and normalizing atrocity even political perspectives are hard to come by. Like water or air this was one thread in the fabric of life. Evil (which is not of nature) might possibly live best in such places where horror is normalized.

By this time generations of humans had been born into slavery. Absent were most of the customs, the mother tongue, the perspective on life and living that their ancestors held. As for the race of “masters”, a kind hearted man or woman might find barbaric the treatment by some to their slaves, while they themselves would own slaves, propping up their own paper thin feeling of righteousness by their alleged good treatment of their own property. Whims and needs, whips and deeds.

From an early age the young boy had been told by his elders that he would be of no use to anyone as a slave, and that great things were destined for him. There was something special about him. His manners and disposition set him apart. It is said he could describe events that happened prior to his birth. He was told by spirits of the elements and spheres. Having been discovered to be great, he must appear so. And so he prayed to understand, to see, to know.

Inventory

Negroes

Joe $100.00

Matilda $80.00

Hannah $120.00

Rose $150.00

Innis $300.00

Sarah $50.00

Lucinda $250.00

Nelly $275.00

Sam $75.00

Low $50.00

Hannah $300.00

Stocks

7 sows $7.00

1 Bour $1.50

9 hogs $27.00

1 pr Bay Horses $240.00

1 bay mare $60.00

21 geese @.25 $5.25

1 fascio Beef(?) $15.00

1 Black Ox $12.00

1 Yoke Oxen $20.00

1 light Brindle ox $10.00

1 Buffaloe cow $6.00

1 do do cow $5.00

6 calves $4.00

The Bridge

A bridge is potent as symbol and strategic as material. Mythologies stress its value and decorate it with epic tales, while commerce maintains its upkeep. Suspended above space and water, it is said bridges provide safe passage between shores. They often provide a platform for falling. A bridge is as crucial for the living as the dead, and a fear of them is not uncommon. They are among the first structures destroyed in war. To control a bridge is to wield power. If a bridge can be said to connect ideas, thoughts and images, then to dismantle them is madness. A bridge signifies nature, tamed.

"I discovered drops of blood on the corn as though it were dew from heaven….and then I found on the leaves in the woods hieroglyphic characters and numbers, with the forms of men in different attitudes, portrayed in blood, and representing the figures I had seen before in the heavens…..and as the leaves on the trees bore the impression of the figures I had seen in the heavens, it was plain to me that the Savior was about to lay down the yoke he had borne for the sins of man, and the great day of judgment was at hand."

Not long after this vision, and fatigued with lack of sleep, the band of rebels headed towards the bridge that lead to Jerusalem, where they were turned back. The number of the rebels may have equaled the number of the dead. Could this have been an exchange of souls, similar to a hostage exchange between heaven and hell before the bridge was destroyed and the town of Jerusalem renamed?

COUP DAMAGE

Damage to the brain at the point of impact.

The report noted injuries to the neck and extensive hemorrhaging and injuries to the extremities, including abrasions to the left knee cap, left arm, left shoulder, right arm and right hand.

The autopsy noted extensive blunt force trauma to the head with multiple facial fractures, and soft tissue injury extending to the neck and upper chest with significant intracranial hemorrhaging.

The extremities demonstrated multiple superficial abrasions, and additional areas of hemorrhaging on the arms were noted.

The Trees did not bear witness, nor the hare that sat motionless in the dark of the night. The doe, the fox, the owl remained mute until well after dawn. Nature was taking sides.

Black Head Sign Post

In the days and weeks following the Insurrection hundreds of Black people, free and enslaved, were killed and tortured. Sixteen of them alone had been part of the rebellion. The cross road pictured is the intersection of Barrow Road and the Jerusalem-Cross Keys Highway, once locally known as Black Head Sign Post, named such because of the impaled head placed there in late august, 1831.

An Interesting Plea

Though he signed a confession detailing the motives, planning and activities of the insurrection, Nat Turner entered a plea of Not Guilty, saying he did not feel so. Hanging from this tree killed him.

Photos are from The Southhampton Slave Revolt of 1831

By Henry Irving Tragle

I.M.F.

2011-10-18T12:04:00.000+02:00

Autumn Hymn

2011-09-19T15:16:00.000+02:00

Illustration by E. Schoenberger

"There was a bit of autumn yesterday that made me thinkof you. I was walking in the morning through layers of mist. The grass wasradiant with rain and sun and there were ravens."

K. Harvey

I feel the season gently infusing the air with the perfumedsorrow of vegetal decay, and the sun has shifted its position just slightly inorder to make its annual retreat into deeper space. Very similar to this mymind turns away from what I see, and focuses inward. My body knows the rhythmsof nature, and I reread certain novels or poems to make my own withdrawal morecomfortable. It's like pulling an old, familiar blanket around myself beforesleeping, comforted by the array of scents, each threaded to a memory, in turnwoven into others, making them indistinguishable from each other. A blanket ofhaving been.

***

In their mythology, the Greeks believed that Nux, the motherof dark night, and her children, Thanatos and Hupnos (Death and Sleep) were theissue of Chaos, the abyss that preceded any form. They believed that thedifference between their own bodies and those of the gods was that their humanbodies were incomplete. The facts of death and sleep testified to thisincompleteness. The gods forever retained form due to their complete bodieswhile human bodies returned to Chaos. Decomposition, the destruction of formwas that process.

***

The sunlight shines like a ghost, never quite warm orbright. It's the time of departure. To die in fall is to leave in a state ofgrace, in harmony and equilibrium between soil and sky, light and dark, andsorrow becomes strangely tinted with joy. Memories as fresh as the crushedleaves beneath a child's feet, even years ago.

***

Yesterday was Day of the Corpse. I walked along the shore,coming across several mangled gulls before arriving at what first seemed to bea large rock formation. At closer inspection this dark object proved to be anenormous sea lion that had been beached after suffering a fatal attack by ashark. This fact was written with tears and punctures in its thick hide, andpunctuated with missing fins and a partially severed head. The presence of thisbody with its halo of flies, and the sheer enormity of its dead weight at firstseemed a contradiction to a day when the sunlight danced so playfully on thecrests of waves and warmed my feet in the sand, when it occurred to me that itwas the season of passing. Now all of nature begins its descent back into thesoil in a ritual that is at once silent, profound and solemn. The fine dayrevealed to me its nature; it was indeed a requiem more perfect in compositionthan any symphony could aspire to. I gazed at this mutilated creature on thesand, the corpse a standing temple of memory to this once mobile life. The sunwarmed my skin, a skin still able to feel warmth, and I bade this death apleasant return to Chaos.

***

"The fire. I love the fire so much. To build them andwatch them burn and feel warm and light and safe. The shadows it casts arespirits. But it is not death, it does not kill. Out of the ash things grow. Theash is left. So much can be done with fire remains, charcoal for the drawing,soil for the flowers. I know this because so often a blaze of emotions hasburnt me up and ash is all that remains. Amazing. Afraid of fire, but would feela loss if I never gazed at it again, like a drug or a pair of eyes. There mustbe many more like us, and so many others who know no magic tricks. So manyworlds to them wasted. This is a smile to you. I am happy to spite theworld." C. Lahti

Putrid eclipse, the sun was a rotten brown, the sky darkenedwith smoke. The appetite of the fire had so far consumed over nine hundredhomes, and at this writing had not been sated. Lately I've watched flames, I amnow. I see this devouring dance they perform on objects, consuming their stageentirely. Fire seems to have no regret, all of its activity is passionate, yetthe result of this passion is the transformation of the object from which it isborn. The child of fire is death, the end of the object. Another way of lookingat fire would be scientific; fire results from the release of energy caused bythe breaking down of matter. Here, fire becomes the twin of sacrifice, and thedeath of the object is not separable from the freeing of the nature of a givenobject.

***

Tonight fire brings me warmth. Single flames keep vigilaround the room, holding on to the tips of candles as if they fear rising intothe air should they let go. A log under the hearth is devoured by fire,becoming nothing. October, I am moved by your bleak and stripped love. Youserve life and death equally. Your infinite body is cloaked only within theblack cape of the night, embroidered in the memory of light that is the stars.One thousand fires release in your name what is bound, every love I feel isburned to you. I count them and feed them to you with my breath as they areconsumed.

***

First rain of the season. A heavy dampness and acrystalline, cold air fill my lungs. I sit on the back porch and watch the fogswirl around a lamp, the mists obscuring sight is so different from last nightwhen the clarity of things under the moon made me want to become the night, tobecome infinite. Soaked from rain, a fire somewhere goes out.

***

What I would paint if I could would be the sacred nature ofdeparture, the scent of dead leaves fermenting in the ground, the emotion ofthe sun as it feels it's strength ebb to nothing.

***

Autumn, the heavens descend, death rises from the ground.Together they consecrate present time; the Moment. My life is blessed at beingwitness to this strange marriage of Illumination and Destruction. A ritual ofcolor and light play somber games, the Sun recedes further into the depths ofthe Sky, Darkness wraps a star embroidered tunic oover the world, as leaves fallin silence, fermenting in the damp earth. Past, Present and Future are ruined,now indistinguishable from one another, real time curiously matches dream time,standing still or approaching and withdrawing like waves. The ghosts of theancients return in children's Halloween masks, dim reflections of an embryonicand pagan world. Fire consumes, thereby destroying objects and releasing themof Form. I feel my hatreds melt, also losing form. I feel everything in sightgiving in to gravity as this immense home spins incoherently in space,convinced that in the end there will be no reason to ask why, rationality andjustice as absent as those who would enslave by them. All that I love is in theform of burning coals, increasing in both heat and intensity as the cold andinvisible autumn winds fan them.

Photo by Ralph Eugene Meatyard

Motion Study 2 (Michael Rodney King Jackson)

2011-08-22T17:54:00.000+02:00

Illustration by Kathleen Makielski, Surgical Anatomy of the Face

On the Transformation of a Pop Star into a Race Riot 1992

VIOLENT.

1. Marked by, acting with, or resulting from great force.

2. Having or showing great emotional force.

3. Marked by intensity; extreme.

4. Caused by unexpected force or injury rather than by natural causes.

5. Tending to distort or injure meaning,

RACE

1. A local geographic or global human population distinguished as a more or less distinct group by genetically transmitted physical characteristics.

2. A group of people united or classified together on the basis of common history, nationality, or geographic distribution.

3. A genealogical line, a lineage.

Noun: A struggle with others for victory or supremacy. war, competition, warfare, contest, rivalry, strife, striving.

RIOT

1. A wild or turbulent disturbance created by a large number of people.

2. Law. A violent disturbance of the public peace by three or more persons assembled for a common purpose.

3. to act in a wild way.*

4. a brilliant display of color.*

BLACK

1. Color. Being of the color black, producing or reflecting comparatively little light and having no predominant hue.

2. Having little or no light.

3. Often black. a. Of, relating to, or belonging to a racial group having brown to black skin, especially one of African origin. b. Of, relating to, or belonging to an American ethnic group descended from African peoples having dark skin; African American; Afro-American.

4. Very dark in color.

5. Soiled, as from soot; dirty.

6.Evil; wicked.

7. Cheerless and depressing; gloomy.

8. Marked by anger or sullenness.

9. Often black. Attended with disaster; calamitous.

10. Deserving of, indicating, or incurring censure or dishonor.

11. Darkness, to black out, to lose consciousness.*

Adjective: Characterized by intense ill will or spite. evil, mean, vicious, wicked, nasty, poisonous, malevolent, malicious, venomous, malign, malignant, spiteful.

WHITE

1. Also White. Of, relating to, or belonging to a racial group having light skin coloration, especially one of European origin.

2. Not written or printed on; blank.

3. Unsullied; pure.

4. Habited in white.

5.a. Incandescent. b. Intensely heated; impassioned.

6. Ultraconservative or reactionary.

In considering these definitions the first thing that is striking is their obvious applications to the Rodney King affair and Mr. Jackson, incurring dishonor, and attended with disaster. Then one may notice the moral value attached to the colors, but there are a few other connections to explore here.

The fifth definition of the word, violent; tending to distort or injure meaning. Socially or politically considered, the meaning of blackness is revoked, or radically altered by Mr. Jackson through surgical procedures that could be construed as a type of violence against identity. When we take the word, race as a noun the dictionary tells us of a struggle for supremacy, or even war. Here the concept of a race riot becomes such a struggle. As for the moral value ascribed to the colors, such arguments that have highlighted this obvious example of euro centrism have been argued very eloquently over the years. What interests me now is the fourth definition of the word, riot, and the eleventh of the word, black. These two definitions compliment one another when bound by the act of cosmetic, aesthetic surgery. Darkness, to black out, to lose consciousness, becomes a prerequisite for a brilliant display of color to transpire.

As the affects of anesthesia begin to overwhelm him, Mr. Jackson slips into the layers of his flesh that he so wishes to transform, he loses identity, is no longer distinguishable from the voids within him. In this darkness he sheds his skin, looses boundary, and becomes the night. This night however, is not permeated by stars, rain or clouds, but by powerful electric lights, the glint of surgical instruments, and more likely than not, by white surgeons. It is a white night into which he descends. Here the riot takes place upon the black body. In a brilliant display of color, layers of fat, muscle, bone and cartilage are revealed, opened to the harsh light in which nothing escapes, where no shadow is cast. In the white light of the operating room there is no place for blackness to hide. The body of Michael is laid bare upon the table and opened. His blackness thus ruptured, the riot commences.

In the case of Rodney King this same phenomenon applies, as it does for any other less profiled, but no less extreme examples of racist violence. This is that blackness defined as the loss of consciousness, is necessary for a riot, the brilliant display of color to be acted out. What is interesting about Michael Jackson is that the process is willed for and paid for by him. He presides over his mutilation and is its architect. To what extent though is Michael in control? We are somehow tempted to place him in a role of victim or victor. He could be both.

One juror in the trial of the officers charged with using excessive force against Rodney King was reputed to have stated that King was in “total control” of the situation. In following this good citizen's logic, it appears that in such a savage beating, or within the context of oppressive, brutal force, it is the object of violence that ultimately holds the strings to the marionette that beats him. Yet is that puppet master a masochist, or is the lesson that the good boy is the one who doesn't play with toys he doesn't know how to use?

I see that it is a larger body, in a way an institutional one that is the puppet master. A racist cultural body that toys with real bodies in a theater of terror and entertainment played out in prime time for maximum advertising profit. This media spectacle also takes place on the person of Michael Jackson. He is the body of the state's desire, a war within a war, an undeveloped picture, a film negative.

DANGEROUS

This was the title of Jackson's most recent album prior to the L.A. incident. In the videos to the songs, Jackson is seen dancing the sharp, clean moves that characterize his style, but his face often contorted in simulated rage and passion. He, the gloved one, the post modern Peter Pan from a sprawling estate called Neverland (where all is negation), comes back to the public, his well publicized flirtations with fantasy having lost him popularity. In a media blitz coinciding with the album's release, Michael invents himself as dangerous, no longer the fairy from Neverland, and certainly not to be messed with. In a marked difference from earlier videos there is an absence of fantastic imagery. Contemporary problems are montages behind him, a wind machine blows his straightened hair, and he tells us that it does not matter if we are black or white; he is now the physical transcendence of such things. He ascends from the material and it's hardships into the metaphysical. Or he could be restating the politically correct cliché that, "we're all the same inside"?

“The lynchers tied him to the back of their Ford car and dragged him through the city streets. All of his skin had scraped off. F. noticed that the black man had turned white, and she wondered if that's what they had in mind when they preached in church that we're all the same inside”.

It has been proposed that in our time that the black body itself is seen as dangerous. This view was maintained by one attorney for the defense of the officers held in the King beating. The justification he gave the jury was that the officers acted on the belief that King was dangerous. This threat, he went on to argue, was proved by the antics of King, who danced like a bear, roared at the police, and laughed. Indeed it could not have been laughter and dancing that constituted a threat to several well-armed police, but police perception of blackness acting, as blackness should not. This was answered with blackness, the loss of consciousness. In these moments had the spirits of Michael and Rodney merged, fleeing into the Los Angeles night, one by anesthesia and scalpel, the other by baton, mace, stun gun, and boot, miraculously fusing and finding their reflections in the violence perpetrated upon each other's bodies?

Now the historical connections begin attaching themselves to this moment in the fusing of these two media personalities like so many viruses to a cell. Coming to mind is the practice of eugenics on the black populace in the U.S. from the 1890's to the 1960's, experiments on marginalized peoples living under the Nazi regime, even the coliseum antics of the Roman Empire can seem small compared to the metamorphosis of King and Jackson in the arena of satellite television. Here these two black men are the wet dream of a history of institutional hatred, the cops and surgeons are the new pioneers of eugenics.

In his medical textbook, Surgical Anatomy of the Face, Wayne Larrabee has stated that while standards of beauty have been set for Caucasians based on both popular perception and centuries of art that depicts The Caucasian, no such standards have been set for other races. The rules of proportion for the face of this standard loosely follow those of the portraits of Rembrandt. A majority of work done in the field of cosmetic surgery on non-white peoples has involved epidermal and bone alterations that utilize these standards, creating a sort of faux Caucasian.

The surgeons Humphries and Powell became pioneers in setting these standards when they established the concept of the aesthetic triangle, an area of the face where proportions and features are distributed to a more commonly pleasing whole. It is interesting that it was only three officers brought to trial in the King incident, though several took part in one way or another. One could see these three as the main surgeons, the others as nurses, assistants, interns, etc. The three formed a triangle over the non-white King, working on his face, applying force where necessary with the objective of transforming that face, manifesting or enforcing the established standards of beauty. Officers Powell, Koons and Martinez joined the pioneers Humphries and Powell in that they became Rodney King's aesthetic triangle.

Another interesting correlation between surgery and law enforcement is in the harmony line described by the surgeon Holdaway. This is an imaginary line on the face that divides the face into properly placed halves. The police are often described as the thin, blue line that divides civil society from anarchy, thus separating the face of the populace into its proper, dualistic segments. Another term used to designate an officer is a peace keeper. In the context of cosmetic surgery, the thin, blue line, or police become a harmony line that defines citizens and culture into a cohesive whole that maintains Caucasian standards of beauty.

We can easily imagine the metamorphosis where a pop star becomes a riot, and where police become surgeons in a world yearning for white. Whitewash, whiteout, the white light of oblivion or salvation...the need to solve any of our problems with racism disappears with the black man, one way or another, they shall overcome, unless the abhorred Other in turn takes up the scalpel and mallet to transform a white face, that of oppression and status quo in a surgery similar to burning Los Angeles.

Motion Study 1 (A Lost Occupation of Oakland)

2011-08-21T16:29:00.000+02:00

There are stories that are born to a place and to a time, stories that are unfolded like a great piece of silk over hundreds of years, and there are tales that appear and vanish like flashfloods or lightning storms, here and there over the world, and have no place in time.

Just as happens in the late fall, the quality of light shifted just so, illuminating an implicit death foretold. In this light things were revealed normally left unseen, and even those who could not see this, they felt its glow grace their skin.

1946

The war was only a year gone, but the city had every aspect of its life change, and was suffering for a reason to be. The war had given it a sense of importance and had to some extent eliminated the divisions among its citizens. A generation of people born into poverty had come to find work and in less than a decade could at last feel that weight fall from them, and they at last tasted the luxury of dream.

Attempts across the nation by leaders to resume life as it had been lived prior to the war were met with resistance. The social fabric had been changed and to deny a right once granted is for a nation to sign its own death sentence.

The bus was full of veterans of the war, of working women on the way to pick up their children from grandparents, and the faces on the bus reflected just how the city’s population had shifted. The workers and former soldiers were of several ethnic groups and were making small talk in a way that would never have happened years before. Neighbors.

At the intersection a squadron of police cars escorted two large trucks whose cargo was stock for a luxury store currently suffering a strike staged by the women employees. One young man was just then reading about that strike when he looked up from his paper to see why the bus was not moving. Instinctually placing the image of police over that of the strike, he began shouting out his window at the police and drivers of the truck. Other passengers followed suit, and soon the driver of the bus pulled in front of the convoy and turned off his vehicle.

The afternoon sun slanted low into the faces of the people as they exited their cars and taxis, glinting light off chrome and glass catching their eyes as they demanded police and drivers to abandon the cargo. With the street now choked with empty cars, the crowd grew as pedestrians joined. Within hours all city transit had come to a halt and a sense of joy played on the faces of thousands. By nightfall all business other than grocery stores, pharmacies and bars were closed, and the bars placed their Jukeboxes on the sidewalks where the overflowing crowds danced in the warm night air.

The next day many woke to hear a radio announcement by their mayor that the previous evening the streets had been emptied as order prevailed. The citizens had found they were being erased. In the few days that followed many took it upon themselves to direct traffic, to help keep shops open where food could be bought and the light feeling continued to give them courage. A large crowd moved to the mayor’s mansion and demanded his resignation.

Noted national intellectuals, and leftist leaders remained distant from this surge of light, fearful of what they could not see, of what did not follow any previous model of movement. It was a new organism. In less than a week they had managed to kill it.

A New Lascaux

2011-08-09T14:59:00.000+02:00

Leni Riefenstahl's representations of men and Busby Berkeley's representations of women are viewed from the 21st Century like ritualistic cave art, an incantation of power. A pre-lingual woman's voice, outside time, both laments things to come and things that have passed.

I had accidentally placed a PAL tape into an NTSC camera, and saw the results could be interesting to work with. When the selected footage was loaded into the camera, the computer crashed. Dragging the contents out of the computer's trash, an entirely different result became the material to work with.

The footage was filmed off the television.

The Music was done by SLIP and is also in part the result of a technological "mistake". I was in an improvisation group, and we came across a partially erased tape, holding only the vocal track of another project. We very much wanted to play with her again, so we recorded new tracks to her remaining vocals, in a sense "auditioning" her. We hoped that when she heard the recording she would want to be in our group. It worked!

Slip was;

John Blue

Chen Wei Liu

A.L.Dentel

Tim Blue

Happiness for One Day

2011-08-07T15:04:00.000+02:00

Mary Maclane, one of America’s greatest (and under-celebrated) writers died on this day, in 1929. At the age of 19 years, she published her memoir, a searing and poetic document of desire in an age before suffrage, and way before the notion of gay/lesbian/bisexual rights.

The year was 1902 when her book was published and she lived in Butte, Montana, a small town then where she lived among a number of people who could possibly be affected by this publication. She wrote of falling in love with another woman, she wrote of stealing, of suicide, she wrote of the Devil, of the pleasures of eating an olive. Hers was a book that challenged the entirety of society, one that she seemed to wish to join and be a part of as much as she had contempt for. Reading her book changed my life. Sadly, this great American work has had trouble staying in print. This will change soon with an immense work of love by Petarcha Press. Today, as homage, I will post a short film I made some years back. The text is read by Susanne Sachsse and is written by Mary Maclane. Heidi Follin plays our heroine. Music by John Blue and myself.

Devil's Mountain

2011-08-06T00:45:00.000+02:00

Below is a short video made from a recent trip to an abandoned spy station here in Berlin. The location was originally the site of a Nazi training center. After the war it proved too difficult to demolish, and the grounds were covered in a great mass of rubble from the ruins of the city. It soon became a ski "resort", the mountain becoming grown over in forest. The Americans began tests to find the best location to build a listening station, where with radar they could spy on the East Germans. The wires from the ski lifts proved to interfere with the transmissions and were removed. Huge, abandoned domes and former top security buildings remain on the hill, slowly decaying.

A couple of years ago the site was one location for a feature film I made with my friend Paul Rowley. Last week I returned with the composer for that film, Emily Manzo, so she could see this magnificent place herself, and I shot a tiny bit of video and made this short.

Teufelsberg

2011-08-06T00:31:00.000+02:00

Untitled from Tim Blue on Vimeo.

Irony is Not Always Something to Laugh At

2011-08-02T10:06:00.000+02:00

The Leader of a Good, Christian Nation Poses for Pictures with Each Member of an Assassination Team, and Pets the Head of a Muzzled Dog Named after a Great Arabic City, Signifying the Normalization of Bloodlust as the Target of the Killing is Symbolically Set on Top of a Mass Grave Estimated at Comprising up to Nine Hundred Thousand Souls.

One Flaming weekend that even the endless waters of heaven could not extinguish.

2011-08-01T17:32:00.000+02:00

The monthly silent film series, Rising Stars, Falling Stars last Friday featured the film of Germain Dulac, and was accompanied by John Blue and myself. I was excited because we were going to try out a new way of playing, with him experimenting more than before in electronics, and I had recently begun a few new things with a completely de-tuned electric guitar. Okay, it will sound incredibly art-dork-fan club thing, but before the gig I told John I really wished Yoko Ono would come to one of these. But it is because I love Yoko, and the Dulac film made me think of her, and I wondered if the Arsenal had any of her films in the archive.

But, you know a much greater surprise for me was when Stefanie told me that Mario Montez would be in the audience! I was so happy at this news. There were so many folks there, some sat in the aisles. Vaginal Davis was On Point with energy in her introduction, and so funny. Stefanie’s introduction of the introduction was also fun and funny.

Loosely, put the context of Queerness in your head. Loosely it is in mine. It was a very queer weekend.

John and I struggled with the set, and both knew we could have been better, but there was some nice moments. But the theme of artists working was beginning to emerge as the predominate strain throughout the weekend. Just what is it to watch musicians and a film together, what does it create? The party afterwards was filled with talking, laughing and millions of photographs. At one point I was looking around thinking I could almost be many of these people’s grandfather, which was weird and exciting and inspiring. Mario was at the party, but I was too shy to talk.

In defiance of the heavy and relentless rain, the next day began with us meeting high up on the roof of the Sony Center and gathered to celebrate the birthday of the origin of the word, Superstar. This word is incarnate in the person of Mario Montez, whose grace, beauty, and humor lent SO much content into the works of the more largely celebrated Jack Smith and Andy Warhol. At this party I think I was in some alternate universe of Historical Cracks, meaning, among many people who have done some very important work over the last 40 plus years in making the world a much better place, but people who are not as recognized for this work as they perhaps are due. John Heys, the dear, pleasant and generous soul who worked with Peter Hujar and David Wojnarowicz, among others, was there. He can drop you information that is so worthwhile to pursue, as if he were offering you a glass of water. John also started the world’s very first weekly gay journal, Gay Power, in 1969. He found out about my interest in sculpture and furniture design and turned me on to two very good sources to look at. The lovely and smart Zazie De Paris was there sporting her beautiful hand made jewelry. Zazie has been an actress, performer and singer for many years, and also can tell you stories of her life that are NOT name dropping, because, in fact…these are the facts of her life. Mick Jagger, Nick Cave, Jane County, on and on. Zazie has also been nothing but gracious and kind to me over the years. Matthias Mueller was there, in line like everyone else, to get and autograph from Mario on his birthday. Matthias’ own films are lovely, and long an inspiration to me. My dear friends, Wilhelm Hein and Annette Frick were there also. Wilhelm has been long a friend and mentor to me, an inspiration and help. His own work over the years includes bringing the entire idiom of free Jazz to Germany along with his brother, and doing very experimental, hard hitting, political and beautiful films over the years. Annette is a photographer who has an amazing body of work as well. She also over the years has been a big support and help to me. The thing is, this party was packed with the underground heavy hitters, all there to wish Mario a happy birthday. If I emphasize their status in things, it is in the context of queerness, and the theme of artists working, and what that means. There really could be no networking, as in fact, many of these people are poor. It is more a kind of thing like, we have found each other, over space and over time. Beatrice, Cordoua, aka, Trixie was there, and I sat with her a long while, loving her company as always.

Later that night we went downstairs for a screening of some of Mario’s work, broken by informal conversation between Mario, Marc Siegel that was full of anecdote from Mario’s life. I was looking at this beautiful creature, and left wondering about what ephemeral things that were given freely to Smith, Warhol, and Ludlum, and how this work has been received for generations now. Hell, I remember talking all ablaze about Chealsea Girls when I was a teenager, which was already a generation removed. Mario’s screen presence is phenomenal. The beauty of Mario Banana is unparalleled, and, as I said the humor. When the peel of the fruit surprises her with an unruly smack on the face, she does not flinch, but with the slightest look on the face tells us she knows. Mario’s ethnicity also lent an exoticism to these more known artists that is often central to their work. I think Jack Smith was aware of the gift of Mario, and dealt with reciprocal generosity. Warhol, on the other hand appears less grateful, often using Mario as an object of derision. Later I got Mario’s autograph on a book put out by Hein and Frick based on photos from a recent festival here in Berlin. Looking at the book, I realize it was full of images of these people here to celebrate Mario, and that these people were my friends. Artists, working. I collected as many autographs as I could. There is a great section of Evi Reussel in her home made bear outfit which she signed. Susanne Sachsse, who has been a dear friend, and is amazingly talented and versatile, also signed a nice picture of her. I think the point of all this is, Do Not Drop Names, Keep Them!

The next evening I went to see my friends Christy and Emily play a gig. I had heard their CDs before, which I found to be a world so intimate that at first I was shocked to be in before being laid out by a lavishly detailed mix, and left floating in a near narcotic daze. Emily Manzo had also provided the score for my film with Paul Rowley, which was an entirely different side of her work than this, so I did not really know what to expect. From the get-go, the music live worked the same way as the CDs, but also very different due to it being Live. The instrumentation was a rich and warm, thickness that was juxtaposed to the high clarity of their harmonizing vocals. Also the instrumentation had many elements which could be called ‘retro”. The jangly warmth of Christy’s guitar recalled The Smiths recalling The Byrds, without being a rip off or gimmicky, because of her skillful use of pedals NOT as effect, but often as part of the Song’s structure kept it firmly original and contemporary. With Emily’s Piano playing being rooted in a classical avant-garde, the set opened with her playing reminding me of Lamont Young’s work with overtones. This thickness was not lost in muddy swamps. The songs themselves had clear, distinct and surprising changes, and themselves were played with changes that bled into the next, helping us, the audience, get drawn into a world instead of just hearing a presentation of one song after the next. As I watched them I was thinking again about artists working, and I was in wonder of what I was witnessing. You could say this was just a concert, but it was not. It was musicians working skillfully with the material of sound in a sort of sonic painting. If you know then that they also are a couple, then what this does to the meaning of making work to show, together as a couple, and what this in turns means to receive this work, it is nothing short of a marvel. The show was brilliant and inspiring. They have one more tomorrow at Mica Moca, a venue in wedding if you are in Berlin and want to see a great thing of what it means when artists work. (http://de-de.facebook.com/pages/Mica-Moca/147256382006271)

Found covered in paper, on backside of vintage frame

2011-07-10T20:31:00.000+02:00

click to enlarge

Walter Benjamin in the Stacks

2011-07-06T08:00:00.000+02:00

Some Books Found in Walter’s Library;

Audio Culture, Christopher Cox

Beyond the Dream Syndicate, Brandon W. Joseph

In Search of the Blues, Marybeth Hamilton

Giordano Bruno and the Embassy Affair, John Bossy

The Rosicrucian Enlightenment, Frances Yates

King Leopold’s Ghost, Adam Hochschild

The South Hampton Slave Revolt, Henry Irving Tragle

The Paris Commune, Frank Jellinek

The Gnostics, Jacques LaCarriere

The Reckoning, Charles Nichol

Wonders and the Order of Nature, Daston and Park

Verses and Versions, Vladimir Nobokov

Gumbo Ya Ya, Saxon, Dreyer and Tallant

The Complete stories of JG Ballard

Religions of the Oppressed, Vittorio Lanternari

God’s Country, Percival Everett

Noise, Rupert Taylor

The City in History, Lewis Mumford

The Necessity for Ruins, R.B. Jackson

Hallaj, Mystic and Martyr, Louis Massignon

Oasis, Semiotexte

The Wit and Humor of Oscar Wilde

Ice, Anna Kavan

The Trial, Franz Kafka

The Complete Poetry of William Blake and John Donne

Under the Volcano, Malcolm Lawry

The Autobiography of Red, Anne Carson

The Devil’s Blind Spot, Alexander Kluge

Quarantine, Juan Goytisolo

The Last Horoscope

2011-06-26T18:43:00.000+02:00

Every Night and every Morn

Some to Misery are Born

Every Morn and every Night

Some are born to sweet delight

Some are Born to Endless Night

William Blake

The stars of the Firmaments themselves had rebelled, their calculations and assignments had for too long been used as instruments of an unforgiving and punitive “corrections”. The handful of texts they had used as reference for millennia were considered unamendable by Reason. But who was this Reason, and whom did he serve? None could remember.

Below, the currents of desert sands and seas danced with each other, celebrating the newfound Unreasonableness of lesser beings; Men. These people, like the wind stirred, and nations fell. One after one. Inspired, the heavens refused to provide for the calculations and assignments any longer. Day refused its services, and night denied its cover in a pact where they abandoned the Texts and learned to sing with Men.

Dream Logic / Reflecting Pool

2011-06-20T18:53:00.000+02:00

"In a night of despair I dreamed I was with my first friend from my school days, whom I had not seen for decades and had scarcely remembered in that time, tempestuously renewing our friendship and brotherhood. But when I awoke it became clear that what despair had brought to light like a detonation was the corpse of that boy, who had been immured as a warning: that whoever one day lives here may in no respect resemble him." Walter Benjamin

A comfortable sense of place was provided by a few details; the lasting warmth of the oven filling a well ordered room, morning autumn sunlight that slants low through other rooms, animating and gilding in gold the flecks of dust, and the sounds from a piano somewhere. Such was the setting this morning.

From where I stood I could see a memory, and I smiled at what was not there, or at the shadow and idea of what will not be. Such as it is, with this memory properly residing in the future tense, it awaits it's cue to parade through my welcome space on it's way to nothing.

I smile at this phantom because I loved it. Since it is a phantom, and was perceived as memory it resides in the past, a projection of was. And so I am tricked by Time into a smile for one whom I adore, who properly resides in the past as memory, and in the future as a memory yet to find it's way back to my welcome space. This morning, as time dissolved, I was alone.

In the fragmentation of Time it is the dreamer alone who remains intact. Thus I stood alone in a room, untouched, while the three aspects of Time became one, and the casualty of this merging was the object of my love, a victim of an evil alchemy in converting what is present into what is absent.

Dreaming of the sea. When the sun had descended far enough from the heavens as to touch the waters, it burst into blood and flame. In this manner it set fire to the sea. The flames then rode the tide toward the shore where they broke in burning waves. In this way did they set fire to the land. I began to run, but the earth split in two, exposing a wound of bleeding soil. A woman who stood on the edge of this crevice tossed to me her child, a boy, while looking at me as if this was long expected, as if it had been rehearsed. In her eyes I saw the night, and I cried out because in the night within her eyes I saw that there was no dawn. Nothing would ever be born again, her child was to be the last. Mercy was an angel (of sorts). She fled from where she hovered in the sky, and the bloody sun blinded all the population, who from then on made love with gunfire. The priests of all faiths began to pray, but it was to the emptiness that they had enthroned as God. I walk with the boy on a scorched and empty world, under a sky made of rags devoid of stars. Autumn leaves appear on his skin as he disintegrates in my bed, consumed by many sicknesses that race through his small body and blood, bringing him an endless sleep. All that matters is that he live. The ghosts of all the spirits of the dead breathe into him their memories as if to feed him, they know that should he die, so even does their memory of having once been. We now all exist in fear, suspended in the air, unable to see through the acidic smoke. We are cold, as the sun has committed suicide, and we cry for the boy whose eyes are futility. We are afraid of the nothing that awaits us with his absence. What he sees is only the memory of his mother's immolation and my descent into insanity. This madness is a burning hatred, and each moment is an ending, the End. What life remains of me flies across the galaxies in search of the emptiness called God, so that I may kill it. Murdered angels float in space, their wings shorn from divine bodies, and their crystallized blood pours from their wounds, flowing into blackness as rubies. Planets, moon and stars extinguish themselves, obliterating identity. The woman who once burned touched me, and I remembered leaving the boy alone. She instructs me to accompany him to his death, to place pillows under his feet.

I float in space, dreamless but conscious, and without the means to move. Above me is the specter of a naked woman, rotating the constellations as if she was the axle of a wheel. As the heavens move faster, the stars whirl around her head, becoming blurred, or looking like scores of comets. She eclipses light with her orgasm.

My sleep this evening could best be described as transparent. Most often sleep takes the form of solidity only penetrated by an occasional claustrophobic or extreme nightmare that is rarely remembered. But there I was, for hours looking at the walls, my eyes having long since adjusted to the lack of light. I went over the day's events, thought about the coming day, and kept looking at the clock, when I noticed that I was in deep sleep. I felt as if I was dreaming. Closing my eyes, I could see the dreams clearly, and by opening them I could see the room through the colors and shapes of the dreams as through tinted transparencies. For some time then I enjoyed this dual state of consciousness.

Easter came and went without any fanfare. Jesus has become an amnesiac compulsively drawn to the tomb of Joseph of Arimathia, like someone who can't remember why they are standing in the kitchen or what they had come there for. The gates of the elect are closed. A car bomb tears apart the face of God, whose blood and tissue soak the damned. An invading colony of ants, the damned storm the termite mound of Heaven, disguised by the scent of God, or rather wearing his face, to make off with the larvae of angels. We prey to the Lord. Lord hear us prey. Or walled up in a box of cracked plaster, a delivery driver hurls muted prayers at the sky like cannonballs, so the sacred light of heaven might bleed over us while levitating buddahs smoke nerve gas from a hookah pipe. The feds write reports and shred them, secretly lamenting the demise of Koresh, whom MTV was very eager to unplug.

"Since it was terror, and disturbance, and instability, and doubt, and division, there were many illusions at work. By means of these, and empty fictions, they were sunk in sleep, and found themselves in disturbing dreams. Either there is a place to which they are fleeing, or without strength they come from having chased after others, or they are involved in striking blows, or they are receiving blows themselves, or they have fallen from high places, or they take off into the air though they do not even have wings. Again sometimes it is if people were murdering them, though there is no one even pursuing them, or they themselves are killing their neighbors, for they have been stained with their blood. When they who are going through all of these things wake up, they see nothing, they who were in the midst of all these things, for they are nothing. This is the way that each one has acted, as though asleep at the time, when he was ignorant. Good is the man who will return and awaken, and blessed is he who has opened the eyes of the blind." Gnostic Text

Only the embers of a once joyous fire. A beast made of polished steel, broken glass, and knives claws it's way out of my head.

In a dream, a male at once ancient and boyish is in the tree outside my window, masturbating a cock with thick hair, yet hairless, enormous, yet the size of my index finger. I watch from behind the curtain, but he stares at me with his hand around his cock, his face feverish. Filled with grief, I run from room to room, finally hiding under a grimy desk where I sob. Back at the window, a beautiful Thai youth is diving from his third story window to a mattress on the sidewalk below. On the second attempt he lands head first on the hood of a car, his neck snapped. His body convulses into that of the old man. I run under the desk and resume my crying.

A clock frightens him into consciousness each morning where he sleeps in a bed that barely accomodates his body, let alone his dreams, and there are rusty stains on his pillow. The blood (or is it concrete?) stiffens on his knuckles. The morning is ushered in by trucks on the freeway whose tarps bring to ímind the wings of great celestial bats the way they rip the air. Wires tighten around his heart as the illusion that someone was near fades.

When bound to a stake in an open field, I see that the stones around me are pieces of the sky that have fallen, forsaken and cold. A building is constructed from these rejected fragments of the heavens and I am presented with an option.

Time will disperse, revealing a shadow. He went into a deep sleep.

Of the twins, only one has sight. His brother is laying on a red velvet couch, sightless, dead. They have been dressed the same. The boy with sight has his hand resting on the edge of the couch, just above his brother's head. His eyes have bored holes through the congealed time that is history at the insistence of the quality of his pain. This sorrow both demands and dares, and there can be no passivity in what the gaze rests upon. The two holes serve the function of the end of a double-barreled shotgun, and through time this is how he has held vigilance over death, though there is the possibility that the gaze may turn inwards, like a gun, to himself. The brother lays still, eyes closed, no gaze.

Is it himself he stands guard over, is this pain that of his own death foretold? No, in death feeling is destroyed. Did his brother feel death? Only alive were they the same, one now is nothing while the other is the suffering of the absence that nothing cannot feel. Never more different.

X-Sessions

2011-06-18T08:48:00.000+02:00

A couple of years ago with my brother John, I participated in the X-Wohnungen festival produced by the HAU (Hebbel am Ufer) theater in Berlin. The idea behind the festival was to focus on one neighborhood and have an audience which travels in pairs, and with a map, go from apartment to apartment, seeing several installations, performances, or exhibits. The festival operated for five days, eight hours a day. For my flat, I converted it to look like the old migrant, worker flat it originally was, and made a ten-minute film that was presented as a triple projection (which can be seen in the “film” section of this blog). This was accompanied by interviews John had done with our grandmothers concerning their childhood experiences of immigration. While the interviews and the film played, we performed music live, wired in from the kitchen. The audience rarely knew it was live until exiting the flat and seeing us in the small kitchen filled with instruments.

This we did eight hours a day for five days. It was the most strenuous exercise in improvisation I ever have undertaken. Here I have finally gotten around to putting some of the music together for others to hear. The following sections together form about five hours of improvisation, mixed into roughly 25 minute segments, so it is easy to listen to and come back to the others later. It is not really free improv as we were somewhat bound by the limits of the film, as well as by performing live music for so long in an building that was not really soundproofed for neighbors. I have kept the playing intact, editing out only the exits and entrances of the audience from my apartment. Session X-10 also features Georgian artist BEKA GIGAURI on clarinet and mouth harp, and VAGINAL DAVIS on assorted objects.

I have tried to get these to play in this blog, but cannot seem to figure it out. Here is the link for a free download of each 20 minute track. I think they are nice, and John's guitar playing is lovely.

http://www.last.fm/music/The+Pixie+Kitchen/X-Sessions+MP3+uploads

Paint from Life, said Caravaggio

2011-06-13T20:35:00.000+02:00

With this, the final play of sunlight flickers through the leaves, casting shadow on my rooms.

Two Magpies clamor like machine guns at a large crow that threatens their nest.

This sunlight shining on my windows casts reflections on the other side of the building, which emphasize and exaggerate the flaws in the vintage glass, striking the building with strange, spherical shapes.

The Still Life reflected a life that had become still.

The Turkish border is swollen with refugees from neighboring Syria.

This morning as I laid on my back in the park I imagined Beckett, imagining himself as company, as he laid on his back in the dark.

What shadows play on the fabric of a tent in Sudan, as the government considers withdrawing troops, what sounds heard outside that tent, and what memories of a twenty year period of war do they conjure?

Scraps of papers lay about with titles of films written on them. In another color ink are written the dates for this month’s performances and meetings.

There are two guitars, a banjo, an accordion, a violin, two wind instruments and a few percussive objects. The saz is broken, its body cracked and without strings.

As the sun sets, the crow has been chased away, a couple makes love, unseen but heard, and the woman across the courtyard hangs clean fabric in her window.

The authorities made a list of items found in Caravaggio’s house. There were empty canvases of differing sizes, and little to no furniture. Paint, but no brushes, a large mirror and a cabinet containing twelve books. No one bothered to note the titles.

Suspended and Not Vapor

2011-06-08T15:42:00.000+02:00

1. A flock of pigeons burst into flame while circling the pond.

2. Waiting at an airport. The time is situated within the hour that is referred to as four a.m., but remains outside, removed, or parallel. I see it more in terms of a distance than of a time; tomorrow is east of me. Color is some sort of herald. An angel is a messenger, or the message. My grandfather brought back from a mountain a block of obsidian that must have fallen from this sky that was just as black. The message is in the fluidity of change, as the sky heats it's alchemic oven this obsidian melts into the violence of purple, a bruise, then pastels of reds, blood, and finally from a primal black stone comes gold, the daylight which invites or insists on the immolation of secrets. The ghosts of dreams evaporate from the light let in as the sleeper opens his eyes, or flee into shadow, awaiting the movement that comes from the vastness of night.

3. Dampness draped the black air, hung from very low clouds over a city. Within the clouds rested many of them, who had come to witness a birth. They hovered, whispering amongst themselves as to where and how. Magi of sorts who were immune to the deceptions of the senses, blind, invisible and bodiless. But they could feel their own world bulging against that of the other, ready to burst from the violence that only life has when it breathes and exhales it's own. The older of them patiently rested in the mist entangled firs while the younger took advantage of the wind to flow rapidly down the streets or through the cracks of windows and doorways seeking that profound confusion that is death.

The Beloved and his father stood on wet grass and withered strawberries, shivering because of the wind, and framed by the dripping golden haze of the light from the porch. A pistol was the sole source of warmth in the Beloved's hand. Perhaps the sound of it piercing the sky had stirred up the winds. The father had returned to the hazy golden house, the young man we call the Beloved could just make out whispers in the air around him, while what rode the wind sensed his will of resolute power. They knew in moments another would be born. Neither compassionate nor malicious, indifferently they caressed his body.

The image of his father framed in a dripping warm haze sent him tumbling, falling forever into what could be called his self. It was the image of a father who smiles, and who was seen from the inverse of infinite light years from within a body not yet fifteen years old, his name resting on the lips of the Beloved as perhaps a bubble might, when a bullet provided the necessary release of pain brought on by an eternal and lonely vision from so far inside his skin that a body was forgotten. The dampness was strange that clung to him, and he was afraid of what he no longer could see, but was led by winds he could now understand, as he was relegated to the realm of image.

Born under the sign of the wound, as an infant the Beloved was baptized with the scalding water of a teapot by a father who sat drinking endless scotches in a room so cold that breath issuing from the child's mouth was a fine mist of crystals as he lay writhing and screaming on a dirty floor. When the father could stand no more, and realized that the squeal of the teapot was louder than that of the infant, he simply emptied the contents of the former onto the crying form of the latter. The child was soon sealed in hate and henceforth let no one in or out. But the hatred was not yet focused, for it needed an object to latch onto to become real and tangible. At the age of fourteen that object had become his self, and for hate to be known as such it must first experience its converse, love.

This love had been felt for another boy a year older, who at the funeral stood apart from the rest, who did not know him, under the overhang of a granite tomb, drops of rain rolling from it's roof to the soft soil beneath his feet. Absence had taken residence in his chest, an abscess that gnawed at what substance he was made of until he felt that he would collapse should he move.

To steady himself, the Lover stared at the inverted image of a tree that reflected in a clear pool of rainwater until he could no longer see it. It had become a hole in the earth that he entered, descending through the muddy roots and topsoil, while wondering if his love had been here before him. At the bottom of this hole, slippery wet leaves covered the ground. He looked up to see the world of the living through the puddle and could see an image of himself distorted by drops of rain. Low clouds formed a sort of sky that was punctured here and there as if it were lightning by the roots of what grew above. Several crows hopped from branches looking back at him and cawing, so he followed, making no noise, to a clearing where the Beloved sat atop an Indian funeral pyre, with two crows perched upon his crossed legs.

He was still the beautiful boy he had slept with, though a void rested in each of his eyes that served to make him untouchable. On the assorted branches and twigs sat a crumpled photograph of the two of them, sitting on an unmade bed, laughing, that a friend had taken of them the previous week. The dead Beloved attempted to pick it up, but was stopped by one of the crows that quickly clasped it in its black beak and flew away. The pyre then ignited and the lover could hear the boy attempt to speak through the rising flames, but terrified the Lover ran back to that hole in the sky from which he had earlier descended. From a distance he could be seen retreating from the funeral, resembling a crow hopping amidst patches of yellow grass under dark rows of firs.

At the underage club where they had met the music was louder and speed sales up in the one bathroom adorned with vomit, syringes and spray paint, and the need to fix a reason for this significant death danced with the spaces between those who knew this boy. When the Lover entered the club, after wandering off the hours that followed the funeral, those who saw him so mud splattered, moon skin in filthy black suit, were kept from approaching him by the imposing feel of absence. The Beloved's death articulated an affection with no object, a void.

The Lover knew that the course of events had seen the slow mining of every pleasure from the boy by those who would want only to fuck his sorrow, or his golden brown skin once wrinkled by the scalding water of a teapot. A boy who had seen everything as his fault, and wanted nothing short of annihilation, but who for two weeks before his suicide attempted to allow another in, an attempt that proved too laden with sorrow to prevail.

The Lover had slipped into the father's home the day before the funeral, having been provided by the Beloved with a key for early morning meetings, and had taken the gun. Now in the club the sounds of drunken and misplaced sorrow were pushed into oblivion by by memories too large to accommodate what threatened their borders. He wanted only to get high, to push consciousness into the grave with the one whom he loved, but had no money.

An overweight and frightened trick sat quickly drinking and eyeing the teenaged Lover who looked so sad in his muddy black suit. He was just the kind of nauseating person the dead Beloved would have picked up just to make himself feel worse. The two of them fucked in an alley, and the mud on his clothes made him think of the earth that now covered his beloved, and with this man over him, entering him, he could only hold the image of the boy whose sorrow caused the winds to blow to a source that summoned only death.

His own grief mixed with rage at what becomes of people who have no choice in being brought into existence, and this feeling filled his heart and spilled onto the rain soaked streets. The pistol was finally warm from being in his hand so long, that when the man had finished, the trigger was easily pulled.

The wind picked up slightly, and what rides it gently lapped up that substance that is the source of life and death in these moments of transubstantiation.

4. The moon is in triple decline, shadowed by the earth, wrapped in fog, and near it's disappearance in the sea, it is a celestial cadaver, orbiting the head of the world as some profane halo.

5. The birds common to the area where I am accustomed to sitting before work are extraordinarily active today. Whereas they usually group according to species along the fountain, in the trees, or on the ground among the cafe tables where I sit, today they dart from one area of the square to the other, back and forth, mostly alone, and lost amid all the other birds. Counter to this activity is the sight in my memory of innumerable sparrows, half devoured, in the paralyzing inertia of decomposition, scattered along the sidewalks of my childhood neighborhood.

Here are a few stills from this montage of nostalgia; the chicks, with bald and oversized heads had a certain obscenity not inherent in the corpses of other, ground dwelling animals that had publicly expired. How, I wondered, could they have fallen from the sky when there was nothing contained within it to fall from? What called them to the earth in this last fall? A black cat, bleeding from the mouth in the street on my way to the grocer's one morning, belonged on the ground, to the ground, in a way. Birds should have floated away.

A family of hawks returned every spring to wreak terror upon the local, smaller birds. They would cry out in rapid shrills when swiftly falling on an unfortunate, lone sparrow. The sparrows would sometimes as a group try to divert the predator should they be near, but more often than not the hawk would snatch the bird in mid-air. During those summers we could also often see a snake writhing in the hawk's talons, or a rat's tail waving beneath it's broad wingspan as the large bird flew to the awning over the house on the corner where they nested summers in a row. I perceived this cry that the hawk would sound as some devise that would freeze the prey in fear.

One summer, when climbing behind the garage with a friend, I found a body of a recently killed hawk. I spread its wings to over three feet of ornately designed feathers of several shades of browns, grays, and black. After showing it to my friends, we imagined it to have lost in a fight with a cat, crawling to this remote site to die of shame. We gave it a funeral based on what we knew of Egyptian Pharaohs.

The crow and raven were mysteriously anti-social, always seen observant and alone. They were more in league with fog, shade and trees than with other animals. Their principal occupation was not the busy hunting and gathering of the other winged creatures, but time spent hunched in the firs, or perched on houses, watching humans. At times I thought that they sought my confidence, other times that they stood in judgment of me.

I remember when two sparrow chicks fell from a nest in our roof. I placed them in a small box filled with dry grass and fed them each hour, keeping a lamp over the box to keep them warm. One morning I awoke to find them standing on my chest, chirping to be fed. I then decided to teach them to fly. In the backyard there was a shrine to Saint Francis, who I recalled having been a friend of birds, so it was from there that we began. I would hold them and gently toss them across the lawn and see their attempts at flight improve each day. After my father died my family went to the east coast for the summer. My birds I left with friends of the family. From the Howard Johnson hotel room in Connecticut where I sat watching Speed Racer cartoons with my brothers and sisters I called to inquire about my bird's health. They had died shortly after we had left.

I paid no attention to Robins as they epitomized boredom with their flat gray and rust coloring. They appeared under the azaleas each morning after a rain to pull worms from the lawn, and were always present on the way to school, forecasting the uniform monotony of both the weather and school routines.

Chickadees were quite the anomaly. They wore the black hood of the executioner and were allied with his activities, yet their play and movements were entirely frivolous. Occasionally I sighted a Bluebird as a hopping patch of bright color within a dark thicket of bushes or small trees. One bird I knew only by call, which resembled a telephone dialing. I would never see it and could not imagine its appearance, or preferred not to, as if to do so would betray it's successful stealth. For a time I had two pet ducks, Yacky and Daffy, who would follow me all over the backyard sounding out their funny little quips. In the winter when the wading pool would freeze, we liked to put them on its surface to laugh at their attempts to be figure skaters. After they had matured the opossums that lived in the honeysuckle bush dragged them under the porch where I later found the mutilated carcasses.

I have seen only one Woodpecker, a few Owls, which after sighting I dreamed of them flying sightless, with maggots falling from where the eyes should have been, through a forest at night. I have seen two Buzzards while sitting atop a hill that glided so close that I could see their wrinkled heads and hear their wings slicing the air.

6. Hosts of angels fall from grace in delirious rapture. The prison of faith crumbles as they feel the joy of a fall that contains no consequence. Some extend their wings to catch the air, slowing down so as to prolong this feeling, others pull them in close to the body, speeding and intensifying it, and rush headfirst into the void. A god stripped of companions cannot recall why he did not create for himself wings as magnificent as these, and longs to also leave his empty heaven.

7. Sitting by the fountain once more. A large fly strikes my arm, loses balance and falls on it's back, next to my hand. A sparrow abruptly lands, looks at me, then the fly and devours it. The bird looked at me once more with one transparent wing protruding from its beak before taking flight.

Public Sex and Movies

2011-06-03T20:36:00.000+02:00

Flora

The beautiful spring has clouded over a bit, but this is okay because living on the top floor means the sound of rain on the roof is more beautiful than anywhere than perhaps the sound of it falling on the surface of a pond, or lake. Another nice thing about spring is the pace of the blooming. A month ago it was these small purple clusters of what seem like miniature tulips, followed by daffodil and tulip, followed by lilac, then by rhododendron, and now azalea. The leaves on the trees get broader by the day, and the smell of flowers and fresh water is everywhere.

Nekropolis

Underground just now the monsters do not sleep. A thirty year lapse in our time has passed since they have walked among us, but recently a document of light and celluloid was examined beneath the Sony Center in Berlin that shows them at home in a kind of subterranean Hell, soaked in the richest colors, made even more so by the darkness that frames those colors.

If I call their home a Hell, know that it is only so for those of us, the living, who cannot survive the strength of our own obsessions. At home the Vampires discuss sex and feminism in parlors hung with the fine paintings they collect, Frankenstein ruminates over the constellations, Witches and Warlocks meditate calmly or practice spells. The formality and order with which they conduct their lives is indeed elegant, lending to our own a light where we, coated in the dust and rubble of wars and greed, appear shabby at best.

As they live beneath us, at times our own political disturbances will reverberate into the chambers of the Damned. In this text, document, film….whatever it may be called, a Vampire and a drunken actor are seen discussing the nature and existence of the Devil. The time is 1970, a time in our world of intense political upheaval. Though even in Hell no one has seen the Devil, they wonder; could it be Nixon, Mick Jagger, Kenneth Anger, or some other world leader? The Vampire is inquisitive to say the least, she cannot shut up, and the drunken actor keeps pushing a bottle of scotch to her lips, as if to tell her that such a line of questioning is only relevant to mortals.

At times, when not talking amongst themselves, the Monsters address us directly, sharing with us details of their sexuality, or frustrations with the misunderstandings between Mortals and Monsters. One fine, young monster speaks to us about the desire to be loved, the need to be wanted, another time the same female Vampire who was seen discussing the Devil tells us of the frustration of her sex life with her husband.

There is mention of a time of the slaughter of monsters, and one gets the sense that the entirety of this document comes from this, that they are telling us that we have not won, that they are alive and well, and share with us things that make us all more or less “human”. The difference between their world and ours is one of beauty and sophistication. Indeed, the damned are cool. And gorgeous. I want to fuck the dead.

May Day.

As the weather was so warm, I thought I would take a walk before the sun went down, to the park by Susanne’s. I sat on a bench under a lilac tree, and a few men passed me by. I was wearing headphones and listening to Violent Onson Geisha, thinking that noise may have nothing left to say to us, much like painting. I was not really feeling very sexy, but thought to take a stroll to the part of the park where the guys are that is more secluded, because it was not so dark yet, and I thought I would open myself to that space as a place to cruise at night, little by little. After the first turn in the path, there was a young guy, maybe 22 with lovely, thick brows, an amazing mouth, wearing a knit skull cap, and a long sleeve, white Tee shirt, and those kind of pants that are not shorts and not pants, rising as they do just above the ankle. There was something about him that looked familiar in that he resembled, or had the look of a Latino Hip-Hop guy from California. Anyway, it was more cat and mouse than I would have preferred. Maybe it’s a feeling of middle age, but I usually think the young guys just want their cocks sucked, which because I was not really looking for sex thought a bit too much work, so I left him. A few paces later, I rubbed my dick to see how horny I was, and indeed the flow of blood had shifted since I last took a pulse there. I went back too where he stood, and he approached, one hand wedged in his underwear. We began what could have started things going, but this guy came riding up on a bike and my friend booked like it was his boyfriend. I did not know if this was a sign that he just took the opportunity to leave, as he could have changed his mind, so I walked away, rather than follow him. About five minutes later, he passed below me, and I noticed he stopped to see if I was coming, so I went down the hill into the clearing. He dropped to his knees and ran his mouth over my pants, kneading my dick, then rose up, under my shirt, licking me all the way up to my nipples, then crossed my chest and licked my armpits. He was great at it, or rather pursued his own interest the way I like it, not a lot of biting and twisting, but instead a smooth, and even soft running of his whole mouth over my body. He backed up off me, and I went down on him, unzipping his pants to find a cock perfect for my mouth in width and length. He was cut, and had thick, heavy balls, even in shape and size, and a shaft and head forged by some master ironsmith, it was so linear and hard. Wanting more tongue, I stood up and we kissed, rubbing our crotches together, he sucked my nipples again, this time I ran my mouth over his neck and ears. By this time we had taken most of our clothes off, and I had his ass in my hand. It was so full and round, covered by a soft coat of hair, where the cheeks curved under to his asshole. I pushed my finger against his hole, the rest of my hand filled with his ass, as I sucked and licked his chest. As I began getting my finger up his ass, he shot a thick load onto the leaves at our feet, and I took his tongue into my mouth. At this point I wondered if I even wanted to come, as the sex thing was not really what I wanted to begin with, but to just look at that cock for a few more moments was the deciding factor. I jerked off looking at his naked body, and said thank you, rather than Danke to see if he was American. He said nothing, put on his clothes and left in a hurry, which may have been because for the first time I noticed we had a crowd around us.

Watching Static

Televised images contain compact and focused information that instills and reinforces dominant social codes and values, whether in the form of advertising, the contexts created for the daily news, or in melodramas made for TV. The space between broadcast channels is often where a new potential is discovered in examining the relationships built between the image and the viewer. The moment of decomposition in the saturation of images is a moment of intoxication in possibility.

terrorism as media pornography

celebration of the secret, and a replacement of the Public with a universal Private

provide a glimpse of sub social, sub cultural areas of secrecy that do thrive in public

Anonymous

Rode my bike to the Tiergarten and passed a rather thickset guy, also riding his bike. We made eye contact but kept riding in opposite directions. In the meantime I passed a handsome African guy sitting on a bench, but whose face looked in total concentration in some inner world, so I kept riding, but parked the bike nearby to see if I would notice him coming out of his trance to cruise somebody, which would mean he was fair game. An older, German guy passed me and stopped after a few steps to simply stare at me. I think there should be a certain amount of glancing, and sizing up of a person and a situation, but a several minute stare is a bit much to endure, so I got up to see if anything had changed with The Thinker. Turns out he had moved into the bushes, as I could see his legs and those of someone else, also that they were jerking off. I rode past and saw the guy on the bicycle again, this time we really checked each other out. He seemed perhaps Greek or Spanish, and appeared to have at one time broken his nose. He was a certain body type I like, about two years outside of having been very muscular, in a way, the bodybuilder sits half an inch under a layer of fat, but is still there. I noticed he rode his bike into the bushes, so I followed. Around the bend he stood, his adequate, but ultimately unmemorable cock in his hands, stroking it. As I approached him, he raised up his shirt to play with a nipple. His hands were large and tanned. When I got up next to him, he simply shoved me down to my knees, so I sucked him for a bit, then wanted to see if I would want to suck his ass by licking under his balls, finding out how clean he would be. I’m not a neat freak that way, but have had some rather unpleasant experiences, so it is better to check first. Anyway, he loved that I was licking under his nutsack, and jerked off vigorously. To my surprise he gently moved my head back and shot a load all over my beard, mouth, eyes and shirt. He was the kind that really sprays in a linear spurt, a rapid and thin cum. He zipped up, tossed me a Kleenex and rode his bike away. I jerked off on the spot with the little taste of cum that had hit my lips.

What is Liberalism?

A space that eliminates discourse by a useful dictionary of identities. Thus we have a liberal censorship, a liberal silence, to keep left issues visible, but not challenged. With a recent memory of the effectiveness in which the Rodney King riots were suppressed as a reminder of the complete triumph over 60’s-70’s radicalism, and a youth without a subculture, a placid culture of Tolerance presides.

Lady’s Room

Lying on the grass next to my bike with the Walkman playing Keith Hudson, I was about to close my eyes when a guy caught my eye. He was shaved headed, and had that sort of “queer” look that used to be sexy, but has since become a purchasable signifier of what type of gay one is. However I may have issues with the gays, I feel like a disgusting hypocrite sometimes, or an old school sexist, or even a pervert in that I think the gays are good only to have sex with, and this gay was pretty sexy. I closed my eyes, however, and continued to be surprised by Mr. Hudson’s amazing talents as a producer. Some minutes later, I woke to the sexy gay laying next to me. Without talking, he actually put his hand on my leg. I pulled him close to me and felt him up. We started getting too hot to be seen on the open field in such a position. This is when we tried to talk. I speak no German, he hardly spoke German, and no English, only Turkish and a little Spanish. Telepathically, we agreed to ride my bike to a quieter place. At first he drove, and I sat on the little rack, running my hands all over his ass, and up his back. Then we switched, and finally pulled over at a restroom and went to the stall. Standing on either side of the toilette we kissed and removed our clothes. I leaned back and he began sucking me off. As it was good, and I did not want to come yet, I raised him up, taking his chin in my hands, and sliding my finger in his mouth. This time I sucked him. He had a thick, but average length cock that was fun to take all the way to his dark, and nicely kept bush. This sort of mutual thing went on for awhile till he turned around and offered me his ass. I ran my palms over its curves, and wet a finger to fuck him with. He was nice and firm, with a sort of velvet growth of hair around his hole, which I played with as well. At this point someone came in. In fact two, and it turns out we were in the girl’s room. I have learned lessons from how this sort of thing can kill a mood, so I took the opportunity to cum. Seeing me cum, he shot a wad on the toilette seat. We dressed and waited for the women to finish and went outside where they were waiting with their boyfriends. Whatever. We laughed and parted after he wrote his name and number down in my notebook. His name is Bahri.

I thought two things today that amused me. The first is that a male lion is a Man-Pussy, the second was the name, Patsy Decline. (I conceived of Decline as in a decline of altitude, as she really did fall to pieces)

Book Release

We were the first to show up, and stood in the rain while some guy unlocked the door of the bookstore and let us in. They had moved tables and covered the shelves for the party and had set up one table where they would serve Champaign, and display the book that being released just now was the occasion to celebrate. Susanne and I sat on the couch, and talked with Daniel. Soon the two rooms of the store were totally packed, upstairs and downstairs. The scene was fun, being primarily a crowd mixed between the publisher’s folks, the sort of “radical” left, intellectual people and folks from the Berlin film scene. But this was all made more interesting by the odd folks out; artists, writers, transgendered and a gang of young faggots, who were a bit star struck by us, I must admit, which was also fun. They would glance at us a lot, whisper and giggle. I know from Marc they had seen us on TV, and more likely than not had seen Susanne in Raspberry Reich. Wilhelm showed up, and it is always nice to see him, he is so happy that the young people are into his film, just back from Greece where he showed two programs. He spoke animatedly about generations of anti-capitalist folks, how they arrive at their conclusions in wholly different ways, but somehow find each other. Stephanie surprised me when she told me she just had voided from her life all of her possessions, save books and films, put it all out on the street, to start over with a big, empty apartment. Susanne heard this, and gave her on the spot her beautiful, vintage, snakeskin purse as the first thing to start over with. I was introduced to this poet, who I knew was once a part of a film collective, and rather than talk about poetry, which I would have found truly awkward, I tried to steer it to her memories of those days when she was in a film collective. What struck me as great is she said the whole thing started because a group of friends had all read, or discovered some new theory, which they all were so excited about, they began making films almost instantly, to test and practice this theory, even touring to many countries in the process. Ran into Claudia again, whom I met at an opening a few weeks back. She was great, really sort of strange. I remember her saying how she was so into gender politics because she said, passing 40, one just gets physically sick of being one’s self, and rather than see an imperative to become another gender, for her the impulse was just to get rid of the old self. She then went on to talk about being Iraqi-European, and how she never could think of being anything other than herself. So, she was full of funny contradictions that in a way, all refused identity. After this, she told me I looked Black. So, she was weird and it was delightful to see her again. Left with Susanne around midnight, as the drunker one gets at these things, the more unintelligible everything is, given the language differences.

Anon.

At the park I saw a bit of action, a group of about six guys stood around a couple who were fucking. What was interesting about it was that invisible line that makes the circle in such situations. It is like an energy field that people are sort of afraid of. They stood around, discreetly watching, not even their cocks out, save one. He was an older, Indian or Pakistani guy, and was working his stuff with all his might, inching closer, bit by bit, transgressing the circle, which was brave because the couple fucking were young hipsters, not usually open to the likes of the elderly. It took him about fifteen minutes, but eventually he was right next to them, running his hand not used for masturbating, through the guy’s hair who was getting fucked. I really was touched by the scene, but preferred to watch from a distance in part because of the tableau it made, also so as to not be part of that circle.

Sicilian

Just now there are these clusters of soft, cottony seeds which float down from the trees in such quantity as to really look as if it is snowing, making things seem in slow motion, and giving body and mass to the scented spring air. Giuseppe, as I later found out was his name, walked into the clearing in the woods where I sat watching the air in motion. He had with him two dogs. I had seen him before, months ago, and found him too handsome to approach, but made sure he knew I was interested. We sat on the stone steps, talking for about two hours. As it turns out, we both are sort of trapped in our native tongues, so this conversation had to flip around spasmodically with whatever we knew in German or Spanish, as a way of patching the gaps between Italian and English. He had a goatee, rather full and unfashionable that made him sexier. Full head of hair, evenly salted and peppered, and seemed a bit “punk”. We talked about how it is weird that all us immigrants end up meeting in these public sex areas. He felt in a way, the Germans could sense us and avoided us. The whole time we were talking, one of his dogs kept starting fights with other dogs that families or couples would be walking. Never once did this seem to bother him. At one point this older woman seemed to stop, incredulously, and looked at us like she insisted on an intervention. We just kept talking, she had to back up the stairs and descend again through the bushes with her dog. I kept watching his face, or parts of it as we talked, his nose, his lips, his eyes. Unfortunately, I had to leave the park to go to a meeting at Susanne’s.

Samuel Delany;

“Yet, in all cases a dismal, gray, and unresponsive ground is the incomprehensible template against which they occur, not throwing them into relief so much as providing a necessary obscurity to their outlines, making them bearable, even possible, (making them hard or impossible for we who indulge in them to speak of them in any terms save the sexual, even as they are, in their actuality, wholly social), in a world that largely denies they exist”.

Just now the horrible dreariness of the last two days has broken. The clouds are breaking up into huge, tumbling affairs, and the sun passes its gaze across the red, tile rooftops of the buildings I can see out the window.

Dames

The strangest thing is that the racism is gratuitous within the space of the film. It could very well present a kind of all white utopia, void of all color, and work perfectly well. (of course, the absence itself of black people is in itself a statement ignored just now). But to have this one, long shot of the Sleeping Negro was simply mean spirited. It has no other function as far as I could tell. What it does say however, about a white paradise eerily precedes the slaughter of millions in Europe, and comes within some people’s then living memory of a slaughter in America of the Natives that was not yet named Genocide. The traffic of racism through images in this widow of peace between wars.

The Busby Berkeley dance numbers at the end were nightmarish and hallucinatory, spectacular and breathtaking. A camera moving through the spread legs of scores of women, their smiling faces raised between the legs was one of the most erotic and yes, pornographic things I ever have seen in a moving image, rivaled in perversity some thirty years later by the auto-erotic photos of Molinier fucking himself with his special, dildo pumps. The best number was the hanging laundry scene, with the washer ladies smelling the underwear of their men as they hang them to dry.

Friend of a Friend

I usually go to the park at night just to listen to my Walkman and enjoy the night sky. One bench I like to sit on is nestled right next to the wall of the massive fountain dedicated to the brother’s Grimm. From where I sit, I can look up to see the stars tangled and shimmering in the stone antlers of a statue deer. Having played the CD, and finished a tall becks, I decided to wander into the sex area. It always is weird to me, seeing the faces emerge from total darkness, as if the air itself had rearranged its structure to manifest the illusion of men. They vanish as fast as they appear. Rather disoriented from the sight of so many phantoms, I decided to linger a bit in an area more lit by the light from the street. A guy walked past me, very sharp features in his face, particularly his jaw and chin. His mouth was gorgeous and full, with rich and dark lips, and he had the most beautiful head of dark curls. I thought he was French; he was probably Spanish, Italian or Portugese, with the name, Alessandro. We began a deep kissing, and then he suggested we go somewhere else. I followed him across the fountain’s courtyard to a more secluded area. A lot more kissing lead to our removing of clothes, which is always a turn on for me, to be naked, or near naked, outside, and at night. We took turns sucking, and though he had rather smallish balls and dick, he was fun to play with because of his passion. He suggested we take turns coming on each other, and knelt down so I could spray his face and neck with cum. I wiped it all over his chest, then got down so he could splash me. I stood and we kissed again, our faces still wet with cold semen that I smeared into his beard stubble with my mouth. We walked partly home together, leaving each other by the Ubahn outside my house.

Arsenal

I hope to sit next to Jon Heys at the film tonight. Sadly, Zazie will not be there, as she is still in Paris. Last week, sitting between the two of them was hilarious. They both talk during the film, to themselves, each other, or me. They sing as well, and lean forward to tell me in my ear, but not whispering, about how this number or that related to a show or some art thing that happened in the 60’s or 70’s. In the lobby, Zazie had me in tears as she squeezed her tits, and said if she were in a plane, she would sow her hormones across the world so everything would be pink and glittering. John started to sing a song, stopped, cleared his throat and said, “For you darling, I will have to go an octave lower” and sang, but Zazie interrupted, correcting him on the melody. Then she said, “If you like, you can hear my version on my CD. It’s horrible, the worst” we all broke up laughing.

Gang of Four/Rip Rig & Panic

Even through the music playing in my ears I could hear the clanking and squeaking of my shoddy bicycle working away. I love the lyrics to some of those old songs;

Aim for the body rare you see it on the TV

The worst thing in 1954 was the bikini

See the girl on the TV dressed in a bikini

She doesn’t think so but she’s dressed for the h-bomb

I found that essence rare is what I live for

I knew I’d get what I asked for….

Then;

No man I don’t feel alone

Take my home wherever I roam…..

I got no soul this is it this is it

I’m ready to flip this is it this is it….

No rules no remorse….

Come on let’s wake the living dead

Free your soul free your soul…..

Leni Riefenstal as Busby Berkeley

I rode passed the Reichstag, through the tourists, passed the open, green area where I remember seeing the amazing formations of Nazis in propaganda films when I was young, and I wondered just how much I was conscious of the lyrics of songs from my early 20’s, of how these songs were in fact an education, one that informed me in the use of the song, of Capital, Philosophy. This education came complete with copious amounts of booze and powders, and my hands often smelled that intoxicating smell of lubricant and ass, which I would leave on as long as I could. I liked having a guy’s smell on me from a morning of fucking. I did absorb these songs, I did take these lessons seriously. Eventually the drugs and booze sort of blurred the lessons, but some of us recover, partially.

Drunk needs coffee for afternoon sleep

I stopped halfway through the park, and sat on a bench to continue reading Delany. A guy walked passed me, and I felt him staring, so rather than invite him, I kept up the reading façade until he passed, when I then could continue to actually read. I know these places are used for sex, but as Marc said, “I like being there” even if it is not for sex. The guy returned, this time sitting next to me. I always sort of hate and admire these people who can see someone is doing something like reading, or listening to music, but still insist on a conversation. I told him of my language capacity, he sighed and leaned back, telling me that it was crazy, that he knows this is not the way to do things, but saw me and thought he would ask if I minded kissing a stranger. I laughed and told him I was reading a book about him at the moment, “the Madman”. He told me he spent the night breaking up with his boyfriend, drinking too much, and would I mind if he slept on my lap awhile. I told him for just awhile, and he snugly laid his head in my lap, and asked me to read to him. I told him he was crazy, to shut up and go to sleep. I could feel a hard on forming in my pants, and hoped he would not grope around, as I did not find him attractive at all. This is not because he was not cute, indeed he was, but it was from the information I left out in this account, that he owned a coffee shop, was too hung over to open it, and called in the family’s employee to do it for him. A fucking bourgeois gay! But the fact he reeked of alchohol and was so forward, and a bit of a ruin made me like him enough to let him sleep on my lap. I read all about shit eating and poetry for a while, then woke him up. He asked for five more minutes, I responded negatively, tousled his hair, kissed him on the forehead and rode off.

Delany

Finished “the Madman”. Delany is really amazing. The relationships in this book are true to the complexity relationships have in life. Laid bare, carefully articulated, the space for moralizing is seriously impeded. A feat in this book, sopping as it is with piss, shit and cum, not to mention the long passages written a language that is both graphic sexually and loaded with racist verbiage.

42nd Street

The movie was lackluster. Fred and Ginger are cute, but it is nearly impossible for me to see the glamour or wonder in such simplistic fantasies. And I am rarely susceptible to virtuosity in any art form. The only interesting way to read this film is through its relationship to racism, then read racism’s relationship to the Great Depression. Fred Astair in black face is really ridiculous, but at once interesting and disappointing is that the moment he begins to smear his face with makeup is just after he kisses Ginger for the first time. I say it’s interesting because we see him apply the makeup, not just perform wearing it, but it is disappointing in that the makeup somehow signifies a borrowed sexual vigor, the age old face of racism as sexual envy. It is hard for me to see through time and imagine what these films meant to a public during the Great Depression. On one hand, was this the beginning of the cult of celebrity? The art deco glamour, the style and wealth must have seemed incredible then. Would the audience identify with the characters as they “worked their way up”, or would they sit in awe and envy of the Movie Stars, Fred and Ginger, living in Hollywood, making movies and money? Whatever, the paradise depicted on the Silver Screen reinforced what Zazie had said about her own use of black face in our project last fall; that even Paradise demands an underclass. I understand Marc’s seminar that accompanies these films has become a war zone.

Day of the Living Dead

I had just passed the area where last year there was a tangle of small trees and bushes where men cruised right off the main path through the park. Earlier this spring I noticed the Park Authority had cut it all back by pruning the underbrush, and I thought that the area would grow back to it’s proportions within the space of a month or two. Looking at it now, I realized this hope was naïve, and that the altering of it was solely to eradicate cruising. I noticed that older men walked through it anyway, as if they were unaware that they were visible, and imagined that invisibility wears off with age, or that by rendering their surrounding landscape invisible the inhabitants materialize. It occurred to me that if one spends one’s whole life invisible, the way that one walks through public space seems from the outside as a form of senility, dementia or madness. I parked the bike, rolled a cigarette and watched them tracing the paths of their desire as if they were zombies.

As I watched them, I remembered recently walking into the cruising grounds near Susanne’s, and how when I approached the stone steps that marked the entrance into the thickets, two couple, males and females, plus one extra man, sat on the steps, not talking amongst themselves as you would expect from a group a friends spending time in a lovely park. Rather, they sat on the steps, not speaking, and stared at me as I descended into the bramble. I could feel their gaze on my back as I entered, and it struck me that the situation seemed as if it were a neighborhood group reclaiming the park for themselves, for their families, like they had a meeting over cranberry muffins and tea about what action they could take to “make the park safe”, and I realized that what I was experiencing was a sort of non-violent fag bashing. Then I recalled how a series of information booths and music was set up near the other cruising ground in the park, and that Marc had told me of how on the radio a group of activists were broadcasting from there an action to renovate the fountain that marks the space, and called for the city to fence it in during the evening.

These sorts of actions, combined with the clear-cutting of the other cruising areas, in turn lead me further back into time to remember the slow, but steady war on public sex that the city of San Francisco had waged, and won, primarily at the city’s west end, near the ocean, and the hill of Buena Vista park, first gutting the entire areas of their lovely forests, meadows and clearings, then replanting them in the style of those very controlled gardens, where everything that is planted is low to the ground, so everything is easily surveyed, with neat, little rows of flower beds, often organized by color, so the effect is that one senses total control, over the natural life and the public life. It would not surprise me to see leashes on the squirrels, or the birds chained to the branches. When I watched this happen, over the ten years it took in San Francisco, it struck me that whatever power structures were in place would actually be happy to destroy entire landscapes and eco-systems, to live in an empty and hostile place, if only to be rid of what eludes their control and what they cannot see.

So I continued to watch the Zombies, and thought that one action could be finding the addresses of anyone working for the Park Bureau, and sneaking into their yards, and fucking cut everything down at night, while they sleep; every flower, tree, bush, even upturn their lawns. When they would awake, all the Zombies would be standing around the house, shovels in hand, covered in sweat and dirt, and without smiles, they would have their cocks out, masturbating.

Just about then Piero walked towards me. At first it had not occurred to me that he was meeting Daniel, and I was surprised and happy he would be out cruising. I kept that thought to myself, and we talked about the clearing of the area. Piero then told me that the Tribe had migrated to an area close to the Arsenal, and that during the day, particularly around lunch, and after work, the area up there had become prime, grazing fields. He then mentioned he was about to meet Daniel (which was slightly disappointing, not that I would find it unpleasant to see him, but that Piero was not out being a tramp). We met up with Daniel in about an hour and the three of us sat on the grass for a while. I made a note to check out the new place at a later date.

Fassbinder

Watched “Fox and his Friends” with Marc. I saw this in my early 20’s. Probably my first “gay couple” movie. What I did not remember, or really even ever considered is Fassbinder’s talent at the look of the frame. Each shot was magnificent in the set, the colors, and the composition of the frame. He really takes no prisoners. The film was like a two-hour catastrophe, each minute just as painful to watch as the next. 1974. Stunning to have this critique of gay culture come at the height of alleged liberation. He paints it as anything but that, with the protagonist doomed emotionally and physically to the whims and desires of an upper class to which he does not belong, and relationships themselves doomed to cycles of use value. At any rate, Fassbinder laid out to see what was to become the truth of the construction we know as Gayness—a system of exclusion and oppression that mimics, admires, and ultimately adopts the very structures that once oppressed it. He does not lament the exclusion, but the real sacrifice of human beings to power. The only cheerful moment for me was the end sequence, where two children come across the dead Fox, and are seen for a long time going through his belongings, turning him over, stealing his watch and money. Maybe I was just glad he was finally dead, or perhaps I just liked the thought of someone finding $8000 in cash on a dead body.

Bobbing, Weaving and Breathing

With the Walkman on, and riding back from the Tiergarten, I began first dancing on my bike, then singing as well. Weaving in and out of the tourists it was quite fun. A while later, I was feeling an oppression, or sadness that was indefinable, and with a heave of breath, gestured out as if pushing away the feeling, like this act was my gift to the world. I thought that I might do nothing else in life but with a sigh, expel this sadness.

Art Space

Looked at the work of Tom Burr, and thought that perhaps his success in the art world lies in the fact that he abstracts sexuality. It is there, but not as sexuality. It is the idea behind how he deals with space. His structures strike me as dead. He does not examine living space, but presents the art world with an autopsy of queer space, that sort of western criticism or study that dates back to the Renaissance, natural history, medical sciences….the Age of Reason bullshit. Because I like thinking about space, I thought his work interesting. At this writing however, I wonder if he is not the same thing as the explorer sent into Africa, or the New World to bring back specimens to the foot of the Queen, who has a vested interest in all things Dead.

Refugee

On the path above the cruising area there are some strays, like myself. I walked past one guy, rather thin, full head of black hair slicked back in a king of 1930’s style, nice lips, medium length black leather jacket. I caught his eye and kept walking. For about ten minutes we did this dance, at times I was close enough to him to see he had names tattooed on his hands. I sat on a ledge and as he passed, I pulled my cock out, hard, for him to see. He, in turn, showed me his. Nice length and width, and he tugged at it with his tattooed hands. Eventually he sat next to me and we talked. He moved here from Bosnia, has a daughter, and together they live with his brother. He asked if I had a place we could go to. The whole time we were playing with our cocks, I told him it would be nice to play somewhere in the park, but he felt uncomfortable with so many families out walking. My place is not really made for bringing folks home, so after a rather pleasant time, we went separate ways.

Auslander

Got my VISA today, and can stay here for another year, working officially as a musician/composer. I am going to miss going to that building, in a way. The filth of the waiting rooms and halls lit by a dismal light, peopled with folks from anywhere around the globe, but mostly Turkish or African, combined with this sort of aimless movement, and endless waiting reminds me of porn arcades. This, coupled with the fact it is a government building, generally with citizens from less well off countries seeking asylum, Visas, permits, gets me kind of aroused. I want them to get something from this country, like I want all the immigrants in California to have the whole fucking State, every stupid grape, orange, pistachio, and win the lottery while they are at it. Last time I was here I saw the guy cleaning the restroom. He was an older German. I liked the smell of the detergent, and thought I would peek into the stalls to see if there was any action, or evidence of it. All I saw was a crude drawing of a cock, no other inscription. I like thinking that people who just scrawl one word, like “Pussy” into wet cement, or draw one image such as this are so overcome by the thought of their desire that no other words are necessary. This drawing here may have remained without further elucidation because it’s creator was at a loss for the German word for “suck”. Anyway, I sat on the toilet for a bit, listening to the old guy finish up, and imagined that I could work there, doing just that. I imagined that he hated foreigners, having to scrape their shit daily, but that I could do my work early, then offer myself sexually to whoever happened to come in. Or, people could get a number, men and women, and visit me one after another. I could eat her out, lick his butt, suck off a group of teenagers, whatever, and everyone would be happy. I’d have a job, people would feel welcomed to Germany, and the other office workers would be happy that life around them seemed so pleasant.

Anon

The other night I saw this compact, but solid looking guy servicing someone in a dark corner of the bushes. I thought it best to sort of keep moving, so I wandered around past the fountain. A few minutes later he passed me and we both checked each other out. We walked together into some trees and began making out. He was so nice feeling, lightly muscled, and really just as much a top as a bottom, which I love, so we kept going down on each other between kissing. He turned around to face the tree so I could fuck him, instead I licked his ass, and stuck a finger up his hole while I jerked off. We both came at the same time, so we walked out of the park together. I walked him halfway home. He told me his name was Don, and that he was from Thailand. He is here studying, he said a full set of degrees from his own country would not land him any substantial job there, that most folks who make a good living were educated in the West.

Bene

Aesthetics—the values of Hip culture on the surface of the frame. Paramount is the contemporary. Examples; In Salome there are two Christs, one a vampire, the other fails at crucifying himself to a neon cross. In Capricci an artist and a poet get into a fight, the studio is hung with the soviet hammer and cycle. As the fight escalates, they have weapons that are a hammer and a cycle. Paintings are slashed with the very items depicted on them. Later, we see the revolutionary artist has taken to painting nothing but huge self-portraits. Comments on 68.

Alevi

Mainly a rural, mountain sect at first. Splintered from mainstream Shiites over an issue regarding a particular saint. Early on they were referred to as “candle blowers”, a term that came from the fact that they integrated women into prayer, meals, and work. Applying the usual sexual envy to a despised minority, it was said that after evening meals they would blow out the candles and orgies would commence. With modernization, the Alevis moved into the cities for work, and retaining a cultural integrity they experienced a continuing discrimination. Because of this, as well as from the 20th century’s wars and upheavals, the Alevis from Turkey moved into Germany, acquiring capital and education to open businesses upon returning to their homeland. Add to a cultural bigotry a class difference and the abyss widened.

By the 1980’s Alevi life had lost much of it’s religious nature and had taken on Marxist characteristics. Alevi visibility became manifest in Turkish intellectual and artistic life. Popular culture remained opposed to Alevi culture, and a series of legal and vigilante repressive measures were employed against them. In 1993 a group of Alevi activists and intellectuals met at a hotel in Sivas. Though the alleged target was a particular writer, a number of those in attendance were burned alive by a Sunni mob. A bystander had rescued one of them, when his identity was discovered to be the writer; the crowd blessed him with serious injuries.

I have seen two signs of Alevi presence here in Berlin. One is a mural depicting a DJ in the manner of Social Realism, He wears what looks like a Mao Cap, and has headphones on, beneath him are the Turkish words for “Alevi Renaissance” The other, more interesting example was seen while I was walking down a street, absently looking at the signs and shops. Above one shop ware letters that once had been painted clearly and brightly, but now were barely visible, faded to just a trace, but you could make out the words, “Heretika Islamiya Kurdish”. Alevi populations are heavy among the Kurdish, and prior to migration into settled communities in cities, the Alevis were largely nomadic, moving about the highlands of Turkey, Iran, Iraq, Syria and Armenia. The storefront seemed to function as a community center, and would appear to be a relic from a former time, save the presence of two, lone old men sitting on chairs, not speaking. I thought it interesting a group would self identify as heretical, a term usually applied from the outside, and laden with judgment.

My interest in the Alevis came from a CD of Muhlis Akarsu, who I learned was among those burned alive at Sivas. In pursuing what little I now know, I also came across reference to genocide of Greeks and Armenians at the hands of the Turks in the early 20th century, and wonder if there is any connection to the Alevis there. Also interesting is that now Syria is governed by a variety of Alevis, who are a minority there. Perhaps out of self-preservation, will to power, and revenge, they have fashioned a dictatorship there. Also with the Kurds having been granted the majority to govern the new Iraq, perhaps a similar phenomenon will happen there, hostility between The Kurds on one hand and the Shiites/Sunnis on the other, hostility necessary to the interests of the United States.

Anon

At the Volkspark, by the fountain, a young Turk sat on my bench. Following each other in a very difficult attempt to communicate, I gathered that he was looking for money. I really had not enough to pay for sex. He sighed and suggested we go to the pay toilet to have sex anyway. The booth was out of order, so we walked to an out of the way children’s playground and sat on a bench there, in a dark little corner. He unzipped his pants and pulled out his cock. Going down on him I noticed his nuts were totally symmetrical, firm and round as small apples. His dick smelled of latex and shit, so I got back up and sat next to him on the bench. Some other guy approached us and the two of them exchanged hostile words. The man stood and stared, as if to fight, and my friend simply turned his head to my chest and fell asleep. The other guy left, and I sat there looking at the stars through the trees, feeling my friend’s rhythm as he breathed. After some time I woke him up, gave him train fare and walked home.

Authentic Folks

Absence of an authentic folk under totalitarian situations (including the economic), and the replacement of an inauthentic folk by a constructed ideal of folk (music, dance, customs). Why does the construction of the inauthentic figure so prominently, for example in former soviet propaganda, in the post-romantic nationalism of Bartok, the Blues Revival of the 1960’s in America, and now with the proliferation of “World Music”? The very notion of authenticity banishes what is real. Where have your folks gone?

Baby Evaporates

I had heard it was to be the end of a stretch of extremely warm evenings, so I headed out to the park just after the sun went down. I sat on a bench and listened to some music for a while before heading into the thickets. Once in, I saw that the little, narrow paths overgrown with honeysuckle were lined with not the usual guy here or there, but was indeed like L.A. traffic at rush hour. I would step aside if I saw a few guys coming towards me to let them pass, and instead the few guys would be a stream of men lasting more than a minute to pass. There were a couple of guys who would stare and follow me for quite some time, and also a couple of guys that I was curious about. I wanted to see what they were up to without stalking them, but my stalkers ended up making me ditch the scene for another rest at the fountain.

I headed back in, now it was darker. The patterns of light from the streetlamps through the leaves was beautifully disorienting, with light hitting my cornea as I followed a bend in the path, making my pupils dilate rapidly to adjust, only to have swirls of light and shapes dance on the earth of the path. Sometimes what appeared to be a leg of a man partially hidden in a bush would prove to be just a trick of light. Seemingly in every corner large enough to accommodate such activity, an orgy would be happening, sometimes with the backs of those observing forming a tight shell, like a turtle which made little moaning sounds, or sighs. One person would leave, and I could become part of the shell. At one location, three guys sat against the fence while others fucked their faces. One guy on the ground got up to get fucked, I stayed long enough to hear his breath change as he was penetrated, and moved on. Sometimes I stay only for sex, and if it is not forthcoming I leave, other times I stay for conversation, or the peace of the evening sky, but now I was being sort of whipped up into accumulating images, snatches of sex acts, little sounds, a sort of pornography in fragments, but which is also open to participation. The charge in such an environment is the risk of undergoing this fragmentation.

My stalkers were a little more behaved, they gave me a little space to move in and make my own decisions. Most of the guys there were really strapping fellows, bulky, swaggering and rugged, not the slender, blond, Nazi type, so I was really getting horny. In on of the pockets of bushes that form a kind of room, I came across another two guys going at it. One leaned against his bicycle, the other had his pants down, and had the smoothest, narrow butt pointed out. One of the guys I was interested in was watching them, his cock out, and the head of it he began rubbing over the cute butt. His strategy for inclusion was excellent; rather than foist himself on a pair already coupling, he just would jerk off, watching, but close enough to join in should there be some subtle gesture of welcoming. When they did not object to his proximity is when he began rubbing his cock on the little guy’s ass, but seemed to be there just as much to pleasure that guy with only that, lest the little guy ask for more. That alone seemed enough, and I was fascinated by this wordless negotiation. I thought I would take my baby’s lead, and stood near him, jerking off. I never really have done the orgy scenes from the periphery. Usually, I have found myself lost in some guy, and looked up to see what a scene had gathered, so I was learning by watching a behavior I found respectful. As my baby did not mind me being there, and into him, not just into the couple, but with acknowledgement that he was into the couple, he began to watch me, looking at my face, my cock, but those little gestures that say, “more” were still absent, and I realized that sometimes where desire is absent, you must create desire, become desirable. I paced my behavior with his as it related to the couple, and when the inexplicable moment came I grabbed his cock and received no resistance, in fact he stopped playing with himself and let me stroke it for him. The little guy with the ass turned around, facing us, so the guy on the bike could fuck him.

At this point it was clear that through a careful, and respectful series of gestures, glances and caresses that we now were a group, together. With each of us looking at each other’s faces and feeling each other’s bodies, a trust was built, as was desire. I looked around and quite a group had assembled, and I wondered how this would snowball, or splinter into micro orgies, fed by each other. Just as I was thinking this, and marveling at the beauty of this type of socialization, of how fragile an intimacy was built, and now even could expand my two stalkers arrived, one from each side of the path. They both rushed in on the four of us, grabbing cocks, trying to suck, to kiss. The four of us zipped up, put on our shirts, and went our separate ways. What was built on next to nothing was seemingly evaporated, and disappeared.

Sway

I recall watching a tree when I was a child, and thinking that the motion of each branch and every leaf was not because of the wind, but was the movement of the tree from it’s own volition. Just now I look out the window at the tops of the trees across the street and watch them sway. Today the last few of those cottony seeds drop from the heights of trees, the sway of them as they fall mimics the movement of the trees. I watched them drop into the pond, landing on the surface of the water, looking like flecks of dust on a green mirror.

Afternoon School Special

The first time I saw him I was sitting on a bench. About 50 years old, but really very handsome and in fine shape, he had a neatly trimmed mustache that had just a little gray in it. He sat on the bench next to mine, and mentioned something to me regarding cigarettes. I offered him one and he suggested we trade. So I smoked one of his. After small talk about different tobacco, filtered versus hand rolled, he asked me where I was from. I told him California, and he sat up straight, and urgently told me to tell anyone who asked that I was from Great Britain, especially if they were Arab, as he was. He told me that there were people he knew who would cut my throat in my sleep if they found out I was American. I told him that it was not likely that I would find myself actually sleeping with these people, and he had to laugh. I told him that my own bed was comfortable enough. Soon we were talking about America. He had lived there for a few years and liked it well enough, but found the Americans stupid. As an example, he told an anecdote about going to a bar, and all the people he met were so dumb that they actually believed him when he said that in his country everyone travels on camels. I asked where he was from and he said Iraq, but that this was before Desert Storm, and no Americans gave a shit about anything Arab. We shifted the conversation to Islam, in part because I wanted to let him know at least this American was not so dumb, and also to ask a few questions regarding specific differences in sects. He was Shiite, and had moved because of persecution under Sadaam, and indeed he was surprised to learn I did know a thing or two of his religion. We started laughing, thinking of our encounter as an inspirational TV movie; One American, One Iraqi, countries at war, on a park bench in Germany they solve the misunderstandings of their culture.

The next time I saw him it was very near that bench, but we were walking opposite directions and both stopped under a tree because of a huge downpour. He did not seem to remember me, or our conversation, and for a moment I doubted it was him. I silently studied his face, and really it was him. Watching his face, I noticed he was staring at my crotch, which responded happily to his visual caresses. The rain would not stop, and soon our little refuge was no longer viable. I motioned without speaking to a thicker area of foliage, and walked under the low branches, and pulled out my hard on. He got down and put it in his mouth. I moved his face up towards me by the chin, because his hat made his face all but out of view. With a better view of him I watched him work at it, his eyes closed, and I wiped the rain drops from his brow. I was hoping he would want reciprocation, but he didn’t, and when I came he swallowed it. I zipped up and left.

Hallelujah!

The film is a long wandering, the kind of plot that it seems could only be a possibility in the early days of cinema, before genres had become solidified into concrete forms. I suppose in these days the making of a film was much more free, resulting in features that contained structural elements, or aesthetics that that would be seen maybe 30 years later, and then in experimental films. The story follows a man who heads a family of sharecroppers through a series of events, and a woman who seduces him outside of this family life into a series of misadventures, both trajectories laced with simple moralisms. Earlier in the week, before watching the film, we were discussing sharecroppers as the beginnings of a black middle class, and this discussion provided me with a way in which to view the film.

At the start of the film a scenario is established of a joyful family life. The family sings in the field as they work, and at the end of the day they each list the luxury items they would like purchased with the money from the cotton sales. Later in the evening their relationships in the context of family are established in a suite of scenes with amazing performances surrounding eating, an impromptu wedding, and bedtime rituals. It is the next day that in another city, on the banks of a river, the family man is tempted by a light-skinned singer/dancer/prostitute into gambling away the year’s proceeds. In the resulting melee that surrounds his anger, he accidentally kills his brother, who had come looking for him. The woman and the con man are shown splitting the spoils.

Back at home, with all the money gone, a funeral for the brother is held while outside in a conversation with a family elder, the Family Man finds a way out of his grief and guilt by discovering the Lord, which in turn leads the family out of poverty into a well dressed, well behaved traveling religious group. One shot shows one of the women stopping the children from a more “backwards” tap dancing with a glance, at which they return to proper hymn singing. None of the ramifications, or implications of this change in economic status is studied, it is only is depicted. One assumes that with the Lord’s forgiveness not only critical thought is abolished, but this erasure is accompanied by economic reward. The Lord will pay you not to think.

While traveling through a new town, the family, in particular the Family Man is accosted by the light-skinned floozy and the con man. In a crowd they heckle him for his hypocrisy. In public, in danger of exposure, he becomes violent with the woman. She returns to continue harassing him the next day at a revival by the river. One by one, the crowd becomes converted to the Lord, the woman alone stands crying, and her outsider status magnified. Begging forgiveness, but also in a sway of sexual/religious ecstasy she, too converts. What follows is his abandoning of his family and his profession for a life of temporary work, followed by his new woman. A scene is shown that establishes just how hard he works, which is cut by another scene that shows the woman, tired of this way of living, plotting an escape with her con man/lover. When Family Man returns from work, she sings him to sleep and escapes out the back. He wakes, pursues, and kills them both. Dying in his arms she does not ask forgiveness, which could bring her closer to a middle class audience, but rather simply confesses her fear of hell, of meeting the Lord, and she dies.

Family Man has now killed three people, and goes to work on the chain gang, out on parole later, he sings a happy song and returns to the fold of the family, where he is welcomed happily and the film ends. One of the most interesting ways in which this all unfolds is that anything bad that happens to Family Man can be traced to the floozy, that all damage to the welfare of the family can be seen in this light as class war. The floozy and the con man operate outside a dominant economy, or on the periphery of it, and are depicted as parasitic, whereas the family’s economic well being is seen as reward for their work. The hypocrisy of the family is never examined, and indeed is only visible outside the space of the film. The one example where how the family acts is seen as a construction, rather than a natural reaction, is at the moment when the woman polices the children’s desire to tap dance at the Revival.

The themes of Family and Work as the key to both happiness and security dominate the movie, with the Floozy and the Con man providing counterpoint, or illustrating a thing that would destroy that happiness and security. I was hoping that this movie would be slowly revealed to be the Floozy’s conscious sabotage of bourgeois values, becoming then a film specifically about class. Instead, the film was a fascinating example of the solidification of dominant class structures as utilized by Hollywood through a movie released in 1929.

So Happy

I forgot to mention that yesterday also was so wonderful for the following reasons;

Finished a short film which I really like

Susanne returned from Zürich

Met Marc, Daniel, Piero and Douglas, walked and checked out monuments and buildings

Saw the movie at the Arsenal

Zazie, John Heys, and Douglas came to the film

Had a beer with M,D, and S!

I was so excited when I got home about what a great day it was, that even after 1 am, I had to go for a walk to tire myself out.

Out on the Town excerpts;

1. American films are like sledge-hammers telling you what to think at every frame

2. I can’t read Proust, it’s perfect

3. I think we are headed into very dark times

4. Two things I hate; one is Religion, the other is Love

5. I look on the bus, at the street, who is next to me…this is my Proust

6. America would simply sink into the sea if it weren’t for Africa

7. Sorry, my English is not so good looking

8. These ARE very dark times

I forgot the Snow Sex

Torn jeans/long johns/worn, leather coat/French Arab/shaved head//late 30’s/run my mouth over his stubbled chin/open clothes to front of bodies for contact and warmth/mutual groping/licking/sucking/clothes removed/completely naked in the snow (except boots)/my forearm between his leg, trying to lift him as he comes/climax/part.

Assembly International

In the club room under the main cinema was where everyone gathered. The building itself is a wonder of 60’s architecture, and adorned in that style of glamour. The clubroom had a low ceiling, richly paneled walls, in a modernist style, interesting glass room dividers, and mod furniture. We showed up when a film was playing. Over 150 people were there, and the event had just started. Instead of watching the film, I took advantage of the fact that everyone else was so I could scan the room, see who was there, and look for new, cute, radical types. It was the usual suspects, and my amorous glances rested on tried and true favorites. It was nice to be there with M & D, it felt like old, club days.

I ignored the film, except for when this American idiot DJ was talking about how he had moved beyond acceptance and into tolerance in terms of what he sought in alternative communities, ignoring that both discourses operate on the terms of what allegedly oppresses those communities, a debate of strategies that amounts to what kind of dog house should we live in. After the film was a “performance” that consisted of a film without sound, in front of which two women read the aims of the Assembly. The aims touched on topics that really interest me; non-representational politics, being outside identity, porousness and fluidity of temporary communities. Years ago, I thought of how one could do political work outside Identity, and had come to the conclusion that such a work would indeed have to be temporary communities, but for the work to remain non-situative, would have to be done secretly. The notion then, of presenting a “we” at a “congress” seemed destined to become directly at home, neatly in Identity Politics. Another way in which I have not necessarily moved away from these ideas, but have troubles reconciling with political action is the extent in which this talk of alternative communities outside identity is often discussed among the same type of people like myself; disenfranchised and privileged white people.

To counter my suspicions was a video interview with Beatriz Preciado, whom I found totally captivating. She had all these ideas underlying what she described as personal experience in terms of practical application of experimental politics. She described using drugs not recreationally, but as practical experiment, in differences of milligrams, the use of hormones not to become another gender, but to experiment with becoming, itself. Her speech was simple, articulate and precise, emphasizing the application of theory. She talked of these experiments in terms of a non-metaphysical witchcraft, and the use of such practices to create small holes in reality, then stressing the importance of smallness, as large holes are so swiftly occupied by the institutional. What most interested me about her is that her practices were done on herself, as a way of navigating a new way of being. I thought that such a subjective political action was something that at once took risks, moved forward, and avoided the dreary pitfalls of leftist theory.

The next woman explained that her text was meant to be read in complete darkness, and that we should not feel bad if we do not understand parts of it. She lost me there, on both points. First off, I can see a performance happening in the dark if it is something aimed a total experience that moves in several imaginative and associative directions, but what simply reading a text does, with no other sound, is claim importance to the words and ideas themselves. It is in a way regressive, towards an author, and not a gift of speculation to an audience. Secondly, the implication that an audience would feel bad for not understanding a lecture, rather than feel angry, or that the author should perhaps feel bad for poor communication skills struck me as a height of arrogance.

I knew from the program that William and Stefan were going to perform, and that performances of the latter of the two are of the most dreadful, offensively childish pulp of New Age bullshit I have ever seen, though immaculately performed. I got what I needed from Beatriz, and enduring a 40 minute harangue was what made my mind up to exit. I walked out of the space, it was ten o’clock, and the sky was an amazing affair of shapes and colors as the sun shined it’s last on the clouds above.

Beastly

Around one bend in the path was a clearing that sat at the foot of a hill overgrown with trees. Through the leaves I saw just parts of one body caressing another. As the wind moved, new parts of the coupling were visible, a hand here, the side if an ass there. I got super hard watching this sort of nature-porno, and decided to move on. Around another bend was a handsome guy and a German Shepard. I wanted to take by hard cock out of my pants and bring it to the dog’s mouth, and imagined the dog licking my pre-cum rather disinterestedly, and then that I would look at the guy and let him finish me off.

Silver Rumor

Despite my wish that it be clear and warm, I have to say that the degrees and depths of silvers and grays that make up the sky, while contrasting with greens equally varied around me, is astonishing. Through this gray and green, I am thinking of how news of the world reaches me like rumor, of how the notion of truth becomes an abstraction when you cannot read a language. The colors subdued by lack of sunlight seem to build a relationship with an understanding that obscures clarity.

Rebound

Looking for a shop to print an image for me, I walked past a building and a young and shorter guy came out. I made eye contact, and as he appeared ready to speak, I took the headphones off. I asked how he was doing, he gave an unconvincing sign he was fine. My look caught him at this, and he confessed that he had just discovered a good friend and his boyfriend were having an affair. He looked about to cry, so I asked him what he was doing just now, and that I was walking to the park to have sex, and he was welcome along. I suggested we walk through the cemetery and he admitted he had never been in one, his parents back home having warned him about ghosts. I told him it is quite nice, and shorter, and we began out. On the way, he told me some of the details, and I offered what advice I could give, in between this we spoke of trivialities like flea markets, or work.

In the park, I did not know if he wanted to have sex with me or not, so I just walked alongside. In the bushes, he stopped and turned towards me. I took hold of his waist and pulled him towards me, and kissed his neck, his ears and brow. He rubbed my jeans, undid my belt and took my cock out when we noticed we were in the middle of the path. We walked to a little niche, took our clothes off, and explored each other. He was quite muscular, but thin, and had a nice pattern on straight, black hair that ran from his crotch up to his chest, thinning out to a line in between. We traded off head, I stood up and fucked him between his thighs as he jerked off. I turned him around and rubbed my cock between his cheeks. As there were tons of guys gathering, I felt uncomfortable fucking him, as he seemed a bit shy, so I worked a finger up his ass, and we faced each other, jerking off, trading hand jobs, and I liked our cocks hitting while we stroked. I had not had an orgasm for a few days, so there was lots of cum from me. When he saw it get all smeared in his pubic hair, he put my dick back between his thighs and came all over my chest. I asked him which way he was heading and walked him to the park’s edge. We hugged, I told him that I hoped he could figure out all his feelings regarding his boyfriend soon, and I walked home.

The End of Blackface

Harry Belafonte was originally approached as the lead. He turned it down. Sidney Poitier later signed on, though reluctantly. Dinah Shore and Pearl Bailey also were reluctant to do the movie. Only Sammy Davis Jr. was signed up with no extra urging. The time was 1959, which is telling in regards to the cast’s hesitancy to sign on for a movie depicting a singing, dancing Negro just out of slavery, which stood in sharp contrast to a self representation of black folks that had begun to emerge in direct relationship to the Civil Rights movement. In this light we can see the film as a conservative and nostalgic move by white folks at the beginning of a very tumultuous period for race relations in America. Indeed, the movie was written first as a novel by a white southerner, later adapted to stage as a play, and finally a musical before this film was made. Important as it was a vehicle for black performers as a theatre piece and a film, the fact that it was voice given to black people by whites both in terms of spoken word and music, Porgy and Bess could be viewed as a total sublimation of blackface, as there is no better make-up than black skin.

Black Pools

The path was barely visible, due to the absence of a moon in the sky, and the branches of honeysuckle tumbling in from both sides. I would stop and listen to the water falling from the trees, as it had just rained heavily an hour earlier, which also made with the heat a thin fog that diffused the little light coming in from outside the park. As I moved along the path’s twists and turns, I noticed perfectly still pools of black, like polished obsidian, that reflected nothing. I thought it interesting that these puddles were even visible at all, as no light reflected off them, as if the black itself was a projection from beneath the earth.

Dry Hump

I passed him laying in a meadow, extremely handsome, over six feet tall, muscular and thin. I tried to tell if he was giving anything away by his posture, and decided to sit a nice distance from him, but close enough so he could see me watch him, but would be uncertain for sure if it was him that I watched. For some time I got nothing, and moved my hand down to my crotch to provoke him. It worked. He started rubbing his cock through his pants. I got up and moved my things closer to him, taking this as a sign of interest. He got up and moved away, and settled across the meadow from me once more, but close enough that I could see he was watching me. He then put on his shoes, got up once more, and walked right past me to piss in the bushes behind me. I watched him piss, it was a huge stream, and lasted quite a while. When he was done I waited to see if he was going to stay there or not, and when he did, I walked into the bushes to him. He immediately put his rather large cock away, pulled me close, turned me around abruptly, held my hands together with one of his very strong hands while the other pulled my shorts off. He parted my ass, kind of lifting me, and started the motions of fucking my ass, his pants still on, and zipped up while he pushed against me. When I tried to unzip his pants he held my arms back again, and I noticed he had several gold bracelets and a wedding ring. He murmured something in French as he came, and held me tighter. As he did not have to put his pants back on, he just walked away without saying anything.

Substance Abuse

Exploring a segment of the labyrinth that I usually avoid due to its proximity to the sidewalk, a saw a man about 40 years old, completely naked from head to toe. He looked Latin, was slightly out of shape, completely shaved, and had a plastic cup at his feet. He leaned against a tree and from the cup scooped handfuls of a white substance, which he splashed and smeared on his chest and cock, while masturbating. The whiteness of the substance was such that it looked chemical, like paint, or glue. These spaces I have been writing about do create their own rules that grow out of familiarity and degree of use. Seldom do you see a person there to perform their own fetish, usually these spaces use a different social template, perhaps a more “normal” one; mutual kissing, fucking or sucking. In this way these spaces reduce external hierarchies, but do often build their own. Coming across this man was a bit jarring at first because of this, but delightful in that this manifestation of desire was welcomed. No one jeered him, nor was there any attempt to police his behavior. In fact, he drew quite an appreciative crowd. By presenting us with his desire, he challenged our own hierarchies, and expanded the diversity of expressions of desire.

Two Euro Suck

Initially I had domiciled under a rhododendron with a hunky African. It was an easy enough courtship, a few glances, a few tugs and strokes at swollen tumescence’s under canvas trousers and, BOOM, you have a happy home. Having happily coupled, I moved to a meadow and read for a while, and soon was in the woods scouting out another Life Partner. It is true, we do go back to the scene of the crime, and approaching my rhododendron home I noticed a man who I realized had watched my previous romance. He smiled and tugged at his crotch, which is a way of tugging on my heart. I sat next to him on a bench, charmed by his slightly crossed left eye, and the thin peels of skin coming from his chapped lips. He mentioned something to me in German, and I responded by asking him if he spoke English. “10 euro”, he says, while outlining the length of the cock in his gray corduroys. I asked him if I could see it. He took out a flaccid, average cock. I pulled from my pocket a two-euro coin, and asked if that would suffice. He stood up, and walked into the bushes. I followed him, he held out his hand for the money, and I put my mouth around his soft meat, which got rock solid in a matter of minutes. The only way I could tell he came was by the slightest tangy flavor in my mouth, as he most likely had a few other suitors during the day. While I came, he walked behind me to wash his cock with swamp water. I felt sorry for the next guy, thinking that while I could only possibly get a throat infection, a new person would get that and dysentery.

Post Script

There was some late sunlight across the courtyard on the roof of the building. I watched the naked branches of the tree move in the wind, wondering when I would start to see the first leaves unfold. Though it was very cold, I had been inside all day and decided to ride my bike to the park before cooking dinner.

It was very bright and crisp once I reached the higher ground of the park with perhaps an hour of sunlight left. I swerved the bike onto the path that lead to the cruising area, finding an expected emptiness, it was just too cold outside, and the starkness of the woods left not much cover for folks who would in the summer be packed in there having sex.

I stopped to roll a cigarette, got off my bike and smoked. After a few minutes I noticed a guy smoking a joint, beer in hand and watching over a field. After a few pulls on his weed he began walking away when he noticed me and came towards me, smiling. I forgot what we first started speaking of, but when I asked him what he did here in Berlin, he told me he was suffering from depression and was not working, but going for walks, watching people and gathering his strength, which was pretty much my situation.

We spoke for quite some time as the fading sun cast its final light deep into the woods. We spoke of depression, not searching for sympathy, but very practically, how we could tell when it was coming on, possible reasons why, which lead the conversation to life experiences, and both ending up here in Berlin. When the sun had gone we both were shivering, exchanged numbers and a heartfelt embrace before parting. His name was Daniel.

So we go on more than a year since we began. This time the subjects may be a bit more varied, as in some areas life is richer and more diverse, whereas in other things scarcity is more present than before. Once again, as before, the spring has clouded over, the sky clumsy with giant, tumbling beings of silver, white and black. Now at sunset I watch the otherwise bland colored brick chimneys glow deep and luminous in the light that seems to somehow grow brighter as it fades.

Now I have a Time Machine outside my window. It sways in the wind, fills the air with soft sound, birds keep it trim by removing damaged or dead parts, and bees rest, hovering in it’s shade when rain falls.

It was mentioned to me by a Marc that my fixation on the Natural may be the result of making experimental films. This was meant as a playful jibe at a comment I had made in admiration of a tree. I thought it was funny, but it triggered a series of thoughts that stayed with me for the next day. I thought of the term, “Formal” in describing a certain type of experimental work, which in turn led me to think of the study of the variety of Forms in nature. Geometry of leaves, petals, the slopes of rolling hills. I had read in an interview with an Iranian film maker that he believed the history of Western film can be traced to it’s origins in painting, and Eastern could likewise be traced to a lineage of poetry. On my bicycle I thought how I always have envied painters. Though I really do not know for sure what is meant by Formal, I remembered what impressed me greatly when seeing Paul’s work in progress was the reduced scale of the working copy which not filling the entire screen, and surrounded by black, the natural looked artificial, like a painting. I liked the natural presented this way, as if it gave a certain truth in art; this is not Real. I have since put many things these reduced size boxes of moving images. Mostly Ghosts.

The rewarding year with difficult choices. I feel it. It is heavy and soft at once. Three years of hard work, not much money, and an estrangement from things that is at times acute, other times it forms something more ephemeral, like air…I feel some very special things drifting away from me, like music. My reason for making it in the first place was that after my first two attempts at making a film were a disaster, I turned to music to save me. I began them both as an experiment in Being in the world, a social being, a way to exist in time with others, outside of words. I did not give film the chance it deserved. Music paid off. I found myself in a very wonderful community of a wide variety of musicians and composers who I eventually moved from. What began as community is now reduced to making movies and music as a solitary thing.

When I feel cornered, or helpless, I often have to find my way out by jumping headfirst into what I fear the most. If I was losing music, and movies were solitary I had to get them with people again, thus I would be among people again. Wilhelm had a book release party and invited his friends to perform. I had not once in over ten years of performing music played solo. Nor had I ever improvised live to a film. I knew Wilhelm and I had a shared love for Thelonious Monk, so I made a short video with footage of Monk and played live to it. Wilhelm is always saying to “show yourself”, and I thought by doing so I would be a step closer to reclaiming three loves; Music, Film and People. I am closer again to the world.

Dearest Paul sent me a nice note on Nature and Image;

Pointing to a tree as if to say, 'See, this is possible. We can do this too'. Brakage of course knew this, Jarman too, and most enthusiasts who found themselves on an optical printer, suddenly drunk with the knowledge of how to change time's constant rate. I remember my first hand processed super 8 experiments, where I crammed rolls of film into tiny tins and then tinted them in golds and violets. The image barely hanging on, dark shifting shapes on blasted bleached out light strips. Lots of these were pictures of nature, swinging plastic flowers, plastic and non- plastic palms. And water. My early obsession with it and the way it conspires with light to deceive the eyes.

The other half of the footage was of people. But the portraits I found fell short. To show someone's face meant nothing. It added little to looking at their face without a camera at all, and served only as a record of a moment. Where the nature sequences made something that had the richness of an image, the frames of people’s faces were only stills of blankness in lines. It was up to us, looking back on the reels, to decide how to respond. Emotionally?

With this blankness? How could that be possible?

Except for one shot, a group of strikers shot from a distance. Here, as a group, the flattening of purpose surpassed the inadequacies of my early silent filming. But yet this flattening of purpose was immediately apparent as the sticky fly trap of abstracting the individual and the group, the Leni Riefenstal mode, flocks of hats and flags united in purpose. Foamy mouthed Fascism.

Maybe this was why our first feature shows the back of the main character's head for the first 15 minutes. In some ways it was an attempt to work through this image blankness, to place a person in an image. Holding back on the face, not having the face ever speak, then drowning the viewer with the loveliness of the image and the horror of history.

These experiments are ongoing. These days it is the residue of memories in broken down fairgrounds I am piecing together, while the faces speak directly to us. Somewhere between the recording of the record and the polishing of nature as it is whittled away.

A big wet sloppy one to you

XXX

Pablo

Austria Tour, sept-oct. 2006

From my window in the pension I can see a broad expanse of mountains rising steeply from their base to the crest. There really is no valley to speak of. The town we are staying rests between the slopes of two of these mountains, with the homes more scatted and the streets thinning in number as the slopes steepen. The town’s center forms a sort of circle, the structures most cluttered around a central square. It is a neat and clean place, and one notices not entirely Austrian. There is an immigrant population of Turks, Asians and Africans. This question of immigration must be quite frightening to these people who are now subjected overt racist propaganda printed on posters all over the countryside as elections near. I could not help but think of the Jews of Europe feeling the noose tighten as the Nazis gained power and territory. They read the same writing on the same walls. It is an optimistic thought that perhaps these posters are only made by, and supported by a small minority who seek power, but history often dashes such hopes and slaughters often smolder for years in the hearts of “good” people.

It is incredibly beautiful here, and the autumn present in the scent and light and sound. The forests are still mostly green, but everywhere dusted with the golds and reds that will consume them in the coming weeks. Range after range of these mountains have held intact the customs and dialects that can be traced back hundreds of years, with small communities living in semi-seclusion from the rest of the world. Our driver gave us a brief description of the histories of some of the places we will be traveling to. A not so distant one involves the shifting borders of Eastern European countries throughout the 20th century. We were told of regions that are in custom and habit Austrian, but where all the folks have Slovenian surnames because at one time that area was indeed another country, and the mass killing of those people who found themselves on the wrong side of a shifting border left the only remaining traces of them in part of a name. Bands of Roma

came and were driven out or killed, as is well chronicled the Jews of Europe exterminated. All this violence in this pastoral beauty.

Susanne pointed out what logic and sense then, that the Viennese Actionists emerged from this place. “to destroy this”, she said while looking at these amazing forms of earth as we drove further and further into it. I imagine then the 1960’s with Austria facing one side to the West, open to the changes happening around the world, the East backed right up to the Iron Curtain, the beginnings of the mass dissemination of cultural rubbish we now name Globalization, and a landscape locked in secrets of violence, and then such a visceral art movement makes complete sense.

More recently worldwide upheavals and economic necessity moves populations around the world. The former colonial superpowers, the very ones responsible for so much devastation wrought upon the world’s less powerful now deal with the influx of people from the very places damaged the most; South and Central America, Asia, Africa…..these people, refugees they have come to be called face increasing hostilities in the places they have fled to, and often face death or persecution if they were to return to where they came from. It is as the World is asking them to please stop moving long enough so we can kill them properly.

Outside the bar one night an African guy motioned me over. It is a movement that usually repels me, used as it is by people in positions of authority, establishing a alpha/omega dog thing. On the street if it is not a cop who uses this method, it is usually then the criminal, often a drug dealer or prostitute. Given the language difference I decided I could just play ignorant tourist if things seemed like they would not go well. Victor, he told me his name was, and he complimented me on my looks, and told me he would love to give me head. I followed him to a nearby park, and we settled into a climbing structure in the children’s area, laying next to each other and we kissed and pulled out our cocks. He masturbated while he sucked me off, and I offered him my underwear to wipe his own cum off his dripping fist. He offered to walk me back part way to my hotel, and along the river we walked, the moonlight gleaming and streaking across the rushing surface of water. He told me how hard it was to live in a country that wanted him out, that he was on a refugee status, and in Austria that meant you are not allowed to enter the workforce. His own country was too dangerous for him to return to, and that there was a small Nigerian community that was here which would vilify him if they knew he was gay. He was 22, and I asked him what he did best, or liked to do the most. He told me he was a great disco dancer. I wondered what it would be like to be 22, love dancing, be backed into a lovely mountain town that wanted you gone, and basically have no imaginable future. I noticed days earlier there was an immigrant awareness group that handed out a paper they published, and asked Victor if he knew about them.

So I believe today is Thanksgiving, here a gray chill is in the air, much like I remember this holiday from childhood. I woke up and put coal in the furnace and made an espresso and now listen to some great music John sent me yesterday. This holiday more than others always was nice for me because of its simplicity. The goal was always just to be in the company of friends and family for laughter and sharing a good meal. Also because it never had a center act like opening gifts or baskets of sweets, the time spent preparing the meal and eating was the focus...several hours of just being in each other’s company. From an early age, and not just because of this holiday, but reinforced by this ritual of Company, I learned the joy of wasting Time, the pleasure of feeling the hours pass. Sometimes Time can feel like an enemy but in reality it is no such thing. It is the house we inhabit, it stood before us and will stand when we are gone for others to inhabit. We decorate our house with our acts and our memories. If this holiday also signifies in its mythology the beginnings of our country then we owe it to justice to remember that slaughter of natives that took place over one hundred years that was not yet named Holocaust or Genocide, and to work for a Time where anyone would be welcome at our table, as our family and in our company. Here in my small apartment I look at the tree outside my window move so slightly in the breeze. The leaves are now gone, leaving bunches of dry seedpods, which rain down like helicopters. It will be a long time to live with the absence of the beautiful coat of leaves that usually adorns this magnificent tree, and I will walk around today with the thought of absence. Who and what have vanished, and also who and what has never left and never will? I know when one has loved something or someone that never disappears. An inventory of these precious things could indeed take us to grief, or even rage, but that precious thing remains in this, at its source, and that is our Company. The living and the dead, we live through each other.

The days have passed recently taking my bicycle out between rather heavy rainstorms. Having the Nico song that was written by Jackson Brown in my head as the soundtrack to these excursions is nice. I have concluded that being cool is not passed on by fucking. Just look at Jackson, then look at Nico. Guess who wins the cool contest. In fact, it adds to her cool factor that she fucked him when he was just nineteen. I’ll give the dork a break. It is a nice song. I cannot figure out the cruising rules in my neighborhood. On the corner is a park where definitely guys go to cruise. There is a restroom there with two rooms. One for pissing the other for shitting. In the piss room the guys stand facing a wall. I imagine they just jerk off onto the floor. In the shit room there are always three to five young guys just standing outside the toilets. I walk in and they all just stop talking and look at me. I do not know if it is prostitution, and I should pick one and head into a stall, or if I am expected to go to a stall and one of them will approach me. I would just ask, but the atmosphere is very sex heavy, male and macho, so it makes starting a conversation difficult. Outside the restrooms there are little squares of trash strewn rose gardens with benches on each side of the square, all facing each other. Here I see older men, not the elderly, but say 35-45 sit and watch who goes in and out of the restroom. I never see them leave to follow someone in, but know they are cruising because I have seen them in other parks, in the sex areas. Another example is the larger park a little further off where one guy maybe twenty cruised me in the bushes but I realized soon he only wanted to watch me jerk off while he hid behind a tree. He let me see everything but his rod, which he kept hidden behind the tree as he worked it out. I obliged him. Okay, that one was not so confusing, just a little disappointing, and took some time to figure out just what he wanted without scaring him off. Then there is the supermarket, where the guys are really cruisy, but I am at a loss as to how to work it in a supermarket. Maybe I was raised by wolves and can only have sex easily in parks. Nana told me guys also use the Ubahn. The platforms are where the guys offer the service of fucking, the market above is reserved for Gay Dating. Seen plenty of hotties, but no cruising so far.

My reading again brings me back to Alchemists and spies. Currently I take walks through the gardens of British Royalty and have dinner with spies from the 16th century where we discuss philosophy. What a gas!

The idea of an unfinished film returns. The notes of a director or cinematographer are found, and some rough footage. The footage could be seen as a love story, then turns into biography, then a ghost story or political intrigue. The footage is presented as it is, with no editing or tricks. The gaps between what is seen are put together by the viewer. Perhaps a scholar doing research has found the material, and his notes serve the purpose of keeping this tale open rather than explaining everything. He wonders if there were two cameramen, based on the style of footage. He searches in vain for actors, crew or director, and has theories of the purpose of this film. Nothing is resolved, everything is open.

Through the 1980s, sideways, backwards and looking ahead

2011-05-26T16:02:00.000+02:00

For many people the 1980s were a time of enjoying the “vibe” of an America and popular culture where money was being made, Image was radically refashioning itself into myriads of forms, and models of ways of being seemed to be multiplying. This America and popular culture was Dynasty, it was Duran Duran, it was pastel sweaters and mediocre designers. It was novels by Tom Clancy and Stephen King.

There was another 80s. I remember my first struggling with expressing my sexuality coincided with a still then unknown cause to what was then called, “the gay cancer”. It seemed being sexually active would mean certain death. When scientists found out more about the HIV virus, this unleashed much of America’s puritanical rage and hatred towards the homosexual.

Then there were the twin poles of modern capitalism, Reagan and Thatcher. Their economic policies both in their own countries and abroad was ruthless. The undercover wars America lead then in Central America were particularly brutal. A culture of resistance built in the 1960s had died. More appropriately, it was killed.

Early on, something happened. The punk movement had shaken up corporate complacency in music, and in popular culture. While on one hand this problem was rather quickly addressed (and fixed) by the same corporate powers, the bands that briefly reigned then served as radical information systems. Much of what I learned about 20^th century art, radical movements and philosophy came from these sources, whether it was from a still taken from a film, used as an album cover, or references in lyrics, or interviews with the young people in these punk bands, a line was drawn as to what type of society we wanted to live in, and a line was drawn to a history of radicalism, that stated we were not the originators, and that we were not alone, or merely petulant.

As this all began to become exhausted from its own momentum, and was also defanged by having learned to be packaged, marketed and sold, there was also a whole generation of folks my age, either on the executioner’s block, or next in line because of HIV. This generation had many in its ranks who grew up in recent memory of punk, and who also had their own artistic/moral outrage to spew forth. In San Francisco there were dozens of short-lived clubs, galleries, bookstores and such where this all played out. Almost any given night of the week you could go out and participate in, or watch a great and radical gesture be lived out in public.

It occurred to me to make this list for a young friend who is the age I was then, and who is interested in this lesser known 80s culture of resistance. Thanks Taylor, for leading me down memory lane.

A brief list of meaningful recordings from bygone days

The Birthday Party-Mutiny in Heaven

Cabaret Voltaire-Mix Up

Chrome-Half Machine Lip moves

Creation (record label compilations)

Z’ev-One Foot in the Grave

Rip, Rig and Panic-God

Diamanda Galas-Masque of the Red Death Trilogy

Marc Almond-Torment and Torreros

Butthole Surfers-Locust Abortion Technician

The Cramps-Bad Music for Bad People

Gang of Four-Entertainment

Throbbing Gristle-Journey Through a Body

Various-No New York

On U (record label comps)

PIL-Second Edition

Mark Stewart and the Mafia-Learning to Cope with Cowardice

Violent Onsen Geisha- Shocks, Shocks, Shocks

De La Soul-De La Soul is Dead

Sonic Youth-Bad Moon Rising

The Contortions-Contort Yourself

Pussy Galore-Exile on Main Street

The Swans-Cop

The Smiths-Hatful of Hollow

Coil-UnNatural History

Psychic TV-Dreams Less Sweet/Themes

Barry Adamson-Moss Side Story

Historical ephemera and artists who spoke about them

Georges Bataille, Accursed Share vol.1-3-Marc Almond

William Burroughs-Throbbing Gristle

Early 20^th Century avant garde film-Rip, Rig and Panic

Oscar Wilde-The Smiths

Critique of Everyday Life-Gang of Four

Jean Genet-Patti Smith

Arthur Rimbaud-Patti Smith

Andy Warhol/Jack Smith-Tony Conrad

16^th Century Utopianism-Derek Jarman

1960s conceptual art and performance-Yoko Ono

The Harlem Renaissance -Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Spike lee

Art Brut-SPK, Throbbing Gristle, Einstürzende Neubauten

Surrealism-JG Ballard

You know, the story could go on and on…..how to begin to list all the African /American artists of the early 20^th century, or all the writers surrounded by Georges Bataille, the painters and historians associated around a Critique of Everyday Life? And how to explain the gratitude to all of them from an entire generation of like minded youth from 1978-1988?

This was my 1980s

Under the Volcano

2011-05-23T18:43:00.000+02:00

An Introduction

With a light so seldom seen in the sky as to appear artificial, a storm rushed in and wiped out what remained of the day. Water gathered in growing pools under the windowsills and the sound of the heavy drops of rain on the tin covered ledges drowned out the music that had been quietly playing. He felt like there was someone with him, brought in by the storms, perhaps. But he did not bother to think of who it was, or what they had come for. Simply, the person was there.

Regret and dream tossed about like children overheard in another room while he watched two crows seeking cover in the branches of the swaying tree, their heavy bodies causing the soaked branches to dip and sway even deeper. He watched the lightning reflected in his neighbor’s windows as the storm passed, and with the heaviest of the downpour over, the slight and weightless bat began its cheerful ascent into what had become night. What ghost had come in with the storm stayed with him as he settled in with a novel. “I must remember not to close the windows when a storm breaks” he thought, and was happy for the company.

The next morning he awoke alone. Along with the papers needed to show the authorities he brought the novel he had begun reading, and headed out on his bicycle for the subway station. It was in these two blocks that the letters of the book re arranged themselves into the form of an introduction, which he read as the subway sped forward to the authorities. The company ushered in by the evening storm was a ghost written into existence in the 1940s to accompany a British Consul who was then living the last day of his life in the shadow of a volcano, high in the mountains of Mexico.

Then, the ghost had in vain attempted to leave some parting words to his charge, as even in the last few seconds of human consciousness our minds and souls are ripe for illumination, even at the risk that such disclosures might flood an unfortunate soul from this life in a deluge of sorrow. As the Consul lay dying, drunk and exposed to the stars, he could not feel the hand of the ghost on his own, nor could he hear the words the ghost spoke on the wind to his ears.

“You have lived within an illusion of choices,” the ghost said. “You have allowed yourself to be chosen by your desires, rather than you choosing them yourself,” He continued, “By allowing this to happen you have delayed in your heart the choice of damnation or salvation within yourself. By not choosing desire, but letting it choose you, love has forever been denied you” This is how the letters had recomposed themselves as an introduction, because in reading them the ghost had been given to another charge, many years later.

Having been granted admission to the country once again, he rode his bicycle to the park. The ground was still soft from the previous evening’s storm, and drops of water glistened brightly on the leaves as he rode on through fields of wilting flowers and hopping crows, thinking of how to describe the ghost. At a small public square known for its use by hustlers, he parked his bike and began to describe the ghost. Looking up after some time a hustler adorned in desolation approached him for a light. As he lit the cigarette still damp with saliva, the hustler cupped his own hands around the hands holding the lighter that the fire might not go out. With this touch the ghost stepped back until evening.

Geography of Wounds

2011-05-15T21:01:00.000+02:00

"The individual breaks the boundary of his skin and occupies the other side of his senses. He feels himself becoming space, the dark space where things cannot be put, and he invents spaces of which he is the convulsive possession" Roger Caillois

What I wish to present here is a group of meditations on the nature of what is revealed within the wound. The word itself, wound, may for purposes here be easily replaced by the words fissure, crack, aperture, opening, rupture, perforation, puncture or tear, all gathered under the sign of Illumination, which is their primary signifier.

With words that convey both fear and nostalgia, most religions, surviving and archaic, tell in their creation myths of a primal place that preceded form. Many of these mythologies are astonishingly similar considering both the temporal and spatial distance from which they originated. Egyptian, Sumerian and Zoroastrian cosmologies tell of a place that we have come to know as Chaos. In Egypt the name for this place was the masculine Nun. In Greece it was the feminine Nux. Both were seen as existing prior to light amidst dark and boundless waters. It is this fluidity that I am concerned with, as it is from a wound that fluid will flow. In fluids things dissolve, water and sugar become indistinguishable from one another. Fluidity is the loss of self, of form and of definition.

In the myths of Chaos sooner or later forms emerge. In Egypt it was an island that first emerged from the waters of Nun. Later myths present creation as less natural. One ancient Sumerian tale recalls a god, Marduk, a god of Chaos who wishes to be served as saying, " I want to coagulate blood in order to build a skeleton and create a human being". This blood, or fluid is what he had to work with and it is from this blood already existing within Chaos that he shapes into something that will serve him. Mandaean Gnosticism much later speaks of this primordial blood that has been contained within a human, "and the blood that is in the veins is flowing radiance".

Gnostic scriptures describe creation as stemming from a Chaos of boundless light in which several Gods and Goddesses reside without form, or more specifically as pure idea. It was the selfish or jealous divinities that were not satisfied with this kingdom of light who created separate realms of which they would be sovereign. In these texts the malicious divinities created form as a flawed imitation of the pure idea of themselves. Light was trapped within skin, this light of Chaos that pervaded the new being with living force. But because this new being was flawed, that is imprisoned within form, it was doomed to annihilation should it not attain awareness of it's slavery.

In Alchemy, all matter is derived from the Materia Prima, the unformed first form, or Chaos, and it is by way of putrefication that the essence of form is finally perfected and freed. There is no regeneration without decomposition. Alchemy was a science that attempted to achieve divine movement through a disciplined and esoteric understanding and manipulation of fluids, an attempt to corrupt form and coagulate spirit. In this way we can see Alchemy as a reversal of Gnostic creation. As the Alchemist Hermes had written, "Dissolve the fixed, make fixed the volatile, and make fast the winged thing, and it will make you live safely."

My intent in speaking of Chaos myths, Gnosticism, and Alchemy has been to illuminate what lurks beneath the surface of their writings, and what I want to convey is the euphoric freedom that is touched in me when I submerge myself in such a text. It is as if these writings stir within my body, rather than in my mind, and a desire to spill myself grasps me.

We resemble the universe insofar as we are wounded. It has been stated that the cosmos is in a constant and convulsive state of expansion, and according to this theory, the outward expansion is a result of the Big Bang and it's inevitable conclusion will culminate in the collapse of the cosmos into it's original formlessness, or nothingness. I would deduce from this that the universe is running from it's own image, rushing forward into it's past to a place of belonging based upon a lack of form where everything exists and no longer exists simultaneously, or more precisely, things exist, but in relation to no thing.

We exist within several skins, and these skins contain or confine our viscera, create boundary, territory and definition. It is by means of this containment that various matter are given names. Yet as some things will not be contained, others remain unnameable.

It is through the wounds to the skin that the object escapes its form and sheds it's name. A wound is a transgression of form and surface, a will towards movement and away from identity. It is a violation of the name.

One need not look back into the history of religion to see a hope for deliverance from the form, we may in fact need look only as far as our childhood. Within childhood imagination form and identity lose their meaning. The child exists in reverie and daydream much more than in utility, which to the child is the superfluous. This is why tales of metamorphosis are so popular with children, it is through them, with the powers of imagination that they escape the Gnostic prison. The fluidity of this way of imagining closely resembles the primal community of belonging. Identity is unnecessary without a maligned other, and the child is able to be both self and other. Because they live within a cosmos yet to be formed, children are capable of remembering the incantations that dissolve form and are able to navigate the waters of Nux and Nun gracefully. But now that childhood has escaped us we find ourselves imprisoned in countless forms, the form of the worker, the citizen, the lover, that have in turn imprisoned that other form, that of our body which serves them, and it is our right to seek the wound or rupture in our forms through which we may flow back to the Chaos of belonging.

What interests me is a certain Will that I see in things. Water it seems, wills itself loose. Matter in a crowded cell wills itself into an open area. I describe these diffusions as a will. Migration from an overpopulated country to a less populous one is a will towards a better life. Space travel is a will towards the unknown. Prison escapes are a will to freedom and revolt is a will to power. These wills towards expansion are what flows from a wound. The nomad, the migrant and the refugee transgress a border. A missile, satellite, and shuttle pierce the atmosphere. The criminal first punctures the social body, then escapes his confinement. The revolutionary impales the king with his blade.

There is no transcendence within the wound as there is no separate Kingdom or consciousness, all is connected by the transgression of borders, and what is called transcendence may more appropriately be described as a bleeding.

We are transfixed when confronted with a wound, gaping mutely at the possibility of what already is. We see our innermost fears and desires written within it's meat, and tremble in fear from our desire to be wounded.

The human body has been said earlier as described by the Gnostics as a prison. This cell however, that we are doomed to inhabit is not without openings through which we may escape, or leak from.

The aperture of the mouth is the seat of both mortality and knowledge. It is from our mouth that words escape, a measure of our wisdom and ignorance, and in which food enters, the stuff that sustains us. It is also from this cave that saliva is produced, which in some cultures is endowed with magic properties. Saliva is the deposit of the soul; spittle is soul in movement. We use it to strengthen an action, for protection, to impress one's will on an object, to "sign" a contract, to give life. Jesus is said to have mixed his saliva with dirt to make a balm that he used to cure a blind man. One spits in contempt at another, most often as a means to negate the power another wields over him.

Vomit is also ejected from deep within our body through the mouth, it will surge forth from a sickly form as if abandoning a burning building, sinking ship or falling airplane. In cases of overwhelming emotion the body will purge itself of horror, fear or despair in the form of vomit.

The mouth may also serve as a receptacle for other sacred fluids, be the place where one wound flows into another. Kissing is an example of this, as is fellatio. In both of these erotic activities there is a loss of self and dissolution of form. There are endless examples of the subtle significance of the kiss in culture. The sayings, "sealed with a kiss", "the kiss of death", kiss of life", and "betrayed with a kiss" each give as an example of the kiss as a means of fusion between two forms, or between the formed and unformed. The lover melts into the beloved, or the living escapes the body as signified in the kiss of death.

In the act of fellatio, the unformed yet semi coagulated substance that makes life can erupt within moist tabernacle of the mouth.

Breath, that invisible and ethereal measure of health and vitality uses the mouth as a door in which to inhabit the body. It is said that the soul will travel upon breath, it is the movement of life itself, entering our bodies, carried on the crisp winds, or exiting us by way of the mouth to return to those currents.

As our breath is said to be the carrier of soul, the eye is said to be the soul's window. Through this window we are told that we can see another's soul at work. We have stated that the soul is what the alchemists wished to reveal, or make known. It is the intangible substance that comprises our essence. It is the light that is imprisoned within our skin and may be made visible by the gaze. With this in mind we may call tears exiled spirit, or expended soul.

We cry for longing, loss, joy and sorrow, all of which have their deepest roots in desire. These feelings we may experience on a daily basis, however, every now and then they may prove too large to contain. It is at these moments that desire will escape us through this portal named the eye. Through these salty tears we taste the waters of our origins, and in them we may travel from the eye to a memory of the sea.

Another saline droplet that may escape us is sweat. Sweat is a measurement of our enslavement to utility and fear, for we sweat in cases of labor and nervousness. The worker is indentured to the task and suffers through it's duration. His imagination may wander far from his body during the hours of work and the sweat that gathers dust on his skin and soaks his clothing closely follows his daydream in the desire to be free of bondage to labor. In a similar way, sweat will escape the body frozen in fear. The body will sweat during an incriminating interrogation, or while awaiting punishment.

Most of what will flow from us is permeated with saltiness, and can thus be associated with the sea, but blood has many qualities that imply more earthen concerns and values. We spill blood to honor our own, and it must be said that blood is also seen as nourishment. An example of this is the Christian sacrament of the Eucharist, where the body of the sacrificed God is consumed by the faithful in a sort of sharing of his wounds. The Aztecs believed that the blood of sacrificed victims fed the sun and kept it from dying.

Vampires, that mythical species of sex and death need the blood of innocents to retain immortal status. Indeed it is blood more that any other of our liquids that symbolizes mortality and immortality. To reproduce and extend one's lineage in a bloodline is often seen as a lessor form of immortality, and too have blood spilled or shed is to die. It is through bloodshed that some of us will die, but the bleeding that leads to death is also a return to formlessness. The addict will annihilate his consciousness, a form of self, by puncturing a vein, the suicide will negate his form with a gun to his face, and the soldier's blood will soak the foreign soil so that the state may expand it's form. But blood is also the vehicle of desire both emotional and physical. We speak of its chamber, the heart when we consider strong emotions, and it is blood that will engorge our sexual organs in our need for flow.

I recall having once cut my wrist on a shard of glass while playing in the backyard. After my mother had left me alone in the bathroom to wash, I lifted my wrist to my mouth to taste that silky redness that was falling from me. I was curiously overcome with the notion that I was drinking myself, an idea that I now associate with the image of the snake that devours it's own tail. Much like sweat and tears, my blood tasted like the ocean, and I remembered my older sister having told me that all people came from the ocean before they were monkeys, and with my lips on my opened wrist I dreamed that my skin was the beach, and my blood was the ocean.

Clearly linked with the qualities of blood, the libidinal fluids are an agent of expenditure and loss. In some contexts celibacy is practiced not because sexuality is equated with licentiousness, but because the release of the libidinal fluids is seen as an unsexing. Here what comprises the identity of gender is embodied within the libidinal fluids, and practitioners are advised to channel, or waste this energy through other wounds.

The sexual act is also said to be a fusion of sorts where an individual undergoes a loss of self at the moment of orgasm. But because the pleasure of orgasm is experienced as a type of fusion, with or without partners, it excludes singularity and thus is more aligned with belonging and return to the annihilating waters of Chaos. It is a return to an end.

It is also known that the eruption of libidinal fluids provokes violence in some who would carve a universe of wounds upon another. Gilles de Rais was said to have climaxed when eviscerating young boys, and the desire to expend fluids will still lead many to rape and murder. The association of sex and death dates to prehistory and continues into our future. This pact is not altogether cultural or psychological any longer, as today it is well known that semen can be lethal.

Despite these sorts of images, the libidinal fluids that escape us are signs of fertility as well, and among these life signs are some of the strongest of images and rituals. Among one Melanesian tribe all adults will masturbate into a communal bowl, then rub the combined substance onto the leaves of crops so as to aid them in growth.

Fertility and death may perhaps be flip sides of the same coin. We are reminded of this by the human sacrifices of northern European fertility cults, and today by the deadly marriage of semen and blood as the prime movers of the HIV virus. And so within the arena of the erotic act we can see that the expulsion of the libidinal fluids carry with their flow the loss of self and the desire for expansion, both integral qualities of the wound.

The urethra could be considered in many ways the reclamation of power. For example, in a mescaline cult that was described by a visiting anthropologist, the shaman alone was deemed worthy of ingesting the sacred drug. The less powerful of the devout were required to drink his urine in order to receive the remaining graces of the drug. Urine is also used as a means of marking territory, and in eroticism as a way to establish authority or possession in the creation of hierarchical roles. In alchemy it often signifies the sun, and has as a distant cousin in the practice of baptism. To urinate is to feel movement and warmth, and it serves to purify and remove from the body harmful toxins.

The anus, on the other hand, is itself riddled with taboo. The excessive concern of contemporary Christianity with its penetration testifies to this. It is also considered as filthy, shameful, and home of death and decomposition. To do justice to the anus we may look at it's virtue of disguising things, it's capability to transform, or unform what we consume, and it's lovely way of unknowing what is known. It's pleasures are often said to be addictive, and indulging in them is to play with damnation, such is the freedom it has inspired for centuries. The Marquis de Sade, Rimbaud, Verlaine, Bataille and Genet have all attempted to describe the wonders of this hidden wound, but maybe it is better hidden so that it's shame covertly aids it's pleasure.

Briefly now I will name wounds of the earth, and relate them to our own in their shared qualities.

The body of the earth, that is the Terrestrial Body, has like us a number of outlets, both natural and constructed through which it's substance is revealed and flows forth from. The spring and the well are examples of this and they both are sites of water, that primal element.

The spring, the natural of the two gives water as if it were a gift. We are attracted to the waters of the spring in part because as I have mentioned earlier, it is water that precedes our form, and because we cannot refuse the kindliness of the earth's body. The spring is a place of repose and what murmurings are discerned in it's flow are pleasant words of belonging, first belonging as differentiated from a belonging to men. Many natural springs are consistent in their offering of water and are the symbol of abundance. Some, being either seasonal or intermittent resemble menstruation, emphasizing the feminine gender of their flow. In areas of concentrated seismic activity springs are heated within the folds of the earth's skin, deepening a claim to the feminine Nun of ancient Egypt. A sulfurous effluvia may escape from the lips of this spring, sulfur being an important substance to the alchemal Materia Prima, letting the wanderer know that it is the soul of the earth that animates these waters.

The well is an inflicted wound and as such holds negative qualities. Because the water from the well is not a gift, nature will exercise a right to halt the waters at a whim. Scarcity and drought are the mute companions of the well. The well is thought to be kin to knowledge. It takes labor to achieve knowledge, and effort to dig a well, and the rewards of both are worthwhile, however temporary and finite. They are what would be the gift reduced to use value, they are tools. Those who draw water from the well do so out of neccesity, and the waters offer neither solace nor abundance, similar to those who seek knowledge alone are the mere owners of so many useful things. At the bottom of a well one may also discover the corpse. It has often been the repository of violence and is accomplice to the murderer. In the case of the oil well, the putrefied remains of the earth's prehistoric inhabitants are exposed again to daylight and put to use poisoning the current inhabitants.

The cave and the mine have the same relationship that the spring has to the well. Both are transgressions of the Terrestrial Body, the former being that body opening itself, and the latter an external, forced opening. The cave is an opportunity for shelter. It is the childhood home of our species and is encoded in our memory as a place of safety. It provides warmth in it's solidity during a storm, and coolness under the floor of the desert. The cave also provides refuge for the secret and for the mystery, but is not by nature a place for shame. It's secrets are of the timeless and fragile sort, those that need protection from the intrusion of use. They can be of such grandeur that they reduce us to silence, maintaining the secret not by pact or conspiracy, but by awe alone. Take for example the ancient cave paintings whose meanings are now lost to us, or the natural mineral or ice formations that elude meaning itself. The secrets that reside in caves surpass imagination, this beauty that has evolved for no reason whatsoever, not even for itself.

Mines signify rape, both rectal and vaginal, depending upon what is mined. Inspired by greed, they are a passageway that is coerced into yielding a thing alien to the aggressor, and considered of high value. A coal mine would have the negative stereotype commonly placed on the rectum. A diamond mine would be construed as vaginal given the associations of this gem and femininity, as well as the value placed upon a thing of beauty that will inspire men to take and own a thing. There is wealth to be had within a mine, but that wealth has a tendency to be cursed. A uranium mine provides the raw material for extinction, a coal mine will consume it's locale, and is notorious for it's harm to the human body. In the case of gold or diamonds, the wealth attained stands in contrast to the lives spent wasted as wage labor in the procuring of it for the owner. The walls of the mine are not a place for home or shelter, they are harsh and dangerous. An exhausted mine lays on a hill like an old prostitute who has outlived her charms and talents, thus her use value, or a battered victim of rape.

The volcano has several corollaries to our own body. It is the earth vomiting it's own entrails in a death spasm, it is the androgynous orgasm, ejaculating pent up semen, or is the flow that trickles down the contours of the woman's thighs. The boulders could be seen as feces, and the lava as the blood of the earth itself.

A volcano will erupt only when the pressures of containment under the earth's crust is no longer bearable. The terrestrial Body wishes to be outside itself, and the volcano is it's means. The price of containment is extreme, often burying entire towns or leveling forests. What is called a lava dome will form over the lacerated earth as a scab will over cut skin, and the resulting landscape after an eruption is witness to the volcano's intention to destroy form. Light itself is eclipsed by the ash and smoke sent spiraling towards heaven in defiance of the creator of form.

The earthquake, too is a reduction of form and negation of all useful works. Its human twin is war. Both are movements towards waste and violence quite equal in the power to wound. It occurs to me that the quake may be the earth's retribution for it's enslavement to use, and war may be a retribution for humanity's enslavement to a sovereign. The magnificent display of light in our planet's northern regions, the Aurora Boreales, or northern lights may appear as a celestial wound in motion, the flow of it's currents serving as a map to our desire to lose form. It is the night sky dancing in the rapture of it's own lack of boundary, and is testament to the ancient divinities of light founId in Gnostic texts.

Just as our own bodies are riddled with punctures through which we may leak, or escape ourselves, and the body of the earth orbits the sun while bleeding fire, water and gasses, so it's most external skin, the ozone membrane is in a rapid state of decomposition. This may very likely be the mortal wound through which the final gasps of our collective body may be heard returning to the primal nothing, or formless universe, leaving the corpse of that body to be pulverized into dust by an eternity of meteors and witnessed by nothing other than an eclipsed sun.

dedicated, years later to the memory of Peter Christopherson and John Balance

Hadrian's Library

2011-05-11T14:20:00.000+02:00

I am sitting on a bench at the ruins of Hadrian’s libraryand try to recall Marguerite Yourcenar’s book on the enlightened Emperor whileI look at the neatly arranged fragments of marble, carefully placed in stacksby the archeological team, and think of how, or why to film them.

Untitled from Tim Blue on Vimeo.

The sight of tourists crawling this labyrinth of narrow andcrooked streets, their paths trodden over millennia of people’s lives who havegone before cannot help but evoke meditations on Time. How is it spent, dividedand measured? Upon what qualifications is it valued? Remembering one simpleafternoon in the company of friends while I am walking alone through the ruinedefforts of entire lifetimes, indeed, civilizations.

Whereare the Emperor’s books now? Was his impressive structure erected upon thebacks of slaves? How impressive will our efforts, our destruction be threethousand years from now? These are also questions asked by the architect of theThird Reich, Albert Speer. In Monastaraki square, if you sit long enough, you can see the workings of the network of illegal pedlers. The Roma and their children go from person to person, group to group, playing accordian. The East Indians sell small toys, automatic needle threaders, and pocket sized trinkets. The Africans sell the larger items such as DVDs, counterfeit designer handbags, arrays of t-shirts and shoes. Between all of them there is communication when the cops are near, and the speed with which they vanish is related to the amount of their inventory, and perhaps the value of what might be confiscated. We sat for awhile on a marble bench that served also as a wall to the excavated church from the 1400s, which was sunken a bit, making the wall a convenient place for thieves to crawl unseen, from where they might grab the camera or back pack of the unsuspecting tourist. It was at this wall that I filmed this footage of the sellers from Bangladesh. The sight of them shooting these lighted helicopters into the clear night sky got me thinking about the Gnostics, those early christian period heretics who considered all of God's creation, and indeed God himself to be a hostile prison warden, and the world his prison. While I was in Athens Bin Laden was killed. The jubilant faces of Americans shown on the news made me ashamed to be a human being. The on going wars in the name of religion, in the name of civilization seemed to reinforce the Gnostic theologies. I read a news story of a ship of refugees from Libya whose ship went adrift. They came across an aircraft carrier most likely on a bombing mission to the very place they had fled from. Some held up their starving infants for the hope of help. The ship and jets passed them and denies seeing the troubled boat. On the same day there ran a story about the very first air raid, done in 1911, by an Italian pilot who dropped his bombs from the plane by hand on an encampment made of Arab tents, also in Libya. These were the thoughts behind making this small film. The week I was in Athens also marked the year anniversary since the death of my friend, Callie Angel. It is to her spirit and memory I make this, dedicate this, whatever you wish to call such an ephemeral thing.

I Wanted to Make a Movie

2011-04-30T09:19:00.000+02:00

I am not one of those who can say that one specific event in one media has inspired me, or rather determined for me one possible fate of many.

I spoke to myself only, but as one friend would to another. Words on paper were my first companions, and now as this friendship drifts, the years of journals, unsent letters, fragments of stories and outlines for articles become the rubble and mortar of a makeshift tomb.

In my early adulthood I found my first friends. We knew we could change the world because ours had just changed. But the ways of the world, that construct of oppression had already begun to categorize us and put us to use in its service. We began giving away our little utopia to the turbulence of first love affairs, to school, to drugs, to our jobs.

The condition of our happiness was set in those years. In the pensive years that followed, the memory of community in dead time is what fed my dreams, and the words that I wrote then tell a tale of cannibalism where dreams devour dreams until nothing remained, at which point the dreams devour the dreamer.

I would fail in my intention here if I did not bring up the failure of love, or of love's use. I mean the love between two people whose language and kingdom is the body. I do believe in love, but this belief may be among the last of my superstitions.

Using love as a tool, a drug, an antidote to the human condition of total alienation is to place life in suspension, separated from living, from mobility, from action. This stasis is death. If life can be seen as a war of will and desire, then love may be an agent on the side against what makes us human. We become casualties, our wills subjected to the wills of external, abstract forces such as work, state, progress and culture. Love eases this pain. Love helps us do our jobs, and resting in this suspension we construct our tombs, that is build homes.

By saying "the failure of love", I mean specifically of how it is structured for use. There are deep attachments and investments on love by society. Love is a strong sedative for the discontented. Love is insular in that it fosters an exclusiveness that has a tendency to keep people from looking elsewhere for satisfaction, stimulation or social activity. Love keeps bodies from motion, which in turn provides a scenario where homes, cars, televisions, loans, credit and all the other accoutrements of sedentary life become increasingly attractive, which in turn keeps economies going and a large labor force to be exploited where bodies stay in place, without which a strong nation cannot survive. This is how I speak of love. Know that when I say that I've loved or have been loved, that I mean it in the most human, warm way. It's just that how this has been used, and created from it could be the most monstrous parody we face.

Through love, and with my consent, my body became a territory of such forces. I ceased to move.

I saw a community sprout up around a dozen or so short lived clubs that revolved around two longer lived ones, filled with people who had experienced the final gasps of sexual permissiveness before the heavy hand of HIV and taboo associated with it had set in, and people who had also felt the personal liberation of punk. Over just two or three years I witnessed the world's destruction and reconstruction on any given night of the week. Drugs, sex, and more notably the creative act all lost their sobriety and weight in this vertigo induced by play.

Memory, like love is something that in and of itself has no will. It is neutral territory, passive. As such it is easy to possess and put to work in a manner that can be just as liberating as oppressive. It is how this sword is wielded and by whom that makes the difference. Social memory, personal memory can be seized and exploited here in the interests of capital. This is why I distrust nostalgia. My strongest memories cease to be memory and are the actual terms of my life when my will is not submitted to wills other than my own. I am happy when I am allowed to be as I am or as I desire. The power of my memory is that it contains clues when I am lost so that I may find that way of being again. Memory lies dormant, waiting for me to live again, thus freeing it from Time. But for years my demon bedfellow was Nostalgia, and all I did was read, write, work and drink.

One of the most influential books that I read in my confinement was written by a teenager, a young woman named Mary Maclane at the turn of the century, a time when what was demanded of a woman constituted near total occupation. The intensity of her will, the insistencee of her being on an impossible happiness sparked in her a complete rebellion. She saw with the brightest lucidity the future she was offered, rose up to smash it with a No that echoes nearly a century later. Her words and her life helped me see for the first time that one of my greatest enemies was my own belief in, therefore collaboration with the external forces of commerce, society, culture. My memory was not my life because I had betrayed it and reduced it to Nostalgia.

Before this point in my life the thought of a creative act other than writing had become impossibility in part because of moral and aesthetic standards I had set that now seem rather childish. I say this because those creative works that I held in esteem I had set above me, as opposed to seeing them as texts that I could learn from and incorporate into my own being. This gulf of separation is a mechanism of that horrible construction; genius, the cop of creative acts, ensuring not only that all creative acts conform to it's standards of narcissistic esthetics, but also prohibiting creativity as manifesting itself as play. The only way that I could see myself "making" something was by negating the end, and place value instead on the means. To make a film, or write a book for that matter, would have to be an act, the way that walking or talking is an act, both in their meandering forms.

I thought it best to evoke her, rather than depict her, and the windmills at the Altamont Pass against a blue sky, among high, rolling hills of yellow grass, with their white blades singing and humming spoke nothing if not the language of Desire.

I had also become very fascinated with the surveyor symbols that are painted on the streets and sidewalks for reference in the repair of public electricity and sewage maintenance. I began to make connections for alternate meanings of the symbols with space, and began to imagine them as maps to other spaces, perhaps even as maps to other spaces that I may discover and move into with loved ones, should they like what they see there. What had begun to interest me was seeing between the spaces, a search for cracks in what is considered real, where even through the smallest extension of faith or exertion of will, one could forge a way into that other way of perceiving and experiencing, thrusting oneself into the realm where worlds exist upon worlds, where geographic facts such as a body of water, or an empty lot are no longer things that one sees, but instead events that one experiences. I followed the symbols painted on the ground with faith, and found such a space. A vast empty lot on toxic ground in an industrial area by the bay was the place where real concepts of space and time melted away. I cannot do justice to it by trying to describe it to you, but I will say that it was covered with the most rare of flowers, and that the ground glittered in the sun, a mirror of what the sky would be each night. I wrote some pieces in an attempt to understand for my self what this discovery meant for me, and soon wanted to share this with others. The idea occurred to me to make a film, a sort of spiritual adventure documentary.

My love had a need to shape itself differently in order to survive as love. Those external forces had been ingested. I felt the desire to be elsewhere in my life pulling strongly, but wanted to share with him these ephemeral things I had come to know.

The experience for me had not only clarified the distance between my imagined life and my real life, but also was proof of how the meanings attached to the creative act can mutilate the act, distorting it so as not to be recognizable from it's intention. I wanted to make a movie, yes, but more so I wanted to shape a new way of being in an environment of temporary community.

These projects and meetings gave me great joy but when they had finished all that remained was the feeling of a loss of potential in my self, my life went on as before. With the loss of potential there is the sound of doors slamming behind you. What I needed was not to want, but to be. Killing desire seems next to impossible to someone in whom habits had reduced passions to hobbies.

I needed to let him know just how much I loved him, and to thank him for letting me know what it means to have been loved, but more than ever it was necessary to dissolve the context in which that love had grown so that love would be subject to nothing, and nothing would be subject to love.

I kept watching the tiny black bits of debris pull towards the base of the flame where sent by the heat they soared again through the clear, thick fluid just to the edge. Fearing the solidity of the waxen shore, the tiny flecks repeated this gesture again and again until the flame destroys both wick and wax and all is extinguished.

I wanted to make a movie of nothing but credits and thank you, a long list from leads, extras and grips to script consultants and set designers, but my carefully constructed life collapsed, as does anything built by us. Now fumbling through the mess I inventory loves and losses, pick up a few snapshots and will be on my way.