So Far

 









(The Poets of Night and Charnel-house beg to be excused because they have just struck up an interesting conversation with a newly arisen Vampire, and this might lead to the development of a new genre of poetry)

 























That's Goethe for you.  I wish I would have seen Laurent Chetouane's "Tanzstück 2  Antonin Artaud liest den 2. Akt von Goethes Faust 2 und" (Dance piece 2 Antonin Artaud reads the second act of Goethes Faust 2 and) with Frank Willens in it.  I'm sure it would have made some more sense than just reading the beast.

But seriously, how sweet does that premise for a new genre of poetry sound?

As long as it doesn't look like this:

Or this:




I'm sure it would be amazing.  I've been wondering what it would be like since I read the section.  Does it even make any sense?  Maybe I just have to finish the play before this, or anything in the whole First Act, begins to make sense...

(on a side note, what was David Lynch thinking with 'On the Air'?  It's good to know even people you admire can make mistakes, horrible horrible mistakes...)

Appletreehand

Yesterday, Steffi & I decided to head to Eberswalde, the 'forest city.'

Although the ticket salesperson laughed at us (you could actually see her thinking 'why the hell would anyone go on an excursion to EBERSFUCKINGWALDE??!?!!?'), we had very good reasons, namely to see this:

& to scare away any stray bears:

& to grow trees out of our hands:

& to then eat their apples & plums (plums not depicted):

& then make a mess

It was a good time.

I have pretty mixed feelings about the library.  I neither like Warhol nor tattoos, so seeing a building tattooed in a Warholian fashion was not the most inspiring thing in the world (I found it interesting, however, that there was no graffiti on the entire building, as if a building that's tattooed is already 'cool' enough that no one else feels the need to leave their stamp as well).  However, some of the photos Thomas Ruff chose out of his archive are beautiful, and I appreciated the Ourobouros element of the first and last motives; hence:

Young women on a roof garten in Berlin in the 1920s

Stag beetles

Eduard Ender's "Alexander von Humboldt in South America with the botanist Aimé Bonplan"

Students in the international library at Atlantic College in Wales

Archway of the palace von Colle Ameno in Bologna with a landscape view

Horn 61 House in Weimar by Georg Muche 1923

Pieter Potter's "Vanitas"

People jumping out of the window on Bernauerstraße in Berlin 1961; split by

Reichstag on Reunification

Lorenzo Lotto's "Venus & Cupid"

Fathers and Sons looking at model trains

An airplane prototype CBY Loadmaster by Vincent Burnelli, made in 1955 as a transport for a northpole expidition

Young women on a roof garten in Berlin in the 1920s.

There's something very delicate about (some) of these photos & then (unfortunately) something too blatant about many of the others.  But I guess if you're going to look at a building as a billboard for ideas, there's something to say for clarity.

Besides, the flow from one image to the other is what matters & makes the building an interesting element in its not-so-urban landscape.  All & all, another fine building by my favorite architectual firm, Herzog & de Meuron.

parks & planes

 

Yesterday I went to Körnerpark, a small piece of la vie parisienne smack dab in the rough and tough streets of Neukölln.  I love this park, not only because it's so beautiful, but also because it feels so out of place.

Speaking of puzzle pieces that don't seem to fit, yesterday I rode along Columbiadamm, that imagination overloaded Temeplhof airport.

It's going to be very interesting to see the new chic direction it takes, but for now it's one of the strangest places in Berlin.  A cemetery, for instance, separates a mosque & baseball fields that are on the grounds of the airport.

Here's a portion of a poem, "Floss Bracelets," that's about Tempelhof.

This portion was first printed in the Exberliner:

Floss Bracelets (excerpt)

Our cortexes

Home to wild boars
overlap tasks
and foxes
share information but
the newly abandoned airport
can be divided
in the middle of the city
to exist separately,
may even become
though inevitably weakened
a mountain of our waste
 

What always fascinates me about Bruce Nauman is the calculated ambiguity of his language, the various ways we could interpret 'leave the land alone,' just by adding simple punctuation.  'leave the land - alone' would be one rather tragic example, and 'leave the land alone!' would be the militant green interpretation.

I wonder if Bolaño knew about this Bruce Nauman project when he wrote "Distant Star"

That's a photograph by Allen Frame, the man responsible for all the beautiful photos on the covers of the Bolaño New Direction titles, taken at the Dostoevsky museum.

I want to read this & this & go here.

I could say little with little, I could say less with more

Critical Optimism

To take off the hat, suspend the subscription

To keep on the mask when the carnival is over

To go somewhere, anywhere, there is no nowhere, no No-Place

To say ‘no’ with ‘yes’

To learn to love

Jacob Wren's more refined definition

Last night, I was thinking I would send the Critical Optimists a poem I wrote a couple of days ago called 'Again & Again & Again,' but I think they might accuse it of 'naive optimism' -i.e. falling in love with the little things in life- whereby the poem, I think, subtly suggests that such naivete is preffered by the 'editorial voices.'  There's something more at work there too, but I haven't quite figured it out.

There was the momentary desire to then make the poem be more critical, to make it do what I want to do but I think Jack Spicer is right in that the poet has to take him/herself out of the poem & say 'that's the poem's view, this is mine.'  But what, then, is the relationship between this & criticism of flarf?  How does this balance between awareness of subjectivity & pulling out of the poem work?

A day that begins with Scheisse, ends with a little Einverleibung

Didn't make it to Leipzig after all due to the theater in Leipzig's lack of hospitality.  It's absurd to think that they would expect their guest actors to leave their rooms at 9 AM the morning after a performance that doesn't end until 2:30 AM (and, since it's the last night, it will probably go longer).  I'm sure it's because of the huge demand on Gästewohnungen in Leipzig on Sunday nights.  Oh well, there will be other SIGNA performances in the future and it also means Steffi's coming home a day early.

whoop whoop

Instead of going to bed early to catch the train to Leipzig, I went out last night to the good ol' Ping Pong bar & watched Noah get his hot jazz groove on; man's got chops.

At the Ping Pong bar, I had some nice conversations with Danny and Sam about L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry & John Cage.  The subjective choice to deny subjective choice.  Futile?  Isn't this the core tenant of Conceptual Poetry & Flarf?  Not the futility but the escape?  Sam made the interesting point that one of the problems with Flarf is that they never really seem to 'sample' poetry.  There seems to be an anti-intellectual flair to Flarf then; which is then, you know, ironic & stuff since like most of these guys n gals are like getting paid by colleges n stuff...

One could alternatively understand such an intellectual-anti-intellectual strategy (one of the great banes of American society) as a tool in the toolbox, amongst others like rhyming.  This of course would be against their aesthetic & political intentions, but there doesn't seem anything really abject to me as long as there's a critical faculty involved & not merely out of fashion.

The problem suggested here seems to be one of Einverleibung.  Einverleibung is Nietzsche's word for assimilation, by which he means the action whereby an intellectual idea seeps into life. The problem is that even though we may know, intellectually, that Newtonian physics is whack, still in our daily lives this is how we operate, we still expect cliches to drop on us & they do.  Similarly, even though we know that subjectivity is not as simple as we make it out to be, still, in our daily lives, we are all a bunch of Is.  And so if you just act like we don't do this & that you refuse, you resist!, such in your work, then somehow you're already talking about a utopia, a NO-PLACE.

"Tomorrow it will snow or it will not snow says nothing about the weather"

A problematization of these two conflicting movements characterizes much of the work that I find interesting; people like George Oppen & Rae Armantrout would be two examples of people I admire in the field of poetry.  Both are hyper-aware of their critical faculties, but they still trust themselves to feel and to make themselves felt.

Tonight I witnessed another fine example of this fine balance.  Jacob Wren & Pieter De Buysser's piece "An Anthology of Optimism," wherein they sketch out & give examples (from other working artists, politicans and thinkers) of their concept 'critical optimism.'  This piece, aside from being totally amazing & well thought out, was daring & open & honest & fresh.  No conclusions were met, really, but they were suggesting small steps to combat the disease of blasé pessimism, & provided one themselves with the evening.  We could talk long & hard about the theatrical gestures it used but why bother?  Why explain how the magic trick works when you could (hopefully) just see it for yourself? I've seen two of Jacob's pieces, and I really appreciate his sensibility, & this piece especially, because of its willingness to try something new & honest.   I even liked it so much, I might just email them a poem that's related, somehow or other.

Another piece of joy was Arto Lindsay's Penny Parade.  There were a number of really nice musical moments & the whole thing was light & silly, even if they did try to add more serious intellectual levels, it didn't really seem to work & some of the members seemed aware of that (Jacob & Co. were meant to be having a discussion about symbolic capital vs. hard capital as the parade trucks made their way from the Humboldt university's main building to the Haus der Kulturen der Welt.  Funny thing is, they weren't ever in the mix, as far as I could tell, so their discourse itself was banished to mere symbolism) & it didn't really matter.  Of course, if you're going to apply for grants or be taken seriously, you need to have some orverarching concept, something for people to blog about but I wonder if this itself isn't responsible for much of the pessimism that's to be found in culture.  I wonder if people just said 'I wanted to make a dance piece where my i was rocking back & forth & grunting because I felt like that,' well, I wonder if I might be able to approach the work with fresher eyes.  Sometimes reading about all the 'discourse' infuriates me.  But back to the piece: there were some great moments, like watching a copper Lucha Libre masked Sam ramble on about lord only knows what, and then seeing Jonathan on the back of the work truck, looking like someone out of Die Hard. These guys were jamming too.

Intentions & rambling aside (& I know this is rambling, sorry, long day, tiredness winning), all that really matters to me is whether or not I can 'get inside' the piece or if some sort of feeling or energy is transferred - & today was a good day for that.  I think we're still dealing with Ptolemaic emotions and I believe that it's better to keep that in mind rather than to flat out deny it, hoping for the new man, because, let's face it, we're not him.  This is the sort of thing that destroyed Nietzsche.
Poor Nietzsche.
Poor, poor Nietzsche...

If you're in Berlin this weekend

Go see Daniel Jenatsch & Sam Forsythe & Jonathan Bepler in Arto Lindsay's Penny Parade

Instead I'll be here:

boomshakalaka!

Summer was Long

The first days of Fall.  Filled with George Oppen and Morton Feldman.  One wonders what a conversation / collaboration between the two of them would have been like.

Two days ago I saw Monaldo Braconi play movements from Luciano Chessa's "Quadri da una città fantasma" at BKA.  That venue is amazing.  It feels like you're in the middle of the 80's.  Variete seating, banana hefeweizen at the bar, black leather seats.  The piano is illuminated with a red light.  There are Venetian blinds on stage, primary color lit up, like reverse projection televisions.  There are even plastic glow-in-the-dark stars on the ceiling. 

The performance was quite nice.  Monaldo played a bit fast, but this, I think, is due to his Leidenschaft (and his never playing the piece before).  I also think he would benefit from playing it with the turntable movements so that he could gain a better perspective on the pacing and dimensions of the piece.

There were a couple of gems hidden in the rest of the repetoire as well.

Here's a video of Luciano and I performing a portion of "Quadri" way back in the day.

The whole thing (with/after the amazing "Louganis") can be heard here.

Here's a video of Luciano and Jonathan Bepler jamming.  Now that was a fun night.

Tomorrow it's "An Anthology of Optimism."  Then off to see Steffi &/in SIGNA's "Germania Song" in Leipzig.

Things to look forward to.

Shame on you

shame,  shame, shame

Why does everyone seem so angry today?

Is it because of all the wisdom Qaddafi was spitting out?

From the sounds of things, I know a couple of guys at a dive bar back

in the good ol' Califor-nay that'd be sure glad to have another buddy on board

Seriously though.  The only thing separating Qaddafi's speech and The Stag were a couple of ties and broken cue sticks.

Not that this is a politics blog, 'cause it ain't,' but, 'hell,' it sounds like 'one helluva' poetic diatribe.

Example: “You make your speech and then you disappear. That’s all you are right now.”

Check it out