On haste, on failure, on the missing word. On when, oh on when, does the mind become still and thoughtful and when do the stories get up and finish themselves? When did it happen that I ceased being a person who writes? How did the text somehow become the thing I knew how to do, and thus left to the last minute, the afterthought of some construction? Here I am, staking claims of sincerity, of direct expression, and somehow I have lost track of the act of simply standing before the room and delivering a text. The forms have overtaken their content, and my voice has been lost. A horse without a cart is without discipline, without a certain kind of use, but a cart when the horse is lost is simply a place to hide, to take refuge from the beasts of night. Somewhere along the way I went safe. You learn to hide behind two dozen small labors to avoid the heaviest load. I talk a lot of game, I talk game so well I never get pushed onto the court, I spin all my clever ideas around like cotton candy, bad for your teeth. A ceaseless monster of attention and tenuous connections, ever-forgetting, ever-cleansing out the past. My institutional memory is a tribute to collapse, and my list of finished tasks is like a barren field on its best days, broken shit glimmering and we can call these fragments things of use. I do not know what it is to take pride, because I do not know what it is to look back on something– the things disappear and I cannot remember them. Palimpsest, palimpsest, my laziness will be the death of me in memories all over town. Let’s take the chance to avoid the fear of failure for five seconds. The words go unwritten because if they are the wrong ones– if they are not only wrong, but carefully, thoughtfully chosen and still wrong, then I will be the last to forgive myself. Let all choices be made in haste, for I’d rather be lazy, scatterbrained, forgetful, than seen to be the long laborer of foolish works.
I must learn to forgive myself my failures before they are made, and let the foul taste of fear wrap itself around my tongue. Remember to revisit the lingering word.
I haven’t cried this very specific way since Spalding Gray’s death. It’s a particular pain when the iconic voices of your childhood go finally quiet, leaving only what’s been taken down, what’s been taken up in the hearts of the artists, the thinkers, the people that they influenced. Rest in peace, Roger Ebert.
Crush. (the dumb beast of desire is sometimes best held off)
Red lipstick, and your hair done coy, and a dress that shows the place between your shoulder blades that I am always wanting to touch and I think:
by god if we lived in a world without restraint you’d be up against the pinball machine, knocking bottles to the floor, cheap beer swilling on our shoes. I imagine every word as moaned around my fingers. You say something clever and I want to fuck you ‘til you sob. Up against the wall by your neck, in the front seat of your car, perched on the edge of my couch. Everyone else in this room will burst into flame. We eat slices of pizza, steaming hot, and I think about your cunt like a hunter. Fuck everyone, just get on top of me. Please, please, please forget the world and take off your clothes. I want to push all of me in. I want to fucking ruin you. I want to hold you after, your sweat streaking the floor of a hallway. Please. Please. Your lip in my teeth. I think I know exactly how your voice sounds. Come here. Come here. Come here.
what once was a part of Antonio Vivaldi’s Concerto No. 1 Op. 8 in E Major, “Spring”, the Ozawa & Silverstein recording, after some modifications by Sid Branca. probably not in E major any more.
Theatrical space as laboratory
Here are some words I wrote for school today:
Walter Benjamin’s 1936 “The Author as Producer” contains the following epigraph: “Il s’agit de gagner les intellectuels à la classe ouvrière, en leur faisant prendre conscience de l’identité de leurs démarches spirituelles et de leur condition de producteurs.”
The quote is from a 1936 open letter from Ramon Fernandez to André Gide that is in itself pretty interesting—you can find the letter in the original French at http://www.gidiana.net/articles/GideDetail1917.49.htm (it seems an English translation has been published but a cursory search isn’t showing it online). This bit, the line just after the one Benjamin quotes, is the most of interest to me:
“Tel est pour moi le point essentiel : l’intellectuel a besoin de la classe ouvrière pour se connaître lui-même complètement. Et comme l’ouvrier a besoin de l’intellectuel pour se penser lui-même, il existe entre l’un et l’autre un rigoureux rapport de réciprocité.”
“This for me is the essential point: the intellectual needs the working class to understand himself completely. And so too the worker needs the intellectual to think about himself; there exists an intensely reciprocal relationship between one and the other.”
While Benjamin’s reference to Fernandez (and indeed, the rest of the above letter) is very much caught up in global politics of the 1930s, this ties in nicely with the article’s later discussion of Brecht, and the idea of creative spaces as spaces for thoughtfulness, and as a two-way dialogue between “culture” and the world-as-lived.
Benjamin says of Brecht’s “epic theatre”: “It aims less at filling the public with emotion, even if it is that of revolt, than at making it consider thoughtfully, from a distance and over a period of time, the situations in which it lives.”
This latter is, perhaps obviously, an accurate if abstract description of how science operates. Thus the theatrical “laboratory.” (See Jerzy Grotowski for another iteration of the “theatre laboratory,” the Teatr Laboratorium.)
If the role of artistic and intellectual production is to encourage thoughtful examination of lived situations via a series of experiments, then as culture becomes a lived situation, so too must it be thoughtfully examined. The shifting of the apparatus, of the creative form, that Benjamin claims is essential in any truly revolutionary cultural output, then becomes necessary in order for creative forms to fulfill that role. The laboratory approach to art-making encourages experimentation with form, genre, and even the hierarchies of artistic production—see Billy Klüver’s description of the horizontal collaborative structure of the Pavilion project, and the manifesto of its press release. This kind of work makes an experimental proposal to its audience, rather than presenting them with a self-contained world of entertainment. From the Pavilion statement: “Eliminate the separation of the individual from technological change and expand and enrich technology to give the individual variety, pleasure and avenues for exploration and involvement in contemporary life.” Or to quote Benjamin, work that “is capable of making co-workers out of readers or spectators.”
This made me think (admittedly kind of tangentially) about the work of playwright Chuck Mee. Mee is the author of, among many other things, bobrauschenbergamerica, a play inspired by the work of Robert Rauschenberg, one of the artists involved in the Pavilion. His plays are textual collages, often working from a baseline of one extant text (a myth, a classic play, an artist’s work and biography), and remixing it with a variety of other sources. bobrauschenbergamerica, for example, was “developed in a workshop with Tali Gai, Jane Comfort, Kathleen Turco-Lyon, Rebecca Brown, Reba Herman, Alec Duffy, Jacki Goldhammer, and Carolyn Clark Smith and incorporates texts from them as well as from Robert Rauschenberg, Fred Becker, Philip Morrison, Walt Whitman, William S. Burroughs, John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Allen Ginsberg, and Laurie Williams.”
One of the things that fascinates me about Mee’s work is his restructuring of the format of “the play”—all of his works are available for download on his website, http://charlesmee.org, with the following caveat:
“Please feel free to take the plays from this website and use them freely as a resource for your own work […] pillage the plays as I have pillaged the structures and contents of the plays of Euripides and Brecht and stuff out of Soap Opera Digest and the evening news and the internet, and build your own, entirely new, piece—and then, please, put your own name to the work that results. But, if you would like to perform the plays essentially or substantially as I have composed them, they are protected by copyright in the versions you read here, and you need to clear performance rights.”
The plays themselves are often extremely open-ended, containing very few stage directions, or impossible stage directions, or are composed of several sections that can be rearranged in different sequences to different effect. There are ambiguous references to the use of media, to be interpreted differently by every production. They are built to be malleable, to turn readers into authors, into experimenters. This doesn’t always yield the best aesthetic results in every production (of which there are many, since you don’t have to pay for rights if you alter the play enough), but this work occupies a place in between authorship/copyright and collaboration/open source that I think is really, really exciting. Theater as laboratory is where it’s at, seriously.
writing exercises, jan 28, 2013
as soon as you have completed the assigned physical activity, write without stopping until told to find an ending place. avoid using the words “I” and “me”.
——
You think that you body is a stranger, that we are grappling for each other in a desert, that your mother gave you the gift of a body only to let the world take it from you— with the laughter of young women, the fear of small boys, the cradling passage of time in a small room with smaller windows. you wake up not knowing anything and your body protests against the day, and memory floods in like some great weight of brackish water. we come bearing debris, there are many kinds of weight and we have forgotten lightness.
——
There is a place that has been forgotten, is lying fallow, fallowing, wallowing, watering itself apart without company. The nest before a single bird is born. The echo of time perpetuating itself. The blood, singing sharp and loud and unheard. The veins of everyone here have not forgotten, but we are losing the code. Sleep with boughs above your door to keep the wicked out, do not learn the names of places inside your mouth, the secret workings of each tooth and its grinding like a saw mill. Let the hair fall where it may. Bury the bodies in simple earth while singing. Learn all the old songs, realize they were already familiar. Time continues to drip, on, on on.
——
“Don’t stop,” she said.
“But this is where we get off,” he said. “The stop. For the museum.”
“I know,” she said. “But I like the view from the train, when it’s high up and is just the right time of day. The glass on all the buildings does something lovely.”
“Alright,” he said. “We can just keep going until it loops back around, it’ll be dark by then and then we can go.”
“Thanks,” she said. “You’re sweet.”
“You’re funny,” he said, but he was smiling.
——
“Don’t stop,” she said, “please, I have so much more to say, and I just want you to keep rubbing my back and listening.”
some words I wrote after doing a lot of crawling across a floor the other day.
Sid Branca, video stills from girls room, a media performance work in progress
from the group show Hysteria! Visualizing Female Anxiety, curated by Carmilla Dirt at Templehead Gallery, Chicago, 2013
If you’re interested, over at my other less-journaly more-tumblry tumblr, I will be using a couple of specific tags to track things I find that in some way relate to my coursework in this semester of my MFA program. This is more notes-to-my-self than anything, but you are welcome to check them out:
Just Another Friendly Reminder That Dating Is Over and You Will Never Find Love
This Jezebel article does a pretty solid job of pointing out some of what bugs me about many of the trend pieces about online dating:
Sounds shitty, indeed. But one clueless musician’s interaction with a social media manager hardly means that “Women in their 20s these days are lucky to get a last-minute text to tag along.” And why is it always up to men to set the dating tone? All of the anecdotes in these articles are from straight women, because straight women are apparently the only people who would be devastated about the demise of traditional courtship. But if you want to go to dinner and a movie, why not…suggest going to dinner and a movie?
Because hey, everyone: if you are interested in a specific kind of date, or a specific kind of relationship, you should communicate that to the people you are getting involved with.
Because hey, then you either
a) get the thing you want, hooray for you!
or b) learn that the person(s) in question want something different from what you want, and you can make decisions about whether you would like to modify your attitudes about dates/relationships or end your romantic/sexual involvement with that person(s) and move on.
It is actually that easy (sometimes).
Of course, often people don’t know what they want, want conflicting things, are unable to accept or access what they want due to societal or other pressures, have trouble clearly communicating what they want, etc. etc. etc. Relationships are messy business and always will be.
But real talk these things need to go:
- the idea that anyone should be tricking anyone else into a relationship (bonus points for the fucked up attitudes about gender that are usually involved)
- the expectation that you can always assume what kind of dates or relationship someone wants
- the expectation that someone else will know what kind of dates or relationship you want if you do not tell them.
I am, duh, guilty of having done all of these things at various points in my relationship/not-relationship history, so my apologies if all that comes off as didactic. This is all coming from the place of feeling like I’ve learned some things from that chaotic history, and having just had a surprisingly easy and communicative new relationship conversation that has me feeling optimistic about humans telling other humans about dem feeeeeelings.