Streets in that same gray light they always organise for the early morning taxi rides and the city still dreaming its most persistent night figures - the makeshift crew of staggering drunks, curled bench-sleepers and lone walkers, the street corner-standers, the lingerers of various doorways, african guys stood tall, dressed in white, black skin dense against the morning fog, the lovers, the occasional tangle of friends whose eyes are blurred by the onslaught of the morning, still laughing about yesterday. It comes to you in waves of blankness and sudden details. On a further street, a big cop holds a small guy at a skeptical arms length, the latter pushed back to the shuttered news-stand/kiosk painted an anonymous green. And meanwhile, in the back seat of the car that pulls up spilling music to a slumbering traffic light, the middle passsenger slumped forwards between compatriots appears to be cause for concern, nodding into uncousciounsess or nausea perhaps, and while the car waits even the driver leans back to see what's going on there, gesturing as he-that-is-slumped slumps more and the others look to him, or nod to the music, or lose interest and watch from the windows as the green light in the opposite direction gives free passage to nothing more than the morning light and the nothingness - the cross-street a whole direction in the city which no one apparently has a use for right now.
The light changes a bit. You pass a zone where the tops of the few high rise buildings are disappeared in fog. You see the derelict form of the homeless here and there - the best (and worst) of them a guy cast as a sleeping knot of piled rags on the bottom steps to the church. They do the details very good for these trips. And alongside all these the morning city dreams and spits its first born into the streets - street cleaners in orange, taxi drivers, night workers heading home, the insomniacs, the stray dog-walkers. Strange how it works - that only at this time, now in the mornings, do certain features of the landscape come into focus. Only now, somehow, do you see the walls, the boarded up windows on the 3rd floor, the beautiful repetition of the graffiti tags, the angles of a building, the letters of the traffic signs. Only now, perhaps because its near empty, so almost deserted - a film set waiting for the action. And at another street you see the moped that got knocked over sometime in this previous night and which now lies like slaughterhoused cattle, neck broken with the bolt gun, head forwards, handlebars splayed into the road. Or only now when your defences are down does any of this become clear, or even enter the realm of the visible, since at this time in the morning your eyes and brain work a weird and vivid back and forth; a sleight of hand, a dawn hustle that lets stuff flow and form on the back of your skull directly, stuff that would not flow like that any other time. The lulling steady cam of the taxi window whose gliding, speeding, curving vantage point is yours temporarily (for duration of this journey) and you think about how many taxi rides like this you have done - how many early morning escape from where-evers - how many tracking shots out and over to the airport, while the city calls out its cast of shift-working extras to do background detail, so loving, so complete in its partialness, their narrative.
And you remember back at the hotel. The night porter/conceirge was sleeping in his suit when you came down to check out, his head lain on the desk by the computer terminal with its spiral of screensaver and he woke with the closing doors of the elevator or with the sound of your footsteps or suitcase wheels on the stone floor and while you paid and waited for the cab the two of you shared some blurred time, sat there in a kind of awkward half awakeness, in a foyer silence doubled by the lack of a language to speak in and in any case a space too close to sleep still and too hard or too intimate to share with a stranger.
Review here of the Homeworks IV
show at Sfeir-Semler Gallery in Beirut, as part of which Vlatka and I
have been showing the installation/long-distance performance project To Bring Down A House.
The show ends at the weekend. Given the situation lately in Beirut, its
been a bit unsettling to be constantly sending through proposals for
destruction of a house - physical, psychic, playful, awful and
otherwise - as the project entails. My own contributions (see above)
have become more and more minimal of late. Here's a link to a couple of the earlier ones.
Early this morning, a man described as violent and incoherent burst into a residence and shot two people to death before shooting himself in the head. A man, described as being in his early 20's and wearing a dark shirt and cap, asked if he could spend the night at the Youth For Christ Mission after a Christmas banquet at the center ended. The national assembly also approved a new first vice president, a man described as an aging Communist Party hardliner.
A man described as a polite neighbour died following a vicious assault which included an attack by his own dog. A man, described as being of Aboriginal or Islander appearance and aged in his mid 20s, then approached the victim and threatened him with an iron bar. The police have no suspects but are looking for a man described as white, 5'9," 40 to 45 years old, with a medium build and short brown hair. He has been travelling with a woman described as his "new wife" -- the ex-wife of a Minneapolis police officer -- while continuing to defraud people in the Minnesota area.
On November 12, a man described as a mentally disturbed musician shot dead two American businessmen and an eminent French jurist as they ate dinner at a local restaurant. Six people were killed by gunfire in a Portland auto parts warehouse Tuesday morning, after a man described as a disgruntled employee opened fire. Peter Gladstone, a man described as being a "leech on the resources of the community," was arrested Monday for allegedly stealing a $1.99 can of beer.
Arrested for the Sanderson Memorial Mausoleum wire theft last fall were Hillary Ellen Cooper, and a man described as her boyfriend. She was married briefly in the mid 1960s, to a man described as a gigolo. A man, described as a Hispanic male in his 30s with long, black, combed-back hair, pulled up next to her in a black Toyota. A man, described as white, in his 20s, tall, with an athletic build and sandy blond or light brown hair, possibly in a crew cut, jumped out of the car. Police appealed to members of the public who may have seen a man, described as Maori or Polynesian, of thin build with a gold- or tan-coloured dog on a lead. Police say Elleston was with two other people at the time - a woman described as his girlfriend and a man described as his boyfriend. Police were reported to be searching for a man described as 'middle-aged' and 'flabby', who had gained entry to various all - female groups. A small army of law enforcement officers, aided by helicopters and dog teams, searched for a man described as armed with a small handgun. As the coffin was carried shoulder high out of the stadium, mourners sang "Hamba Kahle Umkhonto" as the final tribute to a man described as a patriot.
*
[Been working on lots and lots and lots of the above... it's proving pretty compelling, and extremely addictive. Playing with and discussing for some time now the different possibilities of writing/working with text after Google, after search and replace, after track changes, after Spam-filter text etc - kind of fascinated with the structural and statistical possibilities these things offer, and the kind of access one has to miles and miles and miles of raw text. Need to write something longer connecting this to Vlatka's Google pieces, Graham Parker's spam projects and to some other aritsts I was thinking about. Anyways. This is just a flag for the moment... and a chance to share what's above.]
The new Forced Entertainment performance Spectacular is finally open, after extended sweat, toil and some changes of direction. The completed piece, performed by Claire Marshall and Robin Arthur follows a rehearsal process, and work-in-progress showings last year at B.I.T in Bergen, through which all five members of the core company were on and off the stage at various points whilst the project morphed repeatedly to find its final form. The piece premiered in Essen the week before last (as I wrote briefly here) and we're really pleased with the results. Spectacular plays the Pompidou in Paris this week from Wednesday, followed in due course by gigs in Theatre Garonne (Toulouse) and at Hebbel in Berlin in early July. In Toulouse the performance will be accompanied by a programme of other stuff related and spinning off from the work including my recent neon pieces, a programme of video I've put together featuring great work from Howard Matthew, Oliver Michaels, Aaron Williamson and the lovely Vlatka Horvat.
The sign pictured above didn't make it to the final performance but who knows, maybe it can be a work in it's own right at some point. Made as a quick mock-up for a full-on electrical sign (that of course never got made) we fell in love with the home-made cardboard one for a while before shifting our attentions elsewhere. Perhaps the best part was a period of a week where the letters dropped from the ceiling one by one, leaving an increasingly incomprehensible title above the stage and an accumulating pile of letters below. During the long discussions that dogged the process this pile of letters tended to get used in an on-going side-project/pass time for spelling new words, obscene phrases and general anagrams. Sometimes, looking around the room at the furrowed brows you could wonder if we were all thinking about the show or simply wondering what re-combination of the letters could possibly top RECTAL SAP. Hard to beat.
Full details on the Spectacular dates here - UK touring will be in the Autumn. It's looking like a good piece - simple, strong and binary in its structure, yet pretty easy going, relaxed. There's a nice sleight of hand to it I think. Really looking forward to presenting it around and seeing the reactions.
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