First there was a rocking chair moved all on its own. Before that noises. Then a bunch of smaller things were moving when they should not move or else moved when people were out of the room. Thought there were Ghosts said Dad, and slowly the ghosts that he spoke of got more and more. Some kids were frightened and cried in the Nite, but the older ones did not scare so easy – they were all laughing, Bravado and his brothers, tryna make a joke out it all. They said the ole man came in one time, saw the spirit at there in the corner, right near where he liked to occupy his chair and he just stared that fucker down. Get out of here.
But whatever – in the end they came more and more and lots of them. It got too fucking hard to live there and we had to move out. Priest couldn’t help, couldn’t get rid of them. It was inconvenient. Dad said it just like that – it was just too inconvenient living in a house with so many ghosts. Maybe the house was builded on a burial ground etc. Maybe there was terrible murders of kids and all sorts, done right on the premises. Anyway we had to get out of there. Next house it was the neighbors making trouble - the guy was always killing an animal in the garden or leaving trash outside their door or letting off some fireworks under of his car or the hedge or his brothers t-shirt. So that year we got driven out of one place by the living and another place by the dead. Ghosts was what X said. Fucking ghosts. He did not mind Mice or Cockroaches or Idiots. But ghosts were a Royalty pain in the ass and once they got a hold on your place they were hard to shift.
Loved the butterfly story. And the Kinski clip.
Stroked his "crazy dog" outa frisco in the hills years back. He used to hide
up fire watch towers and abuse hikers babbling abt property and rights to em
from 20 metres up and talk abt his crazy dog. Had an electric collar which
he'd fry it when it got too close to said hikers. Mad laughter thru the
hills. And a stunned and crazy dog. Used to stop it mind.
Dragged his corpse thru the property where I was. Dog still there.
Fucker stank of skunks. the dog I mean. Glad the ol boy was dead i'd guess.
Mount Barnaby I dimly recall. California. Log cabin, woods etc. Anyhow.
Barbara Campbell mailed and sent haiku's by Kerouac, not knowing that I kind of love Kerouac, which I read mostly way back in the past. I had forgotten these though:
Useless! Useless!
—heavy rain driving
Into the sea
Night fall - too dark
to read the page,
Too dark
New York at this point is warm and piss stinking streets and rats running under the cars on 1st street. Got called "a bad man" by a six year old Asian kid in Whole Foods. Usual story. I sat on a chair, the kid thought it was his chair. I was a bad man he said with deadpan even emphasis on the two words, his mum said no I was not a bad man, they had gone to the bathroom, how was I to know, I was just sitting there eating my lunch in a chair that was unoccupied, I was not a bad man the mum said but the kid was not convinced and made an enemy of me.
I am jet lagged and very likely to be rambling here.
Kate sent me this link to a clip from The Secret Life of Machines, which I subsequently followed thru to find more episodes/fragments of the same 80's TV series with Tim Hunkin. Can't say I ever watched it at the time but the stuff on the actual mechanics of everyday technologies is pretty interesting - like some kind of more brainy Scrapheap Challenge. The photocopier one here for example has pretty great stuff on early/diy attempts at document copying - hugely laborious and often involving wet and dry processes akin to photo-development. Made me think these last few days about the technologies that replicate on the one hand (turning a physical object into another physical object, often with an intermediate stage), and technologies which effectively mediate things from one form or media to another - like scanners or samplers. Wondering vaguely if there's a marker moment in technological development where the problem "how can i get another physical object like this one?" gets temporarily superseded by the problem "how can i get this physical object into a non-physical (digital) form?". Something about the physical object being a nuisance and just wanting to have it digital... like 'great, but how the fuck can i get *that * onto my computer?" Probably in fact the dynamic thing is about the process of constant translation backwards and forwards between realms - physical and non-physical, two dimensional and three dimensional.
Thinking now of the Gelatin project Tantamounter 24/7 I heard about way back - a closed space in which the artists were based, working continuosly for a period of days with various kinds of equipment and materials. Visitors could bring to the window of this space any item they wanted copied and within a specified time period a copy of some kind would be made using only those materials and processes the artists had available to them inside the gallery.
The “Tantamounter 24/7” is a gigantic, complex and very clever machine. It's like a huge huge Xerox copy machine, only bigger and more clever. The friendly customer places their personal objects, ideas, smells on one of the entry ports and after a short analysis will be informed of the time it will take to produce the copy.
The “Tantamounter 24/7” can scan two and three-dimensional objects, analyze their flavours, ideas, concepts and contents. As a clever machine it can not just copy or duplicate objects, but of course be tantamount to them. Due to its complex emotional circuitry one will never know how the “Tantamounter 24/7” will reflect the input. After the announced waiting time the input object and its duplicate will be ejected through the exit slot. The working mechanism behind “Tantamounter 24/7” is some completely hardwired intense individual agents operating day and night under close supervision of a bankrupt psychiatrist.
More on that, and some amusing images from the project, here.
*
"I don't even like art.."
Jacob Wren posted a link to this great set of 1986 interview fragments by David Hammons. By coincidence, and looping back to the copying theme, Vlatka and I saw an unofficial (and unauthorised) retrospective of his work a couple of years back which so far as I can recall consisted only of photocopies or replicas of his works.
A butterfly is loose on the stage during the second performance of That Night Follows Day in Gotenburg. The kids are all speaking in unison, just as they usually do, their eyes are steadily working the audience and they are making their way through the text and it all feels very present, very strong. And then there's this extra layer, beautiful and distracting in equal parts - the butterfly, moving here and there, with this constant, unfolding micro-narrative of where will it go and what will it do. The kids say afterwards that as they watch the audience they see them move their heads in strange choreographed unison movements, each one trying to track/watch/follow the butterfly's path about and around the stage. And from time to time the butterfly comes to rest - on Viktor's shirt for example, or on Taja's shoe, or on Yen's shoulder or on Lina's arm where it stays for the longest time, so perfectly still and she so focused on what she is saying that and I'm not even sure if she has noticed it or not. The butterly seems to like green colours and he certainly loves the bright light of the stage. He is not the performance, but from time to time he really is the performance. I keep waiting for his story to resolve somehow. Will one of the performers panic or react when he too gets near them, or freak out when they notice that he has landed on their skin? Will one of them crush the butterfly or kill it with the swipe of a hand? or catch it? But nothing like that happens. The performance is taking place. The butterfly goes around, red and black colours, beating wings. He visits various people. He lands on one of the white lines that mark the gymnasium style floor. Then later I don't see him anymore. There's no end to the story.
Afterwards Keng Sen says that in China the arrival of the butterfly (or a moth) means there is a spirt in the room, a visitor from another realm. At a funeral especially it means that the deceased person is back - taking a look at what's going on. I guess I don't know who it was there in the theatre three nights ago, taking a look at the show, or at the building, or the audience. I guess the butterfly always seems like he's from another story, another logic, another set of understandings even in out the world in a meadow, a garden or a park. On stage it seems doubly so. Also, as I think about it now the butterfly is all about gaze, about gaze in transit - about shifts of attention and trajectory - fluttering from place to place, landing, staying setting off again. Strangely circuitous and arbitrary but always, in fact, going somewhere, searching, looking at, or for something. I loved the way that in Gotenburg he slipped out of my story.
Writing now though I'm suddenly thinking of the end of Herzog's documentary/memorial to his friend, sometime-adversary and life-time collaborator Klaus Kinski, My Best Friend. In the final scene of the film Kinski faces Herzog's camera while a large Amazonian butterfly flies around him - resting from time to time on his face, his shoulder, his outstretched hands. Kinski smiling in the brilliant sunshine, his movements patient, delighted and calm, in love with the moment and with its recording. Herzog on voiceover talking about how, perhaps against his better judgement, this scene and not the tempestuous and confrontational ego monster we've had glimpsed elsewhere in the film, is how he would most like to fix Kinski in his memory. Watching the clip again now (at youTube, here) I had to think about the double layer which was always there in it but never so explicit for me as it is now - Kinski being gentle, careful, kind to the dead spirit in the butterfly, just as Herzog, on the soundtrack is loving, and careful with the spirit of Kinski himself.
RSS feed
