it's been too long since my last trip to vegas

when i was last there, the guggenheim was in new-born swing, O was still the only show worth going to, and the weekend was only five days away...

the desert outside of vegas is the best. henderson emerges out of the rocks and dust like a forgotten mirage of haphazard plans for living. community wasn't forgotten; it was never an issue.

a certain novel came into my life at the most appropriate time, which is always nice, and rare (the pleasure of slow reading). the owner of the vermont bookstore said that reading it before sleeping at night would saturate my dreams with even more glitter and drama than usual... reading the words, the imagination turns the desert rocks you picture into a deeper red than the author depicts. the sun is brighter, and the water more quenching than ever.

i finished that book in an outdoor hot tub on the roof of a hotel i stayed in for the honolulu marathon. it was four thiry in the morning and the moon was barely loud enough to see the pages as they dampened by my wet fingertips. the breeze blew my shorter hair into my eyes, but the paragraphs were clear. the last sentance brought me back to the beginning. i got out of the tub, put on my shoes, and got ready to run.

not too long ago

i witnessed an event that has plagued my memory with violent washes of pink and yellow, a bright green-yellow glare of color --

two birds were fighting, flapping.
one was obviously the dominant aggressor (always a master/slave struggle).
the little brown birds were vicious. i felt as if i was a voyeur of a history-in-the-making moment within a small world that in its own image is a galaxy (a horton hears a who philosophical camera-trick of perspective). what was the meaning of this struggle? what instigated this mutual attack?

my gut became cold and empty. as the one on top used its beak to clamp own on the other's beak, it dug its claws into feathered flesh of wings and stomach to keep it struggling underneath. then the bird drove its beak into the other bird's left eye. pecking away, my eyes tried to zoom in closer, to witness the wound of the eye in its progression. i wished i had a video-capable phone, or video camera, for that matter. the need to record these injuries, the intensity of this big movement of small bodies at 10:21am on a Tuesday morning seemed a duty to me (why else would I have been given the chance to watch this metaphorical struggle unfold? the passion of action begged to be recorded and re-worked to stand-in for a mini-meta commentary on the relationship of all binaries that fight each other only to define themselves and their place in the world.)

i am telling this now because all the birds i've seen lately have been dead. the two in a recent dream existed in a pseudo-symbiotic relationship, the flesh of the larger bird serving as fuel for the smaller, though both were close to death. walking to the mailbox i came across a small bird on its back, wings spread (of course, you say), a material memory of the symbol of freedom and flight. and today, stopping by the water in the middle of a bike ride, the same species of small brown bird was rocking back and forth, touching the shore then retreating again, and again, riding on the slight wave of the river on this Sunday afternoon. it too, was dead, and i wondered which body would decay first, the water-logged or the land-bound? surf or turf?

"I am away from the computer right now."

I think it is really interesting to think about the idea of the Instant Messenger "Away" message --- I'm online, but I'm offline. I want you to know I am connected, but I'm just off doing other things right now...brb

Of everyone of my "buddies" on my list, my sister always has the best, most random lines for her away message. Current example:

A quote from Nike, "a woman is often measured by the things she cannot control. she is measured by the way her body curves or doesnt curve, by where she is flat or straight or round. she is measured by 36-24-36 and inches and ages and numbers, by all the outside things that dont ever add up to who she is on the inside. and so if a woman is to be measured, let her be measured by the things she can control, by who she is and who she is trying to become. because as every woman knows, measurements are only statistics. And statistics lie."

pimp my ride. customize my life.

Found Writing

(an entirely different different example of "The Case of September 16"


NORMAL

My psychiatrist was reassuringly normal -
Neither Woody Allen nor Doktor Freud -
More like my non-existent elder brother

Explaining things. Sometimes in the waiting room,
I'd see another patient, and then another: they looked so normal
Like busy people in the supermarket

Pushing their trolleys around with tinned food, plastic wrapped paper,
Frozen fruit -
Paying for it all by credit card
At the check-out, where the cashier passes barcodes

Across a scanner. Checking signatures,
She smiles at each one of them, guessing from their shopping items
Which one of them believes she has a soul.


(i can't remember, but i think i wrote this...if i did, it was definitely when i was working at mc donalds in high school. or, worse yet, maybe i copied it from Sassy magazine - remember that one? the "pre" Bust magazine? i don't read Bust, but if i kept up with the whole girl reading thing, i guess i would. there's probably as many answers there as are in some of the dead theory guys i keep myself up late reading, my eyes stroking the words of the decaying minds as they channel from the cold ground the memory of their own nostalgia for a young body like mine...)

i want an open sky

a blank-ness
a do-over
no, just a gray white sky
that says
nothing

not a place to colonize
or paint across,
with what little meaning
that might never matter,
(might never pass
for any thing at all...)

just to breathe in
like running between 5am and 7am
from the top of a mountain
in new york state
chill air not cold
just fresh
wet

dirt no other shoes have hit
pounded by the weight
of feet
escaping miles traveled
before
before this morning

a new moment
always comes,
but is never registered
until it passes

morning haze
obscuring the landscape
quiet. chill. possible.


>>and to lie down in it, is to remember, Lines for Winter...

two by two by two is eight more than zero

shout-out to kevin and his new website, www.videohippos.tk. anyone wanna ride to his show with japanther this coming Friday?

Also....LONG LONG LONG overdue...

kelly towles | charles steelman | and their Great One-Nighter, bollocks @ david adamson's old space



None of the usual suspects covered this event on their blogsites, so I'll try to fill-in the blanks...

Art openings are performances, performances of everyday life. They are as fleeting as walking down a street. Maybe a particular moment will get tangled up in your blue web of a memory - maybe the face of someone you actually hadn't seen at an opening lately, a friend who's been in hiding. Or perhaps it is actually the image of an art work that managed to paint itself into your mind, long enough to give yourself some credit for getting out the door that night...

Street art, to me, is the beautiful semi-permanent experience of someone else's moment in that very same location: graffiti is cool 'cause it means someone else, besides myself, was there at least once before, and they decided to do something about it, about the "there" and the "being there." Rather than, la la la, this is the same way I walk to work everyday...someone (who? who cares? anonymity is not just a legal protection, it is crucial to the work itself) decided to grab that space of concrete, that bit o block, that tiny moment of physical presence and make it into an expression of their own. Like taking photos with your cell phone's camera, you've appropriated time and space for your own use.

Often the use value isn't just for the fleeting pleasure of painting with a can and stencil; the messages and motivations of street art are often politically charged and, thankfully, give you a visual experience that differs from the space-invading techniques of corporations. UGh - remember Nissan and their "Exercise in Tagging?" Isn't that like a plastic surgeon giving himself liposuction?

Anyway. BORF, featured in this week's City Paper in a little one-paragraph bit, was one of the street artists represented at bollocks. Rightfully so, I was called a "Delinquent" -- I opted to hit the 14th street openings first -- so, I can't comment on the event prior to the auction. Bollocks!

I made it in just as they finished auctioning off one of the four, (all it took was a slip of paper with your name in a box - be in the flesh to win a piece of street art), almost white walls (the walls had loosely been painted over Kelly's figures from his solo show at adamson last December. The heat of the bodies made the sweat feel as welcome as the dirt under your fingernails after hiding in the bushes to tag a sign yourself. It was there, I was there, we were there. The Event was never more eventful than this. My sweat paid off. I got a piece (we all got a piece), of the action, of the art work, memento of a moment, the work of street artists shown in a space typically reserved for ideologies antithetical to the where of why we were there. Appreciation and "being there." A new audience was assembled, and touched.

All I can say, is my own, thank you. Wish you were there...

where have i been?

sleeping with a new blogsite...

...my mind and fingers have carved out a new web-frontier...watch out. coming soon. leave your shoes at the door, if yr comin' in|side...

oh. and Save the Date (and the last drink for me): Friday the 13th of May, something is going to happen. Reserve that night for beautiful strangers and ugly friends.

guest writer: carter

in the words below, carter touches upon a phenomenon on the connection between the rational mind and the body's sensory equipment. how many times has this situation happened to you? where you drink a glass of milk, but you think for a second that it's water and it indeed tastes like water, just for that split second? though carter describes an actual decision to eat cereal with water, the moment of interplay between the tongue and the mind, at the start of consumption, provides a crack in the reality of expectation in the world...one where alternatives start to seep in and suddenly possibility becomes everything possible...


the first time I ate cereal with water instead of milk
it was weird. for a second I thought I was pouring
gasoline on my malt-o-meal as the water lolloped out
of the gallon jug, like someone was playing a trick on
me. fixing it felt the same but looked different.
eating it looked the same but tasted different, like
cereal with water instead of milk. at least the water
was cold.

midnight/dawn

we constructed a new topography from the ruins, ashes and indestructible manufactured goods scattered across the landscape like colored candy wrappers, a rainbow of trash haphazardly speckling what was left of the earth, after the fire stopped burning the flesh and the land. little could be said at a time like this. a unanimous vote was issued: language was of no further use and was discarded immediately (the uselessness of a wet paper cup). like all other things not evoked repeatedly over time, language was forgotten, and then became nothing.

no, it became nothing's negation; it was so disused that it was everywhere, trapped in and by its own silence; bits of dirt in crevices of chapped hands, the stuff that clings to discarded dental floss, tiny relics of human bodies mixed into dust bunnies: bits of peeled skin, eyelashes, crusted snot, fallen hair (long and short), the hangnails, toenails, and fingernails.

(time was the reality of the curse.)

voices turned pale from inactivity, becoming albino like the creatures that once lived so deep in the sea, away from the self-righteous light. the sounds of digestion and cracking knees when squatting were louder than a concert of any utterances that had once been made.

temperature became important again, as did the nerves just under the tender outer shell of skin.

we began to feel the cells of our lungs imbibing oxygen for the first time, as they had always done, exhaling as much as possible each time just to see the chest rise again and then again. alive. (how lucky.)

some of us developed the ability to wiggle our ears. a few already could move at least one. this proved to be an advantage as these individuals taught the others, eventually founding a new army of auditory ability.

this corps received the transmission of our sins, hearing the green-blood pain the earth was in, as it rocked itself back and forth, curled up in the fetal position.

the sound, a deep yellow-green monosyllabic tome, was translated into gestures made by bones moving to invisible vibes, dancing without deliberate design, motion projected into the marrow by the dying pulse of the land.

this is how we came to re-learn ourselves. we didn't write the history of what was, nor did we construct a diary of the transition: language got us to this point and it was never to be the conductor of the orchestration of our lives again.

the ticking clock of seasons was lost. but out of it the gain was immeasurable. a shattered sea within the frozen crystals of the previous mind.

the greatest catastrophe

is not having a theater in which to construct the maps of your sounds, the code to create the alias of/or self. Logic does not structure the flow of fame, only conduits of surface loop together the memory of information, Cool Information, that is rich enough to dance on (as it constructs) the surface itself.

Language, language, language. Blankets of identity. Scarves of warm riddles. rhetoric keeps us softly at the bay of technology behind curtains, hidden. taking cover. relinquishing freestyle action.

>>WARNING>> this was written using words appropriated from Peter Halley's Hypnotext project, a take on dj spooky's rhythm science text<<

when do you know if something is done?

at least if you over-cook a cake the sweet smell eventually is over-powered by the burn. a bunch of yellow tulips are at the foot of the bed. they aren't from you, or any other version of you, but i imagine they could be. scattered. spilled. the petals open too much, too quickly, because of the heat. their eventual decay marks the end of their function.

then an email, a little reply to a little thing i forgot my fingers so quickly typed and shot off into the "maybe you'll read this" abyss of uncertainty and chance. i try not to read too much into it. just a reply, just as quick as my original impluse-driven, get-me-into-trouble-sometimes typing fingertips. too bad the one thing i care about was the content of the reply. too bad an event was suggested, but was an invitation for one, not two.

if asked "how are things" is there really a chance to reply with something that doesn't fit the norm, the expected, the digital form of small talk? too bad your list of things was so small; goes to show how little of me you know now.


and why am i caring to talk about this here? because writers aren't good at knowing how to finish things off, where to close the chapter, when it's time to turn the page. or if a book has become bonfire material only.

so. tell me. was our we actually just half-baked? or would i never adjust to the new taste that time has flavored for you?

women need words like brains ride bicycles

the haunt of knowledge
is an echo,
a stain of blood
clinging and dried
to the top soil
at the tip
of the mind
the top of
tongue

i never edit
you tend to always revise

either way
your history never matches mine

you remember words i wipe out
white-wash out of memory
before your time
begins to write mine

the feeling of information
differs between each syllable
each context
expression close to comfort
yet
every failed rhyme
echoes a regret

digital can’t touch
analog cannot feel
yet
a callous on my finger
imprints a record
a mark that says

we are trying


Pedagogy (The Feeling of Information), 2005
Kathryn Cornelius
T160 mobile phone image

alameda

alameda

bordered by trees
fenced in by promises
obligations trace pathways
into histories plotted on trajectories
not yet made
not yet traversed
virgin territory
gapping need
you manifested destiny
(or so I thought)

really, you took
transverse lines into your army
webbed together
lying to make belief
that our past was true
crosshatched communications
as your cover

you were always finishing my lines for me
constructing parallelograms
from sentences I was immediately condemned
to live.
to inhabit.
(sentience
out of habit.)

habitually
wearing you on my sleeve
as you wore on my
down-trodden mind
making pathways
of the Less Traveled
others occupied other
little spaces of my gray matter: you fought them out
evicted

for your entertainment
for your pleasure
by your hand
for public display

grounds for baiting
shaded ill intent
promised
to the kill

it's a nice day

for a white wedding


it's a nice day
to
start again

large connected blocks and bricks

piled in an aleatory configuration
...wire twisted during broken beer strings...
beef marinated in Thai herbs, grilled and
served in plastic

a meat market outside the window/hanging
from puppet strings/special order
made-to-deliver
a To-Go order

Carry It Out

Out and up
Over seventh floor balconies
and twelfth floor prison bars

...
an evening left to chance
spent within cold bricks
painted white to form walls

an open sky
saturated purple
untouchable
from below the rectangle-framed skylight

it's so hard to say good bye...

...to yesterday...(sing it, boys II men).

well quiet spaces are hard to find in the middle of construction sites, especially within the confines of adjusted time (and it's all in your head).


on the lap now: The Laws of Cool: Knowledge Work and the Culture of Information by Alan Liu
on the edge now: whether or not the writing will continue...

good bye

i am leaving the world to re-train my brain's focus on academic writing. no fun for a while.

silence. tapping of keys. only my head.

my last show (for now, for a few months): Picture Window in Baltimore opening Feb. 12th.

Alas, I won't be there as I will be working on Christo's Gates installation that week.

i hope to emerge again, in little bubbles popping up to the surface from the depths...perhaps. like blowing milk bubbles in chocolate milk. hand me a straw. i'm diving in.

i'll drink to that

andy warhol did absolut ads, so why not architects doing bottle designs? I wonder if the Corcoran will have Wyborowa sponsor the Gehry wing launch party...

and it's been a while since Rapture came out, but I guess Dior has recently picked up a copy...

Oh the synergy. Who would think there'd still be powerful expressions of alienation, despite such connectedness?

wearable art. wearable technology. hot hot hot!

http://www.engadget.com/entry/6833839062762584

seduced by pure technology...

Useless Technology, 2005
Kathryn Cornelius
T610 mobile phone digital photograph

> more seduction

Comments on thesis writing thus far

okay, not the WRITING part as much right now as the TALKING part...

We had our colloquium meeting just over a week ago and found out our "schedule" for writing various sections. I am preparing for this like a track meet --- lots of diet mountain dew, sweatpants, mental stretching exercises, and marathon dance sessions to guns and roses.

An over-arching theme emerged from the meeting = ANXIETY, and I thought -- This Is It. This is when the history of future academics is written. Who will sink and who will swim? Who wants to stay in the academic institution pool, or who will escape to join the salary paying fields that kill trees to make new pools? I looked around the conference room to see if there were eyes hidding in holes peering into the room, or perhaps one way glass concealing the department chair and georgetown funders, each of them laying down bets on us little horsies all dressed and ready in our saddles, about to burst through the gates --- Fear Factor: which one of us will survive? And, who will get a book contract like two of our thesis advisor's students last year? "MTV, I wanna get MADE!"

Ugh. Reality Bites. A friend in the program is going through the break-down I experienced all last year, somewhat unfortunate timing, but fortunate in that there is ample opportunity for a truly creative project to emerge from that chaos...Amazing how the pressure of the institution can take away from the pleasure of the pain. Picture your subjectivity prior to graduate school as Pangea...your plates start to shift with every digested text, every alcohol-infused intellectual debate, every lonely night spent with one hand on your book and one hand on your text...At the end of it all, the breaking apart of prior perspective not only is an alllusion to the philosophical debate of knowledge construction that is embedded in theories of "postmodern subjectivity" as a state of mind, but it also mirrors Heidegger's notion of developing a New World Picture --- From Pangea we get this disconnected sense of self -- at times you feel more in a state of continental drift than others --- but, don't forget the water, the water binds it all, making a comfortable bath to lie in, hands with which to play with the arrangement of the parts.

I am embracing the pleasure of this moment. My plates are shifted, shifting, fighting for space, breaking mountains into plains and melting ice caps to leak liquid onto new ground, new territory that feels new just because of the rearrangment of the old (never forget your roots).

And in such rambling we hope an order emerges from the chaos (i'll spare the chaos theory quotation here and give the one that started this post):

"Intersubjectivity occurs at the moment of orgasm, when things break down." - Chris Kraus

Writing a thesis is a wave of cresting pleasures, and to reach such pleasure, you have to put in some time, some work, some energy. A thesis is a photograph capturing a moment of intersubjectivity, connections between the parts, your "world picture" perspective at that moment in the development of your own intellectual history. Damn it feels good...

let us pretend

that this is over
final words are exactly that
- final

sex and skin are licked
once more and then
- not again

a light turns off in time to catch a shoulder
exiting the door

the hollow night
mirrors the moon into rings
that stain memory, through glass eyes,
rings that stay just long enough
at the bottom
to stain a cup
with the leaves
and water
that same shoulder
once helped
to pour

So my roommate and I just watched and listened to this guy give a prayer during the inauguration...

And we lowered the volume on the TV as I read aloud from Warhol's The Philosophy of Andy Warhol: From A to B and Back Again:

"What's great about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you can know that the President drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and just think, you can drink Coke, too. A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good. Liz Taylor knows it, the President knows it, the bum knows it, and you know it."

...And as we watch the rest of the TV programming showing the opulance with which the occasion of the moment will be celebrated, let us remember that...

"...sometimes you fantasize that people who are really up-there and rich and living it up have something you don't have, that their things much be better than your things because they have more money than you. But they drink the same Cokes and eat the same hot dogs...and see the same TV shows and the same movies. Rich people can't see a sillier version of Truth or Consequences, or a scarier version of The Exorcist. You can get just as revolted as they can - you can have the same nightmares. All of this is really American. The idea of America is so wonderful because the more equal something is, the more American it is."

---
I am Virilio's "body terminal of man...that interactive being who is both transmitter and receiver..."

cold boredom, and art can be boring sometimes

wearing you like the
comforting arms of
retreat
step indoors
smuggle yourself into
the blue night
the black darkness
the pink empty
of the space between
one fold of fabric
and another

wrap up within the layers
of little upon little upon little
snowflakes
eyelashes
cold cuts onto the tongue
your second finger

touch glass and ice
and forget the difference

open up alone
accept inevitable blending into silence
for white upon white upon white
is as warm as warmth you will ever know

cover blankets with more blankets
because you can, lucky.

let arms be the destination
of final retreat
indoors
alone
together

the right and the left
folded

like a skipping record...

a scratched cd, the player winding and winding around trying to pick up someplace to start, but caught in its own strange loop...

listening to cat power's american flag...her voice makes you hold on, thinking it's about to spill over, the moment before the meniscus breaks, the moment in Keats captures in Ode to a Grecian Urn -- you expect her voice to go somewhere else, but instead it keeps you in that same moment...then you begin to enter into disbelief -- perhaps we aren't supposed to go somewhere else at all. maybe right now is all there is and that is that and so enjoy the looping moment, active suspension...

her voice in this song is exactly what the Philip Glass score used in Rondinone's Roundelay video installation does...keeps you moving in circles, starting and stopping without points to distinguish one act from another...extremely effective in Rondinone's video, and equally meaningful to the illustration of Cat Power's lyrics...

just realized

my last three posts had Sin in them...No Comment.

for the indecisive, or perhaps the Honest

I just got back from a get-your-shoes-on-we're-takin'-a-drive spontaneous trip to pittsburgh. never been before. two weeks ago i thought i should move there. no comment now. jury is out and not due to return for quite sometime.

Saw the Warhol Museum (finally). Out of the fate of my fingers, the first binder (describing the contents of one of his time capsules) that I picked up, opened directly to a page that listed one of the contents as a letter from Alice Denney inviting Warhol to participate in her NOW festival. Pretty damn amazing that it was literally the first thing I read on the page too (a weird weird dc energy must be encapsulating my aura making dc type things attract to my skin -- maybe like when people have dogs that look like they do, or couples start to look like each other...maybe i've just been in dc too long...). Anyway...A few months ago, Alice gave a talk and slideshow presentation about NOW at the WDC Arts Club (moderated by Jean Cohen), which was the first I had heard about the event. Hearing about NOW, and the collaboration of Alice with Warhol, Rauschenberg, and other artists brought to DC for the week-long festival, made me salivate for a similar energy and ambition to sweep through DC and make a "new now" happen...and i'll leave that with an additional ellipsis...

Saw most of the 2004-5 Carnegie International...still wandering around in my eyes and ears is Ugo Rondinone's video installation, "Roundelay." And that's all i'll say about art for now...


Because.

The real thing that i can't get over right now is this hilarious invention called The Pittsburgh. It's a salad that wants to love you more that you want to let it. It's a typical salad with chicken or steak, and...French Fries, with cheese. It's for the indecisive - the want-to-be-healthy-but-still-craving-grease-and-salt-type. It's for the person who wants to feel good about choosing a salad for their meal, but since we know they will inevitably steal fries from their neighbor's plate, the kitchen sidesteps the ill will causing scenerio by including fries on the salad. Crazy. Smart. Tasty. Perhaps the embodiment of the entire spectrum of the American palatte -- health conscious, but inevitably subject to the failings of our own systems of restraint (oh our protestant roots shake at this). Mmmm...The rewarding taste of Honest Sin.

Now is the winter of our discontent...

January 20th will be a busy, busy day. Besides the swearing in of gw, two other events of interest are the following:

1 - at Fusebox, 7pm - Francois Bucher's Television (an address) live video feed from Bogota with the Former President of Columbia. (too bad there is no online feed as well.

2 - at the Pacific Centre for Technology and Culture, their two session winter symposium, Politics in the Age of Empire, starting at 1pm PMT. Fortunately, for this one a live stream the day of the event is available -- http://www.pactac.net/stream.html

just when you thought strategic synchronicity was only a tool of marketing firms...

"I am in so far in blood, that sin will pluck on sin," (from Richard III).

sex lies and videotape

i watched sex, lies and videotape for the first time last night. what a trip! i wish i knew what the popular response to that film was back in its day.

i enjoyed it for its oh-so-quaint lens into the circa 1989 representation of people's relationship to video technology and its fetishized use in mediating the late 20th century notion of "the confession."

today's version (perhaps): http://www.dailyconfession.com. or, of course, the mtv-patented confessional booth in The Real World.


"Told to tell in detail what she had done she replied, 'I have already told you the truth.' Then she screamed and said 'Tell me what you want for I don't know what to say.' She was told to say what she had done, for she was tortured because she had not done so, and another turn of the cord was ordered. She cried 'Loosen me, Senores and tell me what I have to say: I do not know what I have done, O Lord, have mercy on me, a sinner!'" -- In Lea, Spanish Inquisition.

eh. i could get more into this stuff but i have to save it for an upcoming installation piece. besides. it's saturday. and there's nothing else to do.

like returning home from your brother's funeral and finding yourself clutching and smelling his forgotten dirty sock found under the bed by the dog...

...after you thought you already cleaned up all of the leftover details...

I came across a quote from Susan Sontag in a book yesterday...It seems so strange to read another's words when the memory of their death is so fresh in your mind...

the quote (from "notes on camp"):

"To snare a sensibility in words, especially one that is alive and powerful, one must be tentative and nimble. The form of jottings, rather than an essay (with its claim to a linear, consecutive argument), seemed more appropriate for getting down something of this particular fugitive sensibility."

--Well, this is a fitting quote to come across given previous discussions here on the portability of quotation, its link-like form (linking another's mind to the stretch of your own), and the re-re-presentation of it here in the blog (the form i chose for the very reason Sontag states).

Anyway. What I want to get at is how sad it feels to catch a recorded glimpse of a woman's articulation of the world, knowing that it is over. No more will be produced. Like playing the record of bands dead and long gone (IMAGINE), all you have left is the reverberation of their presence...all of a sudden quotations like this are cherished for another reason than before, with a weight of finality that we know is inevitable, but still tastes like cold metal instead of warm tongue.

(I've been living another's death through the eyes and words of my sister who recently lost her most intimate friend, and I feel as though I am pulled like a piece of trash along a riverbed to contemplate death again in a more visceral way, now in this season of its meta-metaphor.)

When Sontag died, I thought of Derrida's recent death. Then of Bourdieu. Then Said. And who is next? Baudrillard? Virilio?

It seems that all the great theory matriarchs and patriarchs are completing the end of their physical season. Will the kids born thirty years from now learn to employ their quotation? Or will it be the words of us sitting here right now that will matter more? I've struggled myself to come to a semi-resolution about the library-as-graveyard dilemma. Which do I prefer? Honor the dead? Wear their skin in the words of my text, marked off by little lines at the top and to the right and left of thought? Or, burn the memories and memoirs - claim no one can comment on the present without a working set of lungs - fill in their blanks? Neither matters as both make nice beds. Both make nice coffins. (what kind of sleep doesn't lie?)

and Virilio -- I hope my quotation doesn't invoke his death too...(read Open Sky, where this quote is from):

"One day the day will come when the day will not come."

Clearing Houses for Irrelevant Theories.
Washcloths for Weightless Words.
postmodern theory always Rests In Pieces.

armed with technology/wrapped up in arms of lovers dead. gone. killed.

"Again we have to ensure that the best of the human is not lost amidst the best of technology, corresponding exactly with the current positioning of Uranus (the mind/technology) in Pisces (the heart/emotion). A difficult juxtaposition, but one that we must get in balance and harmony." (from artnet)

worth considering, even if horoscopes aren't your thing.

and one more,

"The truest representation of the searching mind is just to 'follow the brush.'" (from Tanizaki's in praise of shadows)

The holidays always leave me feeling so...

Deflated, 2005
Kathryn Cornelius
T610 mobile phone digital photograph

this is what you think about when you go running in cemeteries at 8:14 in the morning

Lines For Winter

Tell yourself
as it gets cold and gray falls from the air
that you will go on
walking, hearing
the same tune no matter where
you find yourself --
inside the dome of dark
or under the cracking white
of the moon's gaze in a valley of snow.
Tonight as it gets cold
tell yourself
what you know which is nothing
but the tune your bones play
as you keep going. And you will be able
for once to lie down under the small fire
of winter stars.
And if it happens that you cannot
go on or turn back and you find yourself
where you will be at the end,
tell yourself
in that final flowing of cold through your limbs
that you love what you are.

Mark Strand

null

i want to stop all language
but you keep dishing out the words
nullify the past with
future tense

make your case

before i close mine.

back then

i bit your language
you fed my psychology
ate my biology



are we done yet?

slick exit

wet
like rain gets
loud in
that same quiet
thunder
the loud
that thunder
will get
will do
surrender
under that thunder
reverberate
berated
words
words
washed
by words washed
some
things are wet
(wet heat
is hot)
others leak
some must dry
from time to time
time to time to
time

there.
dropped.
dripped.
hung. dry.
dry.
dry.
dry.
drop.

prevent all watermarks.
lay down plastic first.

is it really so bad to not want to put a period at the end of any project?

is a work ever truly complete?

Saussure proposed that words have meaning only in their differential relation to other words; meaning is the result of a system of differences without any positive terms. Taking this further, Derrida asserted that the signified itself is also the product of differential relationships between signifiers -- meaning is produced through an endless chain of signifiers. From Derrida and other linguistic philosophers/poststructuralists, the relation between experience and language is no longer seen as the relation between the original and its vessel, mirror image, or copy.

Existence, including our individual experience, is comprised of a mosaic of "texts" ("text" for a lack of a better word; see Kristeva, Bakhtin). When we produce a text, like an artwork, its composition is a collection of our experiences, filtered by the producer's subjectivity in that temporal and spatial relation, and translated into some form. Foucault would shake his finger and say, 'not so fast...you can't say producer because there is no producer, no architect; everything has always already been said.' ----well, it's this very thinking that hip theory courses want you to get muddled up in. and i did. hence, the origins of this blog site.

And so...if all the world is a text that follows through me and i flow through it, channeling data like a T1 line packet-switching device (the network exists only if i exist), why must i adhere to the notion of a period? I don't like that sort of final punctuation. Transmission is never complete. Some might say it happens in death, but all you need to do is look at a graveyard, or the Mall, to know otherwise.

When Dr. Seuss died, he had produced and left behind a massive amount of "completed works" in various media. However, there was one drawing he never did complete; despite his prolific career, he kept ONE DOOR OPEN...And that, was a drawing of cat faces. He worked on the same large canvas drawing various sized cat faces whenever he needed a break from another project, or he just felt like it. Upon his death it was determined as his only unfinished work, despite what would appear to be a filled canvas, because he had remarked one time that he could always find another place to make another cat face. That is a beautifully succinct recognition of a fact of creation --- there is always room for another cat face. No work is ever truly complete. It continues on as its own chained link. I did a performance (Mythology Machine/Chain Value) about this idea this past spring where my grad school classmates and I literally deconstructed Barthes' Mythologies, tearing out and folding its pages, in an assembly line fashion to create a chain out of the work. Originally a comment on intellectual labor and artistic creation, I was reminded of this piece as I watched MTV at the gym and saw the new (? new to me) Eminem video, Just Lose It.

"Guess Who's Back? Back Again. Shady's Back. Tell a Friend." I LOVE that he starts this song with a self-sample from an earlier recorded song. In the video, Eminem samples a host of beloved (c'mon, admit it!) Mythological pop rock/pop culture icons, each with their own interesting taboo(tabloid/ed) sexual myth(?)ologies: Michael Jackson, Pee-Wee Herman, M.C. Hammer, Madonna, Christina Aguilera...The video and song lyrics are just full of prior texts for your pleasure-seeking intertextual deconstruction experience!

--->So, I just linked to myself here, when I said "prior text." I linked to some earlier work for a linguistics course, and now I must raise the following question/statement/hypothesis:

SELF-SAMPLING vs./and SELF-LINKING = a "new" and improved art form or a new narcissistic turn in creativity?

The narcissism I am referring to is the Kristeva-on-Freud version --- The lover is a narcissist with an object, but the narcissist is someone incapable of love because his object is metaphor, not reality. "The subject exists only inasmuch as it identifies with an ideal other who is the speaking other, the other insofar as he speaks," (Kristeva). All of the figures in Eminem's video (including himself) are metaphors for a narcissistic-based relationship to sexuality for construction of the individual's identity. This whole tangent is another lens for reading how undeniably connected our constructions are to other individuals, other nodes on the network of communication, and hence, enacting existence. Ideas are just a molecule for eliciting the act of exchange. It is the act itself that confirms identity and hence existence, and all of the other details that come with it -- "reality," "time," "fact," "event," "creative production," etc. The act, the very "Verb-ness" of it, begs a lack of closure, No Periods to Terminate its Verbness into a Past Event, a Closed Noun on a Timeline -- the Punctuation of Punctuated Equilibrium.

And--

From the self-link:

creativity::originality

The reliance of the artist on prior texts in the development of his own artistic practice/products/performances begs the following question: If every text has always already been said, is creativity a fiction? Johnstone [2002] instructs that "creativity has to be embedded in the familiar," and that texts which attempt to be the most boundary-bending still must comment on and derive from the more familiar in order to be effective.

Eminem uses humor and prior texts from pop culture, as well as his own works to question the social construction of sexuality and its mediation by communication technologies (print, tv, etc.).

Let me self-sample here, Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes style...("it must all be considered as if spoken by a character in a novel.")...

From the 4/04 performance, Theory Will Eat Itself: Notes on Postmodernity from A-Z:

Intertextuality
DJs sample without marking the quotation; no brackets or punctuation define the space of the sound, making it free to travel its invisible trajectory without Authorial riot. A reference to a prior text is not made for authoritative legitimation or the (re)creation of power relations through citation. Excerpts are embedded for simply the pleasure of intertextual experience, the vibe of the listener/reader.

It’s all been dubbed before. Creativity is in the manipulation of the sampled sounds, the reworking into new rhythms, laying down of rhymes over drum and bass that dubs no bass with my head(trip) man. I write beats as I type into the keys –pound and pulsate—fingers type with a clackety-clack finger nail tap tap tap, as they scratch another written record of thoughts captured, a composition escaped from the confines of its own history, laying down memories like dropping beats. A letter is a note ripped from vinyl – your pupils move left to right as you read the rhythm, dancing with the prose like a partner in in-step with your own feet.


Again, this is content from a previous performance involving a powerpoint presentation, computer spoken text (the text re/quoted here), and consuming a chocolate cake while drinking copious amounts of water.


AND NOW I'VE REALLY LEFT MYSELF OPEN...

Thanks to Blogger's "Save as Draft" function, I'm coming back to this post, days later, evidence to the anti-period method.

OR --- "Material which has been learned at an earlier stage and 'slept on,' is much more easily recalled. Some kind of REVERBERATION around neuronal circuits must be linking new material to old material, and committing new material to the long-term memory store," (from Solitude, by Anthony Storr).

Lawrence Lessig takes the idea of ideas that has been discussed here thus far into the realm of privatization and commodification via legislation that is impacting nearly all forms of cultural production today (it ain't just the music industry), in his book The Future of Ideas. Copyright is much more a Catch-22 issue today: there is a desire for the openness of the commons , yet a economic capital form is still desired/necessitated by most producers of creative works. If an idea flows through me and into another person in conversation, for example, who can really own that idea and in turn, use it as a raw material for their own production? Are quotations necessary? Should we check to see if there was a PERIOD involved in the idea? Does that "completedness" thwart its own copyrighted "protection" from derivative works?

I am tired of this question and game right now --- I tend to take the Open Source Initiative approach in relation to this, but as competition seems to filter into all areas of production these days (it ain't just the dot-coms - it's as much the dot-orgs too), there is tremendous pressure to reach some personal decision on this -- if you don't, get your own idea body guards. YIKES!

Let's just put it this way. The element of carbon, is the element of carbon no matter what body it resides in at any given temporal and spatial moment. Molecules of water are molecules of water -- we all experience the same weather, just in different parts of its spectrum.


Bottom line (literally): Punctuation is hegemony.
Are you a believer? Watch how what you ascribe to inscribes you ---

diapause

diapause \DYE-uh-pawz\ noun

: a period of physiologically enforced dormancy between periods of activity


Prior silence to this post was the result of being stunned --- my installation at Art-O-Matic was shut-down only 8 days into the show due to the building management's exertion of territorial force (they didn't like the water on the floor, despite its initial committee approval). oh well. Adios. Just hope they get their head on straight and give me back my money - and equipment (yeah, they've been holding that hostage since they literally boarded up the room). Soon.

Now entering...A new kind of silence.

This upcoming diapause will be due to my travel to Miami for Art Basel. Fun in the Sun. Sandwiches on and of Sand.


bye.

of the facts

an intense vision of the facts,
your demand seasoned with age

clarity ruled king
yet the noises you made communicated nothing
only the silent spaces between each
said it all
the melody of speech
dripped from your lips
as you held the coffee cup in your hand

parting ways
i tried to save your song
in my memory
i tried to save your song
in my mind
in my skin
within the chapped cracks

the record was written
in time for
the descent of winter

we all showed up
we all came over
dressed to the nines
dressed to kill
already dead
ready and waiting
for the drink
of your
last song

december 23, 2003

resurrecting an emailed poem, just because L. called the other day. i miss her, but cannot talk until the weekend when the minutes are "free." our interpersonal communication - data exchange - is marked with a commodity value like the food we eat, the clothes we buy, the cars we drive. information is the new hyperCapital, and this marketplace participant is frustrated that my production is ultimately restrained by my ability to consume ($$) my own value. more news (bitching) at eleven.

(from L.)

Used

The conspiracy's to make us thin.
Size threes are all the rage,
and skirts ballooning above
twinkling knees are every man-child's
preadolescent dream.
Tabla rasa. No slate's that clean--

We've earned the navels sunk in
grief when the last child emptied us
of their brief interior light.
Our muscles say
We have been used.

Have you ever tried silk sheets?
I did, persuaded by postnatal dread
and a Macy's clerk to bargain
for more zip.

We couldn't hang on, slipped to
the floor and by morning the quilts
had slid off, too. Enough of guilt--
It's hard work staying cool.

Written by Rita Dove

those days were much colder

biting, bitter, made for the thickest socks possible, layers and layers, the struggle of stuffing two sweaters under one jacket, needing a pair of gloves covered by mittens. winter starts before the cold gets to us here, down south. the north begins its exhalation of the past year much sooner, shaking off its leaves and tracing windows of ice out of the edges of river beds. the coldest, flatest rocks somehow become colder, more flat, with the change in temperature. all of a sudden the wind is no longer welcome, turned into an enemy that the chest and lungs fight harder against as its numbness is taken in by the nose, the reluctant mouth.

the winter is less welcome here. we are wimps with weak blood and a weaker countanence. change, even the seasons, seems so much more a challenge, something only to whine about, if you live further south.

i am tired of the retreating indoors. if it must be so, more incubation and less hibernation, please. turn off the heat. welcome the fire of numbness, pins and pains in the bare feet on the bare floor. lift open the window, lift open the sense of touch and feel the movement across the threshold, from liquid summer to solid winter. take its shape.

Counting down

to art-o-matic.

Saw a sign for a company today called "Think Play," slogan = "Everybody Plays." I have an issue with that name, mostly regarding the enforced relationship between two actions that, to me, have nothing to do with each other at all.

I was reminded of the piece for Art-o-Matic that a friend, Mark Stark, finished installing yesterday. Greg Minah and I ended up playing inside his installation in a way that would seem off from the piece itself...

A few notes to be filled in later (and I'll take a photo of the piece and get it up here):

movement
body v. brain
hegemony of thought
relegation of senses to informants, rather than processors
jail
dylan thomas

There would have been a time for such a word...To the last syllable of Recorded Time

the marbles that were coursing through her capillaries each had a name:

Regret
Frustration
Inadequacy
Brent
David
Hope
Marie
Blonde
Painting
Need
Alone
Tomorrow
Farm
My Past
His Past
Venom
Ocean

Trying to identify and recount them all, their measurement began to take command of her limbs. But then the finger tips opened up. Gravity did its thing. Marbles began to stream from her capillaries to her veins and then Out! Out! Brief Candle, Life's but a Walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage And then is Heard No More. It is a tale told by an idiot, Full of Sound and Fury, Signifying Nothing. They dropped to the ground, pinging it with the excitement of escape, singing as they scampered down the hill to their fate marked by the sewage drain. Meanwhile, the veins bled a little too, weeping at the loss, weeping for the release, crying with the freedom.

Oh, and did we mention what happened before to trigger all this? No matter, of course, but here's a quick instruction:

See that pile, that patchwork sack, lying on the concrete sidewalk over there? Yeah, the one next to the ionic capital, next to the ironic capital building (have you checked your compass today?). I could say more about this sack, but it is what it was: a pile of dirty rags, stuffed into a sack, slung upon the shoulders of a woman and carried around for an amount of time that goes without saying. Goes Without Saying. Nothing more to Say here. Nothing more to See here. Ciao bello.


---For my BFF on her FDF.

How To Collect the Works of

Will they dig through email servers
      hard drives
      abandoned floppy disks
      cookies and browser histories
to construct our relationship, communicate it
in words and metaphors and code
      that we use/d too

Will they weave the threads of words
      digitally produced
      digitally represented
to make a bracelet of friendship
two colors thick
      (that's one for me, and one for you, you know)
so they can put it in a case
on display,
a glass case
made to be more shiny
kept more clean
than we could ever
      clean ourselves
      keep ourselves
      display ourselves
      keep ourselves


Case Closed.
Files sealed.
Weapons withdrawn. For now.

Wait, I thought there wasn't Violence in this
No chance to talk of Struggle
and Power
and General Anger,
or, Your apathy

Weren't our emotions worked out
when we hit Reply
      Return
      Letter after letter after letter after letter
      Send

(wait for

      Reply.
)

It's Oh So Quiet.
      Now.

     digital dust has settled in
     and settled this
for us
for everyone
for all data collection agencies

The Work Order is Complete.

early morning stretching routines

before seven a.m.

the cat is awake
in the neighbor's window
the bird(s) is(are) awake
sounding alarms
(chirp! chirp! awake! awake!)

the leaves are awake
and dying
the wind helps them along, i guess
(there might be some secret suicide pact behind such things.)

the apple on the windowsill still smells
of waiting, waiting for the bannana,
or the pear,
to seduce it
from its own dance
of fermentation

shake dreams and early morning thoughts
from the branches and boughs
of bending trees
(they too, are dying. and they know it.)

forget.
forgive.

some things just know how to let it go
before seven a.m.

An extra hour of waking time

equals an extra measure of words, letting the sugar piled too high stay on the tablespoon and scatter over the bowl of cornflakes.

I've been testing the waters, measuring the time between syllables, getting my installation/performance ready for art-o-matic...I am not going to waste any space constructing an argument for or against the art show everyone loves to hate...I am participating simply because they are letting me do what I want to do and I have a space that is all mine.
-- good enough for me to go ahead --

a few short thoughts (from the drawing board):

1. A staging area for sex is trapped under the bed of my skin, your skin
2. Speed believes no truth except the shortness of stride and the shortness of breath
3. A lack of color produces more light, less vision, tastes great
4. Can you produce more than exhaustion? Does heat become the enemy of comfort in the cold of a room that remains to be full?
5. Volumes reside in white tides of blankness. stillness.
6. HOW TO read a person like a book, by the book. Chapter 2 - Shifting While Leaning Forward Means Feigned Interest.

a bland white space envelopes while the noise closes in color saturated with the promise of progress flavored by NEW! commerce

here, in this oh-so-hopeful new space, i think of the people i am closed off from by the geography of space, time, and the chalk-tasting architecture of this building that chokes more than it creates

..//..

what bites into my tongue is the sliver of a thought that a movie scene could begin with an absence of color, a remoteness of place, and lastly, the loss of a breath breathed too shortly into my ear, just behind the ear, right where the hair starts and the skin disappears...

In response to September 16.

For a number of years I have kept this piece of paper with me, tucked in between the pages of various books and other places (I think -- I can't remember where else it might have lived, though it feels as if it was in a box at somepoint, and not just the pages of a notebook...). I found it again in my art project book earlier today, and I knew I had put it in there to remind me of something, but I can't recall what that was. All I could do with it this time around was read it, then type the words out into world with my last blog post, thinking I needed to crawl inside them to recognize their life.

The page is a standard 8x11 laser print-out, courier font, point twelve. I had folded it in half, half the other way, then half the first way again. It has four main creases that were defined more strongly by squeezing the folds with nails, not just fingertips. At some point in its history, the bottom left corner of the paper was folded in and back, adding a triangle to the topography of the page. The title, September 16, is in bold and finished by a period. There is a slight tear an inch to the right of the period, just hitting the top of "resilient" in the first sentence of text.

Whose text is this, I cannot be sure. When I found it again, before putting it in its current archive, I thought it was mine and read the words as if speaking the name of my child over and over again to a kid on the playground -- no response, no matter the persistance and repetition. And with a deep wave of disappointment over the empty pit of discovery, I remember I never gave such birth: This text is not mine.

Again, whose text is this? Who belongs to these lines, the metaphors? The adjectives? The nouns? For a short while when struggling to identify with it as if it was mine, I would say yes, this line makes sense, I could have thought this on a wet wet gray morning (this had to have been first written on a wet wet gray morning -- an Ithaca morning, a wet tree trunk morning, like suddenly stepping your sock-wearing feet into the puddle made by the shower). But the stiff-necked drama of words like "Victorian daggers," "One" and "beautiful" are not my voice at all, especially these references to age -- teenagers, children, "mess of a life." (I don't like such overt references to time.) Such perspectives on time had to be written by someone more my elder, or, someone who is young but creates their identity and life around the notion that they are so tragic their ability to write from a perspective much more experienced is merited through such naive melancholy. Besides, this text seems too worked, too revised. Over worked, over produced. It is easy to tell that it was born with an audience in mind, not just directed to the self, or the individual inhabited by the "you," by the "our."

I like parts of the text. I don't like a lot of things about it. I am glad it is not mine, but I added to the end of the last line. Can you tell? Which part is me? The difference between one person and the next is certainly more than fingerprints and hairlines --- Vocabulary, and the candor of its employment, are just as defining.

We all have our favorite nouns, verbs, expressions, metaphors, ... all these discursive allusions to experience we live and share with others to make life feel more real...

Typing the words out this morning, knowing they were not mine...it is an act not unlike the experience of wearing a friend's clothes or the pleasure of using your roommate's shampoo. Trying them on, something new without the commitment of actual change ... imagining another life ... when my roommate waits on people, he invents stories about their life, imagining the house they live in, the friends they have, if they are funny and witty or not ... i mostly wonder about what they are like in bed, what their sex style is ... are they frigid and timid? lights off only? is it jackhammer sex? who is a talker? a moaner? an Oh God or Fuck Me person? i have a theory about reading an individual's sexual style by the way they treat their paper napkin when eating, but that is for another time...

What was it about the folds of the paper I kept returning to? They mark out the history of the page, and more importantly, how many times this stranger's words were read by me, another stranger (the original writer doesn't know I exist). I think this page came from Ithaca, from college. Working in the computer lab in undergrad gave me the opportunity to be a written word spy...Like trying to see what the title of a book someone is reading on the metro, or listening in to the faintly audible noise from someone's white iPod headphones. Curiousity: What does this person think about? How do they use their words? Would I expect that sentence from her if I just saw her in the hallway? What does the subject in that paragraph really mean to him and would he come back to that idea again? What is in her Works Cited?

I believe I first found this lost text from a pile of left-over print-outs never picked up at the lab desk. I surely had it that long, (the folds are so many and so deep). The intrigue of its origin must be why it has survived so many moves to different towns, different apartments. It just keeps resurfacing.

When will it disappear again?
Where will it go?

September 16.

Only the resilient milkweeds are left standing in the garden; cocoons hang from their leaves like forgotten ornaments. A few shards of terra cotta punctuate the uniformity of the dried soil. The rosebushes have shriveled. There is no trace of the beautiful hibiscus that we planted. Sawgrass and dollar weeds have overrun everything. They're as stubborn as the birds that continue to visit the ruins of our backyard and die there. I found three carcasses, almost bones, impaled by homemade stakes, probably carved with Victorian daggers. (Wouldn't that be our tool of choice?) Doubtless, the work of teenagers as unruly and gloomy and sadistic as we were. A garden of dead birds -- how excited you would have been at the sight of this. Of course, in some sense, these ruins, the intrigue of homespun murder perfuming them, are perfect. They explain what has become of us. Surrendering the garden to merciless elements, we've tended its disintegration the way we have tended our own -- with beautiful abandon. There is something in these ruins that speaks about us, and to us, in a way that the repulsive periwinkle of roses and sickening lavender of orchids never could. We were always children of overgrowth, of sloppy excess. Disorder breathes life -- and its opposite -- into us.

One would have to know that there once was a garden behind our house to find it. So little is left of it. One finds it the way I find you: in small bits, in cryptic transmissions. Some things are obvious, naturally, but others may be just a little interference in the background that one has to zero in on. It's not that I can't picture you running through this house, or sitting in the garden, or locked up in your room (you were always locked up in your room). It's just that there has to be more than that distance between us, that blankness that separates us like morning fog. A distance that is not so much between us as it is us. I take you in slowly, in tiny bits and try to put you together. But you exceed the meager version that I come up with. You're like the sawgrass and dollar weeds that spead over every border they reach, swallowing up more and more space. At least, there is some consolation in knowing that what is responsible for this mess of life is a forced simple logic and a broken imagination that can't get their hands around a circle that isn't closed.

Well, i felt something should be here now

given all of the thinking i've been doing ---

here's something composed during the last 139 seconds (that's two more than you, Rod):

Can we stop fussing about with all of these names?

Let me use lead
As a litmus test
For all other tastes
Fall to the left of sweet and the
Right of sour

If the taste cuts like the blade
Of a sharp piece of green grass
sliced through the tongue
Then it is pure
It can be called Real.
Not a drawing.
No canvas.
Pixel-less.
Blank. Beautiful. Sharp. Green.

the eyes didn't listen to the ears

so we are still up contemplating sound.

i'm listening to live sound - a breath drawing in the chemical of a cigarette, the slow tap tap tap and tap tap and tap again of the drum stick on a cymbal.

a few weeks ago i busted out some mime moves at a party. i've never done it before, nor do i recall ever seeing a mime on anything but the tv --- i think it was on Reading Rainbow, or maybe there's just that scene in Singles...

could the voice die in its over-production, its hyper-presentation? is the mime obsolute in this culture of communication? do people who witness miming as a performative artform have a base experience of silence to draw upon in creating their response? i ask this as a couple next to me passionately exchange what looks like a debate from the tone of their body language -- they are speaking in sign language.

hands touch more language than the tongue can produce, than the lick of the pen or keyboard could ever recall. muscles have memory beyond the fiber of ink, beyond the flesh-less press of key to board.

biting your lip means you just might get it. if it bleeds, then turn the hand on yourself.

"reach out and touch someone." bye bye baby bells.

How many head trips does it take

to get to the center of nothing to say at all?

At yoga our instructor said to pick the quietest layer of silence and hear what is below that. In class tonight my professor argued that the changing of the senses over time happens, but seemed to lean more towards a somatic source for this observation...

I believe the senses do change over the course of history, but that their evolution is rooted in what sits on either dish of the scale they balance/mediate - body external (social) v. body internal (material). I see this evolution as tightly related to the cultural implications of changing technology (its impact on the auditory landscape, social impact of visual construction in communication ---). It's not just that we have cell phone ring tones that our body jumps in response to, as opposed to snapping tree branches (for example), but it is the importance placed on the relationship of this technology to our behavior patterns for communication that actually generates a shift in sound importance for the auditory sense.

i would say more but my ears sense that it is time to sleep the taste of the day away away away

easy drive-bys,

incomplete picture pieces, shifting value scales, chapters closed before read aloud, vitamin after vitamin after vitamin


Pattern Recognition, 2004
Kathryn Cornelius
T610 mobile phone digital photograph

so i'm getting tired of this planning thing

...talked to my professor about circles and lines the other day...for a while now, and especially lately, i've become more convinced that the way to stop the line is to spontaneously begin a new trajectory that does not map nicely onto any sort of patterned predictability. like when you're driving and your cell phone service cuts out because you enter, briefly, a space that is not perfectly networked --- you've really stumbled onto/into something; it changes your pace. don't be angry your call dropped. that's an opportunity if you want it. what will you do with it? i could talk on and on about frames of context, shifted footing, everyday performances and the argument of performance versus behavior, but i'm late.

disconnection is a beautiful thing. yes, i said beautiful.

okay okay

there's a profile now

who knew

an acquaintance met in san fran last may recently informed me that there are two "kathryn cornelius" bloggers on blogsite. this news comes to me like the realization that i am wearing my underware inside out -- unexpected, but not changing much. / as if living with a catherine all last year didn't confuse enough people. / and the other strange thing is that apparently the other one avidly proclaims her love of christ on her blogger profile (note the abscence of my own profile.). i guess in leiu of a virtual sleeve...

so this is how it feels to be eminem. classic. oh the simulacra.

comment this

thanks to captain pickles for noticing...comments are back --- feed it.

template my life

apparently i thought it necessary to change the design of this site; though i've slightly customized the content, i'm having "template remorse."

just the idea of mapping another's design onto the body of my text is stuffing my legs into the arms of a shrunken sweater - blah.

A new image...

from the CIRCLES project


Hand in Hand in Mirror, 2004
Kathryn Cornelius
T610 mobile phone digital photograph

a few fragments from 'Fragments'

thinking about these as I collect the bits of paper from books I need to return...

"So far as intellectual 'work' is concerned, I have no idea about that any longer. What I have left is a total receptiveness in the void, where nothing is to be expected except from universal gravity."

"Another promise of fragments is that they alone will survive the catastrophe, the destruction of meaning and language, like the flies in the plane crash which are the only survivors because they are ultra-light...the lightest items sink most slowly into the abyss. IT is these one must hang on to."

--from Baudrillard's "Fragments: Cool Memories III, 1990-1995."

It's been a while...

...but I have a good excuse. Just finished a new blogsite last week to wrap up my summer course, Theories of Virtuality with Matthew Tinkcom (by far the best CCT has to offer).

Check it out: http://circlesandlines.blogspot.com

Can’t my letters be like paint?

...My sentences slope like streaks laid across the canvas? If the best gesture of my brain is my keyboard’s flutter which says “this is our/are for each other,” than can I laugh, lean back, for painting is not a paragraph and art I think is no parenthesis.

Adaptation from e.e.cummings (since feeling is first). cummings = a literary Jackson Pollack (?) -- perhaps, if Pollack must be a symbol for artistic gesture executed with orgasmic drunken abandonment (of course with a touch less self-intimate), dripping words with careless precision.

I want to eat another’s paint, soak up words with my hungry canvas stretched much too thin. Satisfy me. Someone.

L. where are you? The biggest We of I misses you!

From the Long Sad Party
Mark Strand

------------------------------------------------------------------------

Someone was saying
something about shadows covering the field, about
how things pass, how one sleeps towards morning
and the morning goes.

Someone was saying
how the wind dies down but comes back,
how shells are the coffins of wind
but the weather continues.

It was a long night
and someone said something about the moon shedding its
white
on the cold field, that there was nothing ahead
but more of the same.

Someone mentioned
a city she had been in before the war, a room with two
candles
against a wall, someone dancing, someone watching.
We begin to believe

the night would not end.
Someone was saying the music was over and no one had
noticed.
Then someone said something about the planets, about the
stars,
how small they were, how far away.

It seemed to write me about it...

Revisiting Directions

Absence is the record of a presence not yet spoken
An extension of the hand not reflected

Restraint is an understatement when addressed in too many circles
An empty face is a pile of features upon features
touching touching touching touching

How to inhabit your space without admitting the touch of others

How to guide a moment into meaning beyond The already known, The could already be forgotten,
The discarded skin of fruit sliced
too ripe
too soon

a photograph
a peel

Green is the loneliest color you'll ever know

from the MS Word dictionary, a partnership with the Merriam Webster company:

Unripe or not mature
Newly cut and still unseasoned
Not yet tanned
Not yet fired
Envious or jealous
Pale and sickly-looking, especially as a result of nausea
Naïve and lacking in experience, especially because of being new to something
Young, new, recent, or fresh

-->end quote re: definition of green<<

-----------------
Crisp white linens tucked into four corners of the bed
a glass of water on the stand, half-full
for now
before the empty sets in

these are days worth waking into
fighting heavy fingers that urge
the body back to
rest in peace

the sheets are the receipt for this transaction
an uneven, single exchange

The sea I suck in deeply, extending the fingers as oars to type waves into the words

...are splashes upon splashes of papers sticking themselves up out of books, posted driftwood -- "hey, save me first, anchor these words!" attention drawn by the highlights, maximized minimum space (black text on white) of 15-20 pages >> nevermind; due three weeks ago...

The form of the index card - constraint? release? retention? reminder?

How do we know what is important?

If it makes its way off the page, through the eyes, to the brain, signaling the hand

1. reach for pen
2. reach for paper
3. write the black ink configured as you see it,
4. record the moment of reading
5. to translate it - later - into a era of knowledge

then it is given a portable reference/record. One that can be owned, traveled with, accessed again upon whim, no need for a library check-out.

With all the information that is possible, how do we know what is important to know?

We mark its importance through its recording, picking the object closest to us for the translation:

The index card

A believer himself in the index card, Barthes (in Roland Barthes) remarked on the action of using it as a tool to record data:

"Still warm, nothing is yet to be determined of its quality: stupid? dangerous? insignificant? worth keeping? to be thrown away? to be focused? to be protected?"

you know you're On the Right Track (???)

...When your citation list for your graduate school paper includes at least 4-5 of the personalities depicted on the Theory Trading Cards. (so jealous these guys came up with this first!)

Question: Why is Tracey Emin on a card in the same deck as Goffman, Foucault, Benjamin, and Said? Was one of the creators of the Theory Trading Cards included in her tent installation, Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963-1995? I guess since it perished in flames a few weeks ago, we'll never know. (Maybe Gilbert and George know yet another something we don't...??!)

"Hell" consummed by fire

...And other British artworks, including Tracey Emin's tent piece...

BBC News

>>no comment right now, i'm too choked up, i think<<

To add to the notes in the last paragraph from yesterday's post...

I just got to some of the reading picked up while in San Fran...

Alison Bing has a great article entitled, "If You Can Read This You're Too Close: Art and Personal Space," in the Fall/Winter 2003 Camerawork Journal that closes with some remarks relevant to the suggestion I was touching upon in the last post. Bing writes,

"Should our thoughts always be clean and uncluttered? ...While comfort zones may be nice places to visit, you wouldn't necessarily want to live there."

The idea of a comfort zone in relation to clutter is exactly what I was thinking about with the construction of identity representations as produced and maintained by discourse with others...It is not as if we need to, or should spend an overabundance of time, in a state of minimal communication or passive viewing/experience. The idea of travel as a means to "unclutter" the chatter of conversation with others (and in one's own head; the sound of cicadas right now comes to mind) can be a welcome respite, but eventually you have to tune-in again, folding away the blanketing comfort of a singular voice - your own - for the mediating "reality" of the discourse that is inevitably social.

Excerpt from an email conversation...What is this beauty thing? What is clarity?

a friend and I have recently been on travel, separately getting out of DC for some time...some of this time has been good, while some has been peppered by life back home - the pressures, obligations, and other "realities" that creep into the daily representations of this "living" thing...

---to quote from the email---

that is why life is so beautiful
what is beautiful are the high tree branches i see from the fifth floor of the library where i write to you now. they are framed by a corner window and evenly sliced by dusty brown venetian blinds. their moment of movement made by the wind is the single confirmation that i am not looking at a thomas demand photograph, a construction fabricated by my own desire (desire, which is always born from absence) to see the beautiful of a life that lives less than its metaphors.

true:
it unfolds itself before our eyes
and then the lids close.
and then the beauty stops, no longer held by the command of vision.

this time away has been good for the clear picture forming faculties of my brain
a picture, i hope, that is less informed by situational context, and one more motivated by the body and its detachable mind.

it's not always easy to figure shit out when youre mired in it
it's beautiful here
wish i could see the "it" with your eyes.

i dont want to come back
don't come back here, but don't stay there. plot your next move while the nostalgia of the familiar is sweet -- before tasting it too much turns it sour with redundancy and routine.

it's so clear here
so simple
it is the desert that erases experience with its expansiveness; the blankness of the desert doesn't ask to be filled in - response is not a demand.

Perhaps one of the reasons that clarity can be derived from travel is not just from the experience of a new place (or, the revisiting of a familiar one that elicits the effect of the new due to the difference of subjectivity experienced in the current moment, as informed by the individual’s spatial displacement), but because for that period of time, your social life ceases to exist as it was before you left. People leave the office, turn on their email assistant, telling the world "I am out of the office now and cannot respond to your message." What a great thing in this hyper-connected world to deny the possibility of communication with at least some of the individuals you are routinely required to engage in conversation. Granted, the cell phone presents an issue to this – many people still travel with them – but often the out-of-range call is so expensive to make that if cell phones are used on vacation, they are for very short, small-scale interactions. Perhaps it is the closing of communication obligations that truly delivers the clarity that can be derived from travel, not actually the physical distance (as we routinely credit; "the distance was good for me," "distance makes the heart grow fonder," etc.).

It seems that discourse with others is like taking a photograph – it creates, preserves, and (re)presents a version of reality (a picture of your life in that moment of time) that is not just that of the individual’s own framing, but is influenced by the context – the others’ discourse. This enters into the realm of representation and reality...Maybe what we need is a moment to ignore the other discourses that correspond to a certain reality...Like in most films (the more Realist, less-Brechtian types), for instance, the viewer is positioned in such as way as to ignore the production aspect of film-making and slip into a state of passive viewing...As Colin MacCabe argues, viewers can no longer "ignore the process of articulation by entering a world of correspondence in which the only activity required is to match one discourse against the realm of truth." If we ignore the production aspect of our socially-constructed reality for just a few days or weeks or however long our vacation is, we can blissfully derive the pleasure of passive viewing which perhaps may clear the clutter enough to gain perspective and furnish clarity on the movies lived in our minds.

this little blogger went out of town...

...while this little blogger should be staying at home, getting work done, blogging more frequently, etc. etc.

If time, i'll post from San Fran. I hope to stop at a few shows, including SF Camerawork for Pop_Remix, with Cory Arcangel (he has some stuff up that was not at the Whitney Biennial or Armory Show).

/off ->

What Is and What Should Never Be...

A friend from class told me of a conference paper she recently heard. For over a year, a graduate student analyzed one week – seven consecutive days – of footage from CNN. Her research lead her to the observation that some very interesting conceptualizations of time and its framing are embedded within the programming of the 24 hour news station. Apparently between 3:00am and 3:15am EST, CNN stops reporting the previous day's news, and begins advertising the news "that's going to happen" later on in the day (after 3:15am). This fifteen-minute interval is a sort of dead zone, the conceptual equivalent of hole in the fabric of time; nothing happens here – the past is wiped away from the slate and the future is fabricated by its framing in the present.

What CNN is up to with its programming - not just with the news but concepts of time - is illuminated by Jean Baudrillard's discussion of time and history in The Illusion of the End. As he states, "the end is, in fact, only conceivable in a logical order of causality and continuity." CNN's programming certainly does follow a linear progression, though Baudrillard's next observation really lifts the skirt on what is at stake here with this seemingly innocent news programming technique, "Now, it is events themselves which, by their artificial production, their programmed occurrence or the anticipation of their effects – not to mention their transfiguration in the media – are suppressing the cause-effect relation and hence all historical continuity."

The relationship of time to the delivery of CNN's content is a painstakingly mutually invested operation. Time must be configured in its current fashion so that the systems of meaning-making and authoritative truth delivery, that upon which news is constructed and delivered, are successful in their persuasion of audiences. From a visual language-based perspective, the news is similar to advertising in the modality it necessarily assumes and asserts in the delivery of its message. Developed by Kress and van Leeuwen, modality:

"...does not express absolute truths or falsehoods; it produces shared truths, aligning readers or listeners with some statements and distancing them from others. It serves to create an imaginary 'we.' It says, as it were, these are the things 'we' consider true, and these are the things 'we' distance ourselves from."

Thus, it is the cultural understanding of these institutions of influence (news, advertising, etc.) that "do their work" by coercion and strategic positioning of their content within the cultural context of the intended audience. Some examples of linguistic modals include "might," "should," "would," and "could," all of which situate another's subjectivity within that space and time, forever influencing their history and illusion of its end.

…Like the geosemiotics of street signs and billboard that insert their advertising messages into the context of the morning commute, the agenda and schedule of another can powerfully influence our own reading of the day, our own framing of time, its end, and our place within it...

>>> A response to this: visit the intersection of the George Washington Memorial Parkway and Rt. 29 (Key Bridge, Rosslyn) to view this painting/installation completed on Friday May 7, 2004 at 3:00am <<<

"I can see why many visual artists dislike words in artworks. They feel that words dirty the clear water that has reflected the sky. It disturbs the pleasure of the silent image, the freedom from history, the beauty of nameless form. I want to name our pains. I want to keep our names. I know that neither images nor words can escape the drunknness and longing caused by the turning world. Words and images drink the same wine. There is no purity to protect." - Marlene Dumas.

Quotation is the act of marking another's utterance...

and directly implicating the experience of their work in your own personal history. Inevitably the material we consume - visually, through words, with ears, etc. - massages the individual's subjectivity into a slightly different shape [evolved] whereby the tracing of impact equates to modification of the preexisting form.

Is Foucault still right? Has everything always already been said? Has it all been done before? If our horizon of understanding is shaped by ideology, we can also say that any discursive material [here reading "text" to be any form capable of signification] inflicts a similar effect as Althusser’s ISAs [ideological state apparatuses] on the individual's own interpretive and productive activities. Does this lead to the conclusion that we are (to use culture studies' favorite celebrity prefix) "Post-Creativity," especially now that the always already has become a slogan for its own nihilistic message?

Barbara Johnstone in "Prior Texts, Prior Discourses," (from Discourse Analysis ) defined a prior text in relation to the accumulation of an individual’s experience. This concept is brought into relationship with intertexutality (which I believe can be read, in relation to knowledge construction, as a synonym for the products of individual’s creativity) by Johnstone and summarized as the following:

"Intertextuality refers to the ways in which all discourse draws on familiar formats and texts, previously-used styles and ways of acting, and familiar plots," [Johnstone 2002]. Prior texts, then, are those texts recognized from past experience that constitute intertextual relations within a focus text. (From my previous work here).

If prior texts invariably influence a person’s subjectivity over time, how conscious are the re-workings or re-surfacing of a prior text in a “new” creative work (an intertextual production)? I believe that the tracing of any prior text to its “source” text is extremely difficult (we tried a few exhausting exercises like this in my Linguistics Intertextuality course). In some cases, it may be damn near impossible, not to mention that again, the level of the individual’s conscious recognition of an experience with a prior text influences their identification of it.

So, who thought of Don Henley when that Atari song came out a few summers ago? "Boys of Summer" was a nearly direct remake of the eighties version. I thought it was kind of cute when they switched the original lyrics from “Saw a DEADHEAD sticker on a Cadillac” to “Saw a BLACK FLAG sticker…” Is this insertion an intertextual creative production? Is the Atari’s “version” actually a “new” text? Is it because the “original” Don Henley song still exists in too many people’s lived experience of it as a prior text that the Atari song could never in this lifetime be considered an “original” work?

Obviously cover songs are a bit more black and white to deal with given the label we’ve created for them. But, I do believe it brings up an interesting point in terms of creativity, artistic texts, and the general circulation of ideas. Lawrence Lessig has written extensively and argued in front of Congress for the public commons, including intellectual and creative works. As he notes in The Future of Ideas, “In a legal sense, the regulations within which the network lives are increasingly shifting power away from innovators and toward those who would stifle innovation.” The examples he cites in the text are scary and far too close to home as an artist and as a writer. I remind myself to take the free circulation of ideas in conversation lightly whenever read Lessig [who, I admit, can be a bit over-aggrandizing at times], or generally any other text on the latest on Internet standard developments, especially the open source movement:: some philosophy:: , or other practices [here re: content] that are rapidly structuring our key means of communication (i.e. circulation of ideas) today.

An appropriate circle with which to end this today nudges towards a reading of quotation’s hegemonic weight on creativity and individual character.

(quoted from Quotation Marks by Marjorie Garber):

“If, for the sake of a crowded audience you do wish to hold a lecture, your ambition is no laudable one, and at least avoid all citations from the poets, for to quote them argues feeble industry.” – Hippocrates, Precepts

One way to get over the rain, on a Monday, nonetheless

is to roam through another’s words, another’s sculptural configurations, another’s aural landscape projected through headphones into the heart center…beats and syllables can mix to form a new mood to pattern your day. These are just some ideas to get started with, raw material for the crude coldness that you must turn into productive ways. Good luck. Best wishes. With regards. See you soon. Talk to you later. How many other phrases can signal "farewell"? How can you step back from the plate you put in front of yourself?