bantams in pine-woods

chieftain iffucan of azcan in caftan
of tan with henna hackles, halt!

damned universal cock, as if the sun
was blackamoor to bear your blazing tail.

fat!  fat!  fat!  fat!  i am the personal.
your world is you.  i am my world.

you ten-foot poet among inchlings. fat!
begone! an inchling bristles in these pines,

bristles, and points their appalachian tangs,
and fears not portly azcan nor his hoos.


wallace stevens

stream of consciousness

owl
howl
mooniac
curly brown hair
ginsberg
naked
on the door of my refridgerator.
milk.
lakes, oceans, seas, milky ways,
nike, sprite, crystal coke, crystel, golden girls, soft pastel.
the pelvis.
no sugar, no fat, no caffeine, no sun, no bread, no eggs. oh eggs! oh deary! oh dairy products!
candy. sugar mountains. babies, dandylions, lion´ s love, the pool
mirrors, warhol, shoot, solanas, new york new york, lonely, lost lost lost, central park, lennon dead. rollerblades, moonwalk, hi-fi, stereo, water fountains, water pistols, ghost busters, ninja turtles, animals in the canalization, mutation, reproduction, monsters, flushing, frankenstein, el espiritu de la colmena, girls, godard, angry old pensioner, death of cinema, video! the vasulkas, volcanoes, the philosopher threw his shoe inside, herzog ate his. pizza, down by the river, stones, ducks, one hundred and twenty two, one dead, rifle, quak quak.
can you still say i love you at a water?
rocks
snow
steam
swimming
pine trees
burn
wood
fire
marseille
criminals,
card games,
golden teeth,
warm at heart, got god inside.
harbour,
glowing blackness of the ocean,
prison on an island.
no man is an island.
moules et frites
mars
fritz zorn
cancer
lobster
lobster napkin
lobster parties,
lobster cholesterol.
american trucks, whopper, double whopper, dyper pooper.
pigeon shit. big one.
mud
honey. ninetees. startled. puzzled. dazed and confused. where have all the young men gone?
pierre et gilles,
a thrill,
a thriller,
strangers in the night,
shot on the stage in nashville.
chéri
cherry
blossom
bloomingdales
chip´n dales
chips and chease
elvis
sweat
meat loaf
lonely meat.
lonely loaf.
lonely valentine.
the flower industry
money as poetry.
from hand to hand.
imagined meanings.

i don´t know if sergej prokofjew was the first one to compose a melody for each character in a story, but i´ll never forget how crazy i went and how afraid i was, when i heard the tune of the wolf coming and started to realize that what would happen was inevitable and the cassette would always end the same horrible way with the poor duck inside the wolf.

touching hands

just saw an amazing video document by harun farocki, "übertragung" (transference), about people touching monuments, memorials, holy walls, footprints of the devil or saints or mother mary, about sacraments, -in general about people all over the world doing absurd ritual acts, trying to touch the untouchable, to suck some kind of a power or spirit up their hands.
i know this strange and special behaviour very well from myself. evrytime i´m near very old trees or walls i enjoy touching them. i don´t know what i think about when i do that, it´s just some kind of a strong impulse to touch something very old that has seen more than you. it is definitely very obscure and even esoteric all this touching of lifeless material, as if to animate it through the touch. -allthough when i think of the touch of a loved one, i know it is indeed animating.
farocki´s video is a brilliant study of these seemingly shamanic and still everyday touching rituals.
it also made me think of something vilèm flusser once wrote about the absurdity of most jewish rituals (like not driving on fridays for example). he said, when the actions and laws of a community are in a way absurd, life becomes a celebration. when the actions and laws however become efficent, productive and rational, life becomes a domestic tragedy.

cat lover

louis wain (1860-1939).
a visionary, supposed schizophrenic lover and painter of cats.
he painted the above in mental hospital. he said about himself:
"i take a sketch-book to a restaurant, or other public place, and draw the people in their different positions as cats, getting as near to their human characteristics as possible. this gives me doubly nature."

barkley l. hendricks

too cool this man. jesus!

august strindberg photographs

instead of working with the light of the sun to imprint its marks on photographs, strindberg let the light of the moon make these pictures.

commercial memories

because the personal is political and the aesthetic is ideological.
reading about the videos of stanya kahn and harry dodge, i had to think about my latest post below and started to figure out why tarkovysky´s or jonas mekas´ aethetics had turned into what they had.
because indeed from the beginning on, they were ideological.
i guess i tend to think sometimes, if something is good and righteous it can´t be ideological. but of course it is! these things are probably even the worst ideologies, like christianity´s love for entire humanity which is mere racist, colonial, missionary, magisterial disrespect of the heterogeneity, the manifoldness and difference in the world.
it´s difficult thinking of all aesthetics as ideological, especially sensing the specific ideological background behind the aesthetics of someone like jonas mekas who i deeply admire so much. but i guess you could call his films aethetics of the sentimental, the lost time, the lost paradise, when things were whole and at home (which is and has of course never been the case, because nothing is ever there when we think it, we are never ontologically at home and nothing is unbroken). there are quite a few christian and humanist ideas in his thinking, maybe even reactionary ones. still i love the films and him, but it does help to understand why they work so well today for commercial styles.
commercials are constantly trying to sell and praise the new, but they know how we feel lost and lonely, disoriented and insecure, so they show us the aesthetics of the super8 childhood films, the old grainy projections, when things were overexposed and imperfect, but retrospectively (and falsely) seem to us just perfect, they show us our lost past and lost paradise, to give us the illusion of buying it back, buying a home and an identity with our new phone, car, camera or kitchen aid. to make us feel secure again, in the arms of imaginary parents who hold ud tight and tuck us in at night, to constitute our lost selves.

commercial man you are such a phony deceiver!
yuck.

what wonders me

i find it so so strange, while working and talking with friends about other works, how older works i love and cherish, have become completely castrated by time and put into a context that absolutely negates their former core and turns them into something empty, but still beautiful, which makes everything even more ambivalent and complicated. for instance the beautiful aesthetics of old jonas mekas´ films, -you´ll find them again in telephone commercials nowadays. the overexposed, grainy, soft 8 or 16mm aesthetics, the aesthetics of polaroids, of faded light. you will find tarkovsky´s revolutionary style in fashion magazines all over the place. but what does this tell me about tarkovsky or about fashion? -was tarkovsky´s style maybe in its core from the beginning on mere decorative aesthetics? or is it just the devouring capitalist monster at work? it´s so tricky working with beautiful images, or probably anything beautiful i guess, because all too much affirmation, will make things ineffective, unable to really transform and move beyond, because beauty is always looking backwards, missing something lost, that was most probably never even at hand.
there always has to be one thing out of order, i suppose, one thing absolutely wrong, broken, not affirming, like a resisting element, that will say no, that will dare supposed ugliness, that will dare conflict and confrontation.

tehching hsieh

two days before yesterday i was the luckiest duck in germany to have the chance to meet tehching hsieh and hear him talk about his work.

he is now very well known for his one year performances.

i was in a way almost shocked when i saw the pictures and started to imagine in detail what it really means to handle time, to "waste" time in these radical dimensions, spending one year in a cage, one year tied to another artist, one year on the streets without a roof over the head, one year punching a punch clock each hour.
i couldn´t stop thinking the ordinary thoughts. how could he live so long without a girl- or boy-friend, without celebrations at night, bicycle tours through the landscapes, travels and trips through the world, evenings with friends, walking dogs or sitting on roof tops. these things.
he said one thing at the beginning that was so full of truth: when he came to new york from taiwan, he was an illegal immigrant, he had no girl friend, no personal life. doing these performances transcended the restrictions and density of his everyday life as a noone and gave him an identity, put his life into another, a much larger and more generous context. one of art, time and timelessness, philosophy, ideas. he also talked about kafka and beckett and said his work had nothing to do with buddha or religion, he said he´s a complete atheist and dislikes meditation.
doing these performances raised and lifted him up. it constituted his life. i understood.
what does it mean to live life? we are all just spending time. dealing with time, watching it pass until we die. and there is nothing ordinary or normal about this. it is completely crazy, absurd, tragic, wonderful, a mystery, a nonsense and without reason.
i can´t really talk about his work, because what he did makes every word seem so false and shaming.
i fell so in love with him, seeing his small and tender body on the stage, hearing his broken english, his humbleness and sense of humor. he was so funny and nice and completely unneurotic and grateful.
anyway.
he certainly did give me ideas to live for that evening.