February 27, 2008

Manny Faber, " White Elephant Art vs. Termite Art," Negative Space (Praegere, 1971): 134-44.

"Most of the feckless, listless quality of today's art can be blamed on its drive to break out of a tradition while, irrationally, hewing to the square, boxed-in shape and gemlike inertia of an old, densely wrought European masterpiece" (134).

February 26, 2008

Remy (that's Jeremy James to me & you) Thompson has started a new blog.

February 22, 2008

CA Conrad's bathroom tour

February 22, 2008

Marguerite Duras, The Malady of Death, trans. Barbara Bray (Grove, 1986).

Billed as a novel on the cover, but weighing in as a 60 page chap using a big balloony font to get that much, The Malady of Death still seems substantial. Posing existential/absurdist questions of the divide between partners, and the impossibility of bridging that gap, the stripped down language of the text reads more lyric than cold. The text itself ends with Duras' notes on how this text might be adapted to the stage or screen, making it also seem more of a treatment than "novel".
___

And then she is silent.

You're afraid she'll go to sleep again, you rouse her and say: Go on talking. She says: Ask questions then. I can't do it on my own. Again you ask if anyone could love you. Again she says: No.

She says that a moment ago you wanted to kill her, when you came in off the terrace and into the room for the second time. That she knew this in her sleep, from the way you looked at her. She asks you to say why.

You say you don't know why, that you don't understand the malady you suffer from.


She smiles, says this is the first time, that until she met you she didn't know death could be lived (44-5).

February 22, 2008

Work no. 1 is now available at Quimbys in Chicago.

February 21, 2008

Paul Eluard, Capital of Pain, trans. Mary Ann Caws, Patricia Terry & Nancy Kline (Black Widow, 2006).

It's always hard for me to read work in translation from languages that I also translate from, as it gets me reading the work much differently and asking why the translators made the decisions they made. This translation is quite good, but at places like the poem "Rubans/Ribbons" on pages 62-3 (facing page original/trans layout) I wonder why the end of Eluard's paragraph seems to introduce extra meaning not in the original:

Les sacrifies font un geste qui ne dit rien parmi la dentelle de tous les autres gestes, imaginaires, a cinq ou six, vers le lieu de repos ou il n'y a personne.

In the translation "vers le lieu de repos ou il n'y a personne" becomes "towards the resting place—which is empty." The translation introduces an em dash not in the original adding extra emphasis to the offset text. Eluard uses em dashes elsewhere, so it would seem if he wanted the extra emphasis he would have used it himself as it formed part of his stylistic toolkit. The English also morphs the image of a room where there is no one around to an empty room, which also carries other meanings. The French word for empty is "vide" & Eluard could have used that if he meant to draw attention to a heightened sense of emptiness rather than a lack of potential human contact.

I've spent days on this single poem, asking myself these questions.

February 20, 2008

from Michael Lachowski:

Pylon was recorded for the Virtual Lower East Side website at the Mercury Lounge back in November.

If you missed us on our recent tour to promote Gyrate Plus, here's your chance to catch us live.

It airs tonight for the first time at 8 pm:

http://www.vles.com/node/30818

February 20, 2008

Athol Fugard, The Blood Knot at ACT Theatre (Feb 8–March 9).

Two South African brothers share a shed during apartheid. One is light skinned enough to pass as white; whereas, the other cannot. What unfolds is an investigation into the very notions of race & the power dynamics, guilt & jealousies that go with it. It's sad that this play is not only still poignant, but very relevent.

February 18, 2008

1. It is very difficult to find thimbles in the Bay Area. I hope the comments box proves the opposite, but I have been to Chinatown, Oakland, Chinatown, SF, Pearl on Market and what seems like every Wallgreen's on the planet. I need 5 thimbles to play my washboard proper. Ideas?

2. Bought at Goodwill, which may explain why some of my analaysis is behind the times, as I await the fully throwned tenured folk to donoate such jewels or move:

The Amiri Baraka Reader, $1.29
Dahrendorf, Class & Class Conflict in Industrial Society $1.29 [anyone up for a class war?]
Best & Keeler, Postmodern Theory $1.29
Goodwill always makes me wonder why I went to college, and why I'm not more engaged in class-war.

3. A young man had an elipelitic fit at the Jack-n-the-Box. Everyone responded just right. He was embarrassed, but everyone else was just right, every the crying girlfriend. It was humanity actually caring. I don't see that much.

4. Working on a piece for the 5th tentatively titled "Even the Paper Tigers Know Dream was for-real--or How I Learned About Affluence Deep in the Hundreds ." You been in the Hundreds? There's real humanity in the alphabets.

5. The play I went to at ACT deserves more thought, dispite the simplicty in thinking of out-going theaterites. [they pain me, they always do: "What if his dad was white?"] This is why I don't take a bat with me to the theater.

6. I didn't get thimbles but I finally got practice paper for Chinese characters. I've been looking for it since I got back in 2005. In Chinatown, SF or Oakland, always go down the unmarked alleys.

Yes.

February 17, 2008

One of the nicer surprises last night at Blakes was seeing the Chris Stroffolino show fleshed out by being accompanied by a bowed saw, an accordion, a violin, and Heather Jovanelli working the percussion in addition to Stroff's own keyboard & trumpet.

February 14, 2008

The Notion of 'Avant-Garde' Problematized
&
Oakland women & firearms (and no it's not a G. Gordon Liddy calendar)
&
Let's cut to commercial
&
Who gives a rat's ass about penmanship? asks a writer who often uses handwriting
&
I think it was Mojo Nixon who crooned "so you went to a college that your daddy couldn't afford/feeling quintessential/feeling existential." But I cd be rongwrong.

February 14, 2008

from Michael Carreira:

Cryptacize is playing on Friday at Artists' Television
Access, 992 Valencia Street. Show starts at 8:30 and
they say we are third of 5 bands. It costs money but
it all goes to help 21 Grand out of a little hole they
are in.

http://www.atasite.org/calendar/?x=2830

February 13, 2008

Numbers.

In 2002/03, when I was amassing the fourth (and last, although I didn't know it at the time) issue of Chase Park, I decided to have an all-women's issue without drawing attention to the fact. I felt at the time, and still do now, that highlighting such issues as special or Other only works to reinforce the marginalization that happens in mainstream culture. Ask a Chinese artist how easy it is for him to negiotiate with a museum right after the museum has had their once every ten years "Chinese Art in the 20th Century" show, and you'll get my meaning. The culture game is replete with tokenism. In the case of Chase Park 4, no one noticed the fact that all the writers were women, not even the writers in the issue.

I think that's how it should be.

Why should an all-women writers issue be special? When it's only men writers, no one thinks twice. Why should the obverse be special?

I don't know what to draw from this, but know that CP4 happened.

CP4: Eula Biss, Anne Blonstein, Kristin P. Bradshaw, Valerie Coulton, Gagan Gill, E. Tracy Grinell, Teji Grover, Sawako Nakayasu, Amrita Pritam, Elizabeth Robinson, Kerri Sonnenberg, Anne Tardos, Aidan Thompson, Stephanie Young & Arlene Zide.

February 11, 2008

The inaugural issue of Work is out. It features work by Rodney Koeneke, Samantha Giles, Ariel Goldberg, Chris Stroffolino, Spencer Selby & Liu Shasha.

Issues are available at Rock Paper Scissors on Telegraph in Oakland, or via the address on the sidebar for $2 or trade (with trade being the preferred transaction).

February 11, 2008

I realize now that my argument with the postal worker this morning had to do with varying definitions of book & magazine or journal. When she told me that I couldn't send my zine media rate, even though I told her I had done so in the past a few dozen times, she was adamant & simply refused. So I checked the regulations and realize now that I should have told her it's a staple bound "book" that is over 8 printed pages with no ads.

February 10, 2008

With the main art gallery closed, yeasterday probably wasn't the best day to visit the Oakland Museum of California; although, the jade pagoda piece in the lower level was certainly something to ponder.

There was a lot going on outside though. In Chinatown, there were several multi-generational small Chinese persussion ensembles keeping things lively between setting off rounds of fire-crackers in store doorways.

And up at a mailbox on the 5200 block of Clarement Avenue (by the Red Sea Ethiopean restaurant) Ariel Goldberg performed a round in her on-going project "Letters to the Names of the Dead." 100 letters written to dead soldiers, sealed in unaddressed envelopes (how do you address letters to the dead?), Goldberg went through several gestures that call forth and emphasized the futility of such a project, while simultaneously calling our attention to the importance of such actions. The mailbox itself seemed a monolithic metaphor of beaucratic and real silence & inaction, with Goldberg's final gesture being to succumb and plant herself as though dead underneath the mailbox. Check her website for photos.

February 10, 2008

Only in Oakland would a well publicized gun buy back program run out of money within hours & send folks home with their guns. Did they really think offering vouchers in a no-ID, no-questions asked environment was going to get a lot of takers?

One interesting thing about the program is the "[g]uns collected by the police will be turned over to The Crucible, an Oakland nonprofit art studio, to be melted down and sculpted into a peace monument. "

February 7, 2008

After something like a 13 hour day of what I will call work as to differentiate it from labor (I do not toil), I came home and looked at some of my projects from 7/8 years ago to find that even though the forms have greatly changed in my work, the central ideas & artistic concerns that I cared about & was concerned with in the late 90s & early 2000s are still very much at the core of what I'm trying to explore & wrap my head around now. I think/hope I'm a little deeper involved in these ideas I was just then beginning to explore.

Looking at a project that I finished in 2001 (Pete Hoffman Days) and what I'm doing now clearly (for me at least) wipes away any sense of radical shift between projects, as I see not only connections between them, but a trajectory.

Stasis or Merzbau or focus or simply unfulfilled aesthetics looking for the right outlet? It's been more than a 13 hours day. I'll hard think on this later.

Seriously, as this needs a hard thinking on my end.

February 7, 2008

Does anyone out there know who were on Secret Swans # 2, 3, 5, 11 and/or 13?

February 6, 2008

Not so much in the hills though.

February 5, 2008

The fact that I had to vote provisionally most likely means that the Alameda County registrar is still sending an absentee ballot for me to my old Chinese address, even though I've re-registered twice now at my new Oakland address.

February 5, 2008

February 3, 2008

Decided today was a perfectly good day for Roscoe Mitchell, so borrowed these from the library:

Roscoe Mitchell Sextet, Sound (Delmark, recorded 1966)
Muhal Richard Abrams, George Lewis & Roscoe Mitchell, Streaming (Pi, recorded 2005)
&
Roscoe Mitchell & Tatsu Aoki, Chicago Duos (Southport, recorded 2003-05)

Much nicer than listening to sports announcers talk about the Pats inevitability factors.

February 1, 2008

My favorite building in Oakland as shot by Liu Shasha.

January 31, 2008

Help 21 Grand out

Fri 2/15 8:30 PM $7-20 sliding scale

21 Grand presents a benefit concert at ATA to raise funds for its ongoing code compliance issues, featuring performances by groups incorporating experimental and rock forms, including Murder Murder, K.I.T., Cryptacize (Nedelle, Chris Cohen, Michael Carreira), Face, and SL Morse (Sarah Lockhart with special guest).

ATA is at 992 Valencia Street at 21st in San Francisco

January 31, 2008

If you're in NY you should check this out.