New York: Make it Old!

Space Cruise Loses its Highway

2010-04-12T20:14:00.000-07:00

Oh the good old days!
All you windy-eyed ever friends in weather fair or foul at all you Great waiting Lakes!

Semar Pegulingan Lingo Puppies (Song, Gong, and Ping-a-long; or Poetry and Participation)

2010-03-28T21:33:00.000-07:00

In downtown Manhattan all imported traditions are ancient ones. Claude Levi-Strauss saw an Indian in a feather headdress taking notes with a Parker pen in the New York Public Library in 1941. Here, the new thing is the same as its archetype. It has to be big and meaningful and empty like a taxicab rolling up to you with its light on and no people in it or else we might mistake it for something fleeting. The jazz bar must represent JAZZ ITSELF, as at the Zinc Bar on West 3rd Street I am told to look at and remember where Billie Holiday sat. So let's pretend that something can escape its already being an imitation of itself and think back to the spontaneous emergence of its grandfather. New York insists that it is possible to be something. But the folk poets on street corners tempt us with their tales of heroes--"we are just like them!" the poets say. We like adventures too! But it is no good to imitate. Heroic heroism has left the room! Ban the poets and bring in the Lingo Puppies! It's not that we let our dogs lick our tongues on the subway because they're the only people who will ever love us unconditionally--we let them because we know they'll never love us back, and love is such a pleasant thing to feel. Nothing deflates the capacious heart like the possibility of fulfillment.

At the gamelan performance I watched a dopey-looking hound trot by the orchestra of bangers and boppers seated before their gilded instruments. Is there anything more ancient than this? I am a Judeo-Middle-Western-Saxon-class sunday with sprinkles and I cann't think of a better opponent than a Kebyar Legong dancer, or a trotting Lingo Puppy. I live by my sword! I am going to be something! I've met my match in this collective cacophany with no heroic melodies or songs of myself! What is this idiophonic ideopathic thunderclap that sets my loins a'quiver so that my heart breaks out in hives?

In New York everything has so much purpose that purpose exceeds its own limits. Each space can meet the needs of each of its potential functions, even those functions that have no needs and only potential. Gong orchestras bristle with potential energy, the kind that poses a threat but never one of fulfillment. Like the dog. There is room here for us all to fulfill our potentials!

Descent (Neil Marshall, 2005)

2010-03-21T14:27:00.000-07:00

In hopes of ousting all netherworld answerless oblivion a team of five adventuresses sink into the chthonic aperture of a maternal geode, carabiners and slick tongues clicking with resolve—a misguided death quest. We follow our team past damp paintings of amateur skill-level, paintings of beasts whose names even babies can pronounce, babies whose scent moistens the pink perinea of said cavern, cavern whence we and all five adventuresses arose and are henceforth headed. The heroic ladies shrunken to babies return—as in a final return—home—as in the fleshy fiber, post or pre biologic abode—and encounter simultaneously untimely demises and timely sapiens’s insipience. We push through to the red-rimmed earth eye and its look conjures memories of the first, longest and foulest sleep.

Sol Goes Home

2009-09-15T18:06:00.000-07:00

"Did you see it?"
"Yes."
"Isn't it beautiful?"
"Oh yes."
"I told you."
"How could I know? How could I ever imagine?"

We all experience nature as does the grieving Thorn, who is too young in Soylent Green's post-apocalyptic universe to know it from memory--"how could I ever imagine?"--but nonetheless knows that it is beautiful. It is beautiful precisely because it appears to him and us through the eyes of the dying father, the last image of power--the power of all of human history and knowledge-- reduced to a shrunken, whimpering child, smiling stupidly at the sight of a grazing faun. Thorn necessarily could not have imagined it until this very moment, looking through the window into a locked temple where nature is already staged as the failure of power, a return to the womb--to a time before knowledge and memory, and it can only appear as beautiful as it is falling away: the colors grow dim in the dying eyes of the father and then the screen goes black.

Do we leave nature or does nature leave us? Either way, it can only be encountered as it ceases to be, when we weep at the grandeur of the setting sun before the lights go on and the credits roll.

Lacy daydreams have taken the place of my sleeping dreams

2009-09-14T21:32:00.000-07:00

On Aplomb by Sarah Banach

D.H. Lawrence's heavy, wet prose is intimate with its topic to the extent that it eludes Memory. She hides from Him. Topic unfolds in the feminine time of reading. Time is pregnant and reflection slips away into lacy daydreams--

'She had to dance in exultation beyond him. Because he was in the house, she had to dance before her Creator in exemption from the man. On a Saturday afternoon, when she had a fire in her bedroom, again she took off her things and danced, lifting her knees and her hands in a slow, rhythmic exulting. He was in the house, so her pride was fiercer. She would dance his nullification, she would dance to her unseen Lords. She was exalted over him, before the Lord.
He watched, and his soul burned in him. He turned aside, he could not look, it hurt his eyes. Her fine limbs lifted and lifted, her hair was sticking out all fierce, and her belly, big, strange, terrifying, uplifted to the Lord. Her face was rapt and beautiful, she danced exulting before the Lord, and knew no man.'

We were all once swathed in a warmth that is now the mere faint breath on our cheek of the imminent and final return that we can only imagine in dreams. The mother is to all of us tears in large eyes, mountains of flesh, hair, forefinger and thumb, the grazing touch that somehow also holds.

Performance Thanatology: The 50 Greatest Ladies and Gentlemen

2009-08-11T13:13:00.000-07:00

I have recently been ushered into the underground world—where lurk the less popular of the popular entertainments—of improvised comedy. It is generally unfunny, though an absurd exchange orchestrated by an actor hip to the general unfunniness of what has already been established as funny—i.e. those formulas that make the improvised joke possible at all—will happen from time to time, and this by way of a very specific kind of event, a poetic event. Thus, I propose, it is our poet/performers that bear the responsibility of relieving all the poor fumbling virgins, the helmeted handicapped, the cops momentarily forgetting not to act gay etc. etc. of their tireless attempts to make us happy.

Comedy is rarely funny. Movies are never funny. When Ali G speaks in a language that we recognize (and that only for its comic foreignness) baffling his guest—Newt Gingrich or Buzz Aldrin or whoever demonstrates enough fogeyish confidence to expect to be respected—it is fucking funny because of the infinite room that the perfectly staged situation leaves for misunderstanding. Comedy is in the postponement of agreement or resolution, and resignation to the impossibility of final understanding always elicits the wordless expressive act—the scratching of the chin, the straightening of the shirttails, the exasperated departure, the laugh—in both the victim and the spectator.

Performance Thanatology’s The 50 Greatest Ladies and Gentlemen (which had its final show last Saturday at the Ontological-Hysteric Theater at St. Mark’s) offers its audience ENTERTAINMENT; that is, a self-consciously entertaining gesture toward the collective vague memory of the promise of pure entertainment made by the vaudeville show, which few of us can say we know much about while most of us can recognize the errant signifiers it has left in its wake; for instance: the “come one come all” banter of the fast-talking emcee, the crescendo of the live soundtrack signaling applause, the spotlight, the magic trick, the sad clown face. Thanatology’s show offers us these traces of a specific though barely recognizable, receding cultural phenomenon and opposes them to the technology of new entertainment—e.g. video, recorded sound, and television. We have, then, the perfect comic duo—that device which derives humor from the uneven exchange between two partners.

Comedy happens at the convergence or divergence of different signifying systems and in Thanatology’s scheme those systems unfold infinitely toward the far reaches of the linguistic beyond and find there us, the audience, The 50 Greatest Ladies and Gentlemen. Reminiscent of both the variety show and our reminiscence of the variety show, this performance includes its audience of post-modern-minded art enthusiasts in such a fashion that we don’t quite know whether to laugh or to cry: the nostalgia is so colored with self-conscious theatrics, the comedy so contingent upon its tragic other—e.g. Ric and Lucas’ loony merrymaking against the recorded soundtrack of 8 year-old Sarah’s dogged piano performance of “Wild Horses” and her simultaneous deadpan announcement into the mic “the song is long gone”—that emotion appears as an amorphous ether reacting dementedly to the desperate incomprehensibility of the world and the impossibility of its representation/remembrance. It is David Lynch’s starry-eyed diva singing “In Heaven Everything is Fine,” oblivious to the enactment of her own ugliness, her hideous incongruity with the stage and its shadowy theatrical outside.

The show is at once comical and terrifying, its farce always threatening to tumble over into the terrain of existential despair. We are given magic tricks without magic, jokes without punch lines, tales without resolution, and other events of mounting tension and consistently denied denouement. And, suffering from the repeated disappointment of bad comedy, I applaud Thanatology’s recognition of the fact that funniness can only occur once Thalia realizes that she is hopelessly driven to meet Melpomene in what is doomed to be an endless game of phone tag. Poor muses. Mel’s phone is blowing up with drunk dials from Thal: “wish you were here, girl! I came out for some air—it’s so loud—and now all of a sudden everything’s spinning and I’m sooooo wasted” and Thal’s voicemail’s all “I know we never get to hang out but you know I’m so busy and I just was looking at pics from our trip to the Keys and it made me miss you sooooo much.”

A Gormandist Manifesto

2009-07-29T14:42:00.000-07:00

Consumerism, as we know—though it produces heaps upon heaps of twisted metal, battery acid, banana peels, bones, and fecal matter—only gets its eager mandibles on the paltry goodies that it deems attractive. We proudly confess our affinity for rusty old novelty items with their orange and blue motifs and misspelled slogans for defunct enterprises, but we dirty our hands at the junk shop only with that same delicious orange powder that sticks to our fingers after a bag of Cheetos and a Bartles & James Blue Hawaiian. And we all know that despite the delightful melange of happy colors that beam forth from the supermarket aisles, there really ain’t much to choose from.

I therefore inaugurate with this statement New Gormandism. Our ninety percent submerged iceberg brains can handle only so much culinary aptitude in that measly bit of floating grey matter, thus we finish our peas in anticipation of the pudding. The peas are often soggy, bland and kind of mushy but they’re not that bad. The pudding is good—sweet and creamy around our tongues like underwater embryonic memories. New Gormandism proposes that we supress the feeble and ill-founded preferences of our fungiform papillae and in the spirit of Gargamelle, who, when great with Gargantua, ate immense quantities of godebillios—the fat tripes of fat oxen—take into our gullets everything that our gullets will take.

As Gormandists we are the new foragers, yet this time we forget our contest with those sluggish Cro-Magnons; indeed we play hacky-sack with them and other non-competitive sports, invite them to tea. We shall raise our glasses of milk thistle extract and Murray’s Pomade in a toast to consumption: “here’s to the body: full o’ shit with nuthin’ to do about it!” We eat indiscriminately and thus begin to walk a little bit closer to the ground. We fill ourselves with coal dust and flower petals just to see what happens and then forget about it. We stand among the old, glass Coke bottles and perfume atomizers, our purpose simply to contain, waiting to be picked up by the oblivious junk collector hungry for Cheetos only to float from his fingers like a bunch of inflated pig stomachs at hog-killing time. What we put in our mouths will never suit us, nor should it, for we are mere vessels, our aim to make true among the urban waste factories spitting out all the good stuff that everything has its place.

Our bodies will merge with gasoline rainbows and discarded Christmas trees because we are what we eat. Should Gormandists remain faithful to the tenets of their practice, they will achieve unlimited transubstantiative powers. They shall remember the time when they gazed at a bag of Cheetos, longing for both the awesome speed of that biotope feline and Chester’s dandy indifference, now wielding all of those powers and more. We shall all become Chesters and vacuum-sealed bags that crinkle like the thunder that crashes over the Serengeti.

Homage to the Life and Work of the Late Parrotlet, Russell T.

2009-01-28T20:54:00.000-08:00

When I am able to see a face whose form is otherwise only a knot in the webbed and worn edging of my memory’s fabric I look at it, and the exchange is so deliberate that the face begins to cry. Ronald Reagan’s tears, in this case, are real tears, not Hellcats of the Navy tears. He cries because he feels that I make him real, though he will always remain a tin man, and tears will only rust his boyishly saucy expression. I’ve never seen Hellcats of the Navy, nor Bedtime for Bonzo, but in 1951 my seven-year old mother watched that handsome man give milk to a monkey with eyes brighter than mine when I now beg him for that relief that can only be induced by the one truly sympathetic face that sneaks away from my receding memory. With his tears he purports to have saved me, though he has never offered me, a Jew, salvation. Am I special? Chosen from the chosen ones by the chosen leader of the unchosens?

Hovering to his right is the kind face of Mr. Russell Pascatore Sr., who begat Russell Pascatore, who begat Russell Pascatore, who begat the late parrotlet Russell T. He is my Eye of Horus, keeping watch on humankind, though, as good father and begetter, he neither cries nor smokes dope. He has shown me pictures of his offspring, and of himself as the offspring of men, other Russells and Rosarios, and called himself a sentimental slob. But when I look here into his benevolent eyes (we will leave aside the striking sculptural elegance and rich tones of the hair on his face and head) he sheds no tear.

I will be brash. In the faded primary hues of the loosening web that is the sagging structure of my memory – booties crocheted by my own grandmother – Ronald Reagan and Jesus Christ are a couple of shams. I must look beyond the green Eye of Horus and pursed lips of Benjamin Franklin to the paternal countenance of Mr. Russell Pascatore Sr. Can the images floating around the heads of the president of the United States of America and the president of Christianity ever become married to their meanings? Can I hope to find my real father? Perhaps I can buy myself a father who will never tell me what to do. He’ll give me one-hundred dollar bills and I will drive out to the hood and buy kine nugs and when I get home there will be a mushroom cloud on TV. The whole of my generous family will be seated before it watching that cloud puff baby mushrooms out of itself like me into my paper towel roll stuffed with dryer sheets. Instead though, I have HOPE. My hope is a smiling flower with heart petals and I hope for a father who will shield it from the spears of angry barbarians tribes.

When I look at the face of Russell Sr. I know that I do not have to fight terror. Nonetheless, I am afraid.

House Press Reading @ Rust Belt Books, December 2008

2008-01-05T00:01:00.000-08:00

Introducing Damien Weber's new book, Pussy:

Due to an expected influx of aesthetically promising trash, Damien Weber will be working overtime this holiday season as an environmentally-conscious elf-forager at the popular culture recycling center. As the month of December will as always precipitate the accumulation of the most recognizable words and images from five minutes ago in landfills across the country, Damien will do his best to reconfigure these bits and pieces into brand spanking new products effecting a collective enigmatic moment of identification among his consumer base. His buyers keep buying because they are charmed and intrigued by the look and sound of something they feel they already know but somehow can’t quite identify. Aside from his foraging, collecting, and recycling, Damien also works as an accountant in Batavia, New York. He has published 17 books and five cd recordings since 2002, distributed among his alternating hometowns of Buffalo and Brooklyn.

Introducing Russell Pascatore's new book, Miriam Sea of Bitterness:

Russell Pascatore taught himself to write in a log cabin built by the Pascatore family in the mostly Amish township of Conewango Valley New York. He did so not by candlelight, but in absolute darkness because he wanted to save his candles, not in anticipation of another world war, but in case there might be a day when the world would be depleted of its ambiance and then Russ would step in with flaming torches leading us all safely into an aesthetically cozy and psychedelic beyond, populated by hospitable aliens and governed democratically by the ghost of his dead parrot also named Russ. The two Russ' and some aliens would be in charge of keeping everyone comfortable and would carry out the task effortlessly because a constitution written and preserved in absolute darkness would in fact constitute no perceptible product but would maintain itself only as myth so that to lead a lawful life would be as fun or as boring as each citizen would have it. We would all speak the language of Russ' poetry, respecting the incontrovertible significance of the myth of our constitution while giving equal attention to the Old Testament, Coast to Coast Am, the Dead, and Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey. And with the different sounds and moods of so many idioms and attitudes converging our new world would resist identification as anything other than a radically loopy out-and-out subversion of the possibility for an authoritative anything.

Broetry in Motion: Rust Belt Books, 10/18/07

2007-10-24T16:33:00.001-07:00

House Press is a poetry-centered group of artists and writers which began to form in Buffalo, NY in 2001. Its mission remains simple: to publish their own work and other work they variously believe in (from their website at housepress.org - check it out!)

Disclaimer: I only discovered the House Press audio file after I wrote this so forgive my lack of preciseness regarding the poems.

Aaron Lowinger
It is even in everyday conversation that Aaron's voices seems to arise from a cavernous well, and then, rearing its head in open air, finds the world as huge and resonant as the place whence it came. But within the lived-in space that his poetry draws, populated by the flickering or dew-soaked objects that have the uncanny ability to make Buffalonians laugh, the sound of his speech must find its way over, through, and around the bits and pieces that occupy the page. With poetry Aaron's voice finds expression in a world complicated by the fact of his object-language staring up from an undeniable podium in a room portentously hot one year and six days after Armageddon. We hear it stopping at the physical elements of our environment, its volume displaced by pressing things. There is not a lack of surety but an abundance of care. Its origin is vast but it emerges tempered and humbled by a measured self-consciousness demanded by the locally multifarious objects of its address. Or perhaps by the mystery of the Muskie "fish of ten thousand casts," the slippery nature of legend complicating a poetry that seeks to be rooted in place.

Kevin Thurston
The beckoning of Odin signaled the subsequent verification of the possibility for a single god of madness, mead, and poetry. The god Odin purportedly gives to worthy poets the Mead of Inspiration, mixed by a team of dwarves. With his associates Russell and Kristy at the bar, Odin's liquid favor rained down on Rust Belt rendering it all the rustier...utter madness----- dick painting, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas and a reading voice progressively representative of the Northern U.S. Nederlands dialect, the diarrheal speech of boss, and Thomas Dolby------ Kevin's poetry was only separate from his performance when the performance itself became concerned with that very distinction. The pronunciation of one was modified increasingly with each reading, monitoring the poem's migration from page to performance space as the interference of sound gradually rendered its content unreadable. And furthermore, once self-conscious performativity is established in the context of Kevin's conversational poems, the listener is confronted with the question: is the self-conscious performer to be held accountable for his or her words as is the casual conversationalist? -- i.e. ought we acknowledge the potential offense of the boss' language once it is reincarnated as performance and cast judgment upon both the author of those words and their poet-messenger? Kevin, do you wish to be absolved?

Michael Snow at Hallwalls, 10/13/07

2007-10-17T18:02:00.000-07:00

Program description from Hallwalls' website:
This screening features three recent films and videos, The Living Room, Triage, and REVERBERLIN, which uniquely exemplify Snow's exploration of sound and image. The digital short The Living Room (2000), which was the impetus for the feature length Corpus Callosum (2002), "dramatizes and multiplies chosen manifestations and implications of 'On/Off' and/or 'Absence/Presence'' (Canyon Cinema). Triage (2004) is double projection film made in collaboration with Canadian filmmaker Carl Brown. Like a surrealist Exquisite Corpse, neither Brown nor Snow knew what each other had filmed, and musician John Kamevaar composed a two-channel soundtrack in a similarly "blind' method. Snow's experiments in sound and image are also evidenced in the feature length REVERBERLIN (2006). Using concert footage of CCMC, the free improvisational ensemble Snow co-founded in 1974, Snow digitally weaves together images and sounds from performances that have taken place across the globe. "I desired an equivalence of seeing and hearing so that one could actually listen, pay attention to the music, as well as follow the picture development,' Snow writes. "That was the goal of New York Eye and Ear Control, too, but it used a completely different aesthetic from REVERBERLIN, which contains more of the freedom that video shooting, editing and animation have given 'film' artists."

Reverberlin is not a record of a temporal happening but a challenge to the possibility of creating an authentic record and a simultaneous impetus for a new temporal happening.The active participation that is required of a free improv audience Snow requires of his video audience - we are inclined to track the occurrences of synchronicity among the mismatched visual-aural landscapes or perhaps to imagine that the visual-aural image is unified or "actual." Snow says of Reverberlin, "I often speculated on how I could integrate our music into a meaningful picture and sound cinematic dialogue. Our music is 'improvised' but my films have never been "improvised'." I would argue the contrary with Triage - two films shown side-by-side on two screens - a real-time film performance which happens each time it is screened. Thus, the final film - a recording of an earlier screening of Triage, taken from the back of a small theatre with the audience visible, framing the two screens - freezes Triage's temporality into an artifact. In this sense, Reverberlin and the final film work as documents in a similar manner - both are short-circuited attempts at history-making, unable to attest accurately to the original event and thus compelling a new one; the former with its appeal to the audience's sensibility for the purpose of organizing its sensory elements and the latter with its unsettling reference to itself, the audience, and the immediate past. As it begins to watch me I no longer watch it but

the passage of time flicking dimly upon the screen
perhaps my brains have turned to sand

And the sound of the pie pans that Snow sets on the strings of his piano which is not the sound I hear happens within and because of that very incongruity (Danielle Bergeron - "it is in the swallowed notes that the secret heart of music can be heard") just as the inanimate objects hung on the Living Room wall begin to breathe and shift only in their relation to the stuffed dog and the still shot of the seated boy and the live woman standing still and the entrance and departure of the film crew.

2007-10-10T19:07:00.000-07:00

Introductory Statement

Here in Buffalo we are concerned with the state of things. Tree stumps and empty buildings exist in grand disproportion with the potential for fruition and habitation so that we are confronted with an abundance of material objects resonating with the memory of a vibrant past and the anticipation of an indefinite future. When a chunk of granite from a demolished bank is moved to the beach of Lake Erie we name the place and take pleasure in it simply because it is there and because we have named it. And the palpable fact -- the sound, color, shape, and elusive symbolism -- of the dark, blank spaces between the piled-up granite pieces guarantee our questionable affections.
The poet George Oppen writes in Of Being Numerous:
'You remember that old town we went to, and we sat in the
ruined window, and we tried to imagine that we belonged to
those times -- it is dead and it is not dead, and you cannot
imagine either its life or its death; the earth speaks and the
salamander speaks, the Spring comes and only obscures it --'
Fragments and debris attest not only to the cagey details of our local history but to the very moment in each of our pasts at which that history has become local -- when the narratives of prosperity and promise began to matter personally -- when we were first able to say "You remember..." -- so that the question becomes whether I will allow the object to stand for itself or will it remain a testament to lost time. If I choose to let it stand the infinite unrequited potentiality with which it is charged will burn my eyes even as I turn them from its look, its excitement in waiting increasingly electric as impossible consummation draws nearer. My choice renders the object as art rather than testament, and then, paradoxically, induces my desire to testify to its presence.

So the purpose of the object is lost to the annals of local legend and as it waits impatiently for its next implementation it becomes noticeably excited so that we experience its desire as art and then seek to capture it and remember. The task at hand is to write about art. Can the word on paper both record and reiterate the temporal experience of the indeterminate art object? Perhaps it would be more appropriate in print, considering our uniquely rust belt relationship with the object. Or, since the internet is itself a temporal experience which leaves behind no concrete traces, would the fact of art's happening -- its electrically charged lying in wait; its animated inanimateness -- be better represented via the web?

In any case, this project runs the risk of transforming the unnameable moment in art at which the thing begins to become something else into a nameable epoch that can thus be added to the annals. When a bloodied and beaten Christ-figure pulls himself across the expanse of an abandoned train station before an audience, art happens at the brilliant intersection of the recorded history of the Central Terminal and its sense-memories ignited within the barely accessible sectors of the minds of those who are old enough to have been there and its physical deterioration and its simultaneous resurrection as spectacle and the hurried clicking of dress shoes on a waxed floor toward the prospect of a lucrative future and the faint brushing of the fake-bloody skin of the actor along a floor blackened by disuse and the glaring silence of its shabby environs no longer "Central" and altogether lacking purpose. No record should be left. I would then find my motivation at the intersection of observer and observed, acknowledging that this dimension exists within the very form of the art object and asserting my place as participant in the happening rather than critic. Selfish perhaps, as my goal is to make sure that the moment keeps me wanting. And what I want is nothing. Let us be satisfied by nothing.