head on a stick

the erotics of the transforming body

2010-10-28T11:28:00.000-04:00

For those who could not see the exhibit, here is the favorable review of The Erotics of the Trasnforming Body and some images of what I showed at Art House Picture Frames in Portland, Maine on view until October 30th. There are more to come and a future show in the works.

http://www.pressherald.com/life/audience/gallery-puts-on-splendid-show-of-drawing-based-artworks_2010-10-03.html

becoming rapture

hinging vertiginous

longing

collapsing, being

beautiful crisis

The Incomplete and The Intimate

2010-07-13T07:39:00.004-04:00

Ma Mere

Dir. Christophe Honore’, 2004

Eroticism is a backdrop for the larger questions about who we are and what we are to challenge what Christophe Honore’ calls the moral straitjacket, the bourgeois tendencies of consumption, excess, and frivolity, the lack of depth in an empty life of human tourism that evades intimacy and engagement.

Isabelle Huppert and Louis Garrell’s staggering and poetic performances intensify Christophe Honore’ ’s contemporized adaptation of Georges Bataille’s story, “Ma Mere” set in the Euro-tourist-haven of the Canary Islands instead of a 1900’s brothel. Intimacy, incompleteness, and impurity are its underlying themes as the film travels society’s taboos, excess, consumptive desire in relation to being, presence/absence, and exchange. Relationships are ritualized to illustrate there is something beyond pleasure: tenderness, kindness, and humanity. The subtext is a coming of age paired with a reckoning with mortality, an accounting of collective complicity and corruptibility, triumph in failure, and weakness as strength. Clichés and conventions of all kinds literary and visual, moral and physical are inverted and subverted; all relationships and their proper order are transgressed and stripped bare from pretense, praise and all socially acceptable gloss.

The film is a kind of modern fairy tale with villains, heroes, innocent children, wicked parents, witches, fairies, and trolls in which Honore’ reflects back “our desire reduces us to weakness”, and that we think we know or assume can be crushed by what is. We can be reborn more honest, frank, and raw, and perhaps, then, more able to really experience the experience we are experiencing. We can mess with the edges and precipices of a vertiginous existence, and feel vertigo and nausea, and then, we are ripe, available and can really experience deep empathy and compassion for one another. If we remove our mask are we more naked; what if we wear a mask and play our role as if our life depended on it.

The fragmenting of the body through edits, framing, bondage, wrapping, wounding, bathing, clothing, and nakedness in relation to clothing raise these questions visually, viscerally, and we are confronting our own squeamishness, our own desire, and our own failings as human beings, as lovers, as corresponding beings, and must examine our own responsibilities, our shortcomings, our failings as we witness those of others especially ones we love. One has to “go a little far”, one has the choice to terrorize or bless another. We are both animal and other. In true Bataille fashion, we must face the abject and its is there where we find beauty. “The origin of the world is the hole,” says La Mere’s lover-collaboratrice, Rea, played by actress Emma de Cannes. What we fear must become what we desire and love. We must embrace what we loath, and find intimacy there. For perhaps, what we loath the most is ourselves, and therefore life itself, and that is our true crime, and our daily death.

The privileged couple, their son, and their odd mix of friends, who are mostly pretty young girl-and boy-nymphs with lots of free time, avoid hordes of overweight Northern Europeans in white socks and sandals, random naked men with piercings in sensitive places, or unkempt boisterous American youths; they retire from the clubs, bars, and streets with an occasional pause to make love in a public place or taxi to their own posh villa with endless views from the swimming pool and patios to unmade beds where they frolic, violate one another, and repeatedly revive and give birth to experiences of Bataille’s theories of the erotic, existence, and liberty.

Pierre, dark eyed and lanky, is a handsome, moody boy who returns to his parent’s villa for a vacation. Upon his arrival his cryptic father speaks in premonitory codes about his mother and the masks they both wear, while La Mere, played by the stunning Huppert, exhibits her destructive ambivalence and insatiable hungers through restless fawning, fidgeting, and a string of sexual encounters, entrances and exits, which are essential to advance the metaphysics of sex, the examination of our sexual taboos and prejudices, and how social structures damage and cut away at our being, depriving us of life, suffocating our spirit, and destroying any real exchange and reciprocity. La Mere’s physical absence from the film for about a half hour marks Pierre’s need to find and make his own way, learn from the abandonment and separation about true union and being, and loosen the knotted ties to his mother. He is forced to journey through his mother’s identity, roles, and doings without her, and she is unable to defend her actions and their injustice. This black hole, as Honore’ describes it, alludes to the necessary demise of La Mere’s desire, and the implications and consequences of that.

La Mere is unwell after a bad fall, and laid in bed, shrouded in a white sheet like Mantegna’s “Dead Christ”, her feet exposed, her body and face recede in an acute foreshortening of the body wrapped as one form. Feet and toes become unwieldy appendages going off in various directions. Her covered horizontality, her fall from grace and desire will become the death she will wear. For Bataille, the feet represent our contact with dirt, our destined fate to be attached to the ground, and our baseness as beings on the earth. The pairing of the a promiscuous mother with the figure of Christ is not gratuitously irreverent or to shock, but rather serves to demystify the roles, which are interchangeable and undress our costuming and perfuming of that which is foul about us, inevitable, the corpse and tragedy that we are. She, La Mere, is both a scapegoat and a villain, guilty of what it is to be human and mortal, a sinner and saint, a mother and woman; she embodies the extremes we are, lives all that we are capable of. Her beauty becomes her ugliness and vice versa; her sexuality’s sovereignty becomes simultaneous poisonous death and health. Boundaries of opposites and dualities as posited by our social structures are blurred, they willingly pair, bond, and multiply through her. She breeds and evokes love, hatred, empathy, compassion, and embodies the pathos, frailty, horror, and tenderness of humanity.

Religion attempts to fill gaps of being, the unknowns and mysteries of our suffering, insatiable longing, and when it reaches beyond its dogma, teachings, and ideals, perhaps it achieves a level of humanity that is valuable. Bataille’s own texts are filled with his own search to unravel the laws, rules, preferences to get at the origins of our social life and its constructions. This films explores much of that rich terrain, not to answer the unanswerable, but to expose its essence of unanswerability and unaccountability. Perhaps, when we unveil, unmask, and denude ourselves, we reach a truer sense of being, a more real experience of one another, and the suffering we all bear is perhaps soothed once we acknowledge the wounds we are capable of and inflict on ourselves and one another.

Bertrand Tavernier, Coup de Torchon: Taking out the trash

2010-06-08T16:30:00.000-04:00

Coup de Torchon, 1981

Betrand Tavernier

Tavernier sets Coup de Torchon adapted from Jim Thompson’s Pop. 1280 in French West Africa 1938, where police chief Lucien Cordier, played by Philippe Noiret, inverts his perceived role as village idiot by strategically killing off those characters who think he is incapable, soft, and incorruptible and incapable of “dirty work”. Tavernier concocts a poisonous cocktail of noir-esque violence, clichés of a spaghetti Western, French colonial African style, with buffoonish clowning as Cordier poaches and disposes of living human trash through cold killings, calculated rendezvous, and disguise of stupidity and base humor. Isabelle Huppert’s Rose, his lover, and Staphane Audran’s Hugette, his wife are either insatiable, deceitful, and vain, and even Anne, Irene Skobline, contradicts him, is inaccessible, burdensome in her attentions, so in the end, women are reduced to the criminal, venomous, and disposable. Men are moving targets in this carnival shooting gallery; they too, are excessive, damaged, and contaminated where good and evil never reconcile. Cordier kicks Rose’s dying husband after he shoots him, and says “You, you won’t have a boring death.” And “This hurts me more than it hurts you.”

The camera seizes and holds hostage innocent African children crouching near enormous trees, as they dutifully recite the French anthem, and colorfully clothed local in the open market which illustrate how we exoticize and colonize through our tyranny the cultures of others with our gaze, our greed, our preferences, and our contempt. We trample lives and decide who lives and dies with little regard for humanity.

Exhumed from the dirt and excess of colonial values, racism, hypocrisy, hierarchy, and human waste, Cordier delivers the message that “all crimes are collective, and we participate in each other’s crimes”. Sublime visual poetry collides with the scatological, as Tavernier and his striking cast send us on a chase for bodies dead or alive, naked, in underwear, suits, or tribal dress to search for what is cloaked and buried within the body, our most sacred power object that holds infinite truths.

Ozu's Early Spring, 1956: Life is ephemeral life

2010-06-06T13:44:00.003-04:00

Jasujiro Ozu's Early Spring, 1956, mirrors at post-war industrialization, Western cultural influences, and the personal and universal oppression of the Japanese "salary man".

Ozu's spectacularly stark black and white floating world tableau is multilayered with architectural elements, fabric folds, veiling, transparency, opacity, and patterns, natural forms, which accompany portraits of faces and domestic activities, rituals, pairings, expressions, and dress is increasingly replaced and masked by the more Modern conventions of photographic mise en scene and even premonitory Burtinsky-esque views that betray shifts of Japanese cultural, physical, and political landscape. The development of treeless gridded cities carved by buses and tram lines, boisterous traffic, vertical neon signs in Japanese, throngs of male-dominated workerforce commute, descend upon, and invade cement roads and walkways and rectangular buildings of uniform minimalist aesthetics, pushing out old ways of living and being.

These Modern structures encroach on a marginalized countryside marred and populated by by contamination, factory stacks, railway tracks to carry workers in the paired-down tailored look of 1950's American-style mass-manufactured white shirts and pleated trousers, or bell skirts below the knee to the granite beehive-office spaces. Even in the prefectures and outskirts of Tokyo, youth dominates, and animals, families, and children are rare an invisible here. The claustrophobic quality of life is is felt at the beginning of the film when in a narrow shaft of an common alley a woman exclaims, "the garbage man never comes". This alley and cry for a lack of order and care exposes challenges of living in cramped spaces, piling human on human in a Modernist Tokyo where freedom, privacy, clean, land and air replaced by the social order of work, dress, and productivity can only hinder, delay, and smother life.

Brushing teeth, shaving, cleaning, ironing, folding clothes, dressing, undressing, packing, sleeping, eating, drinking, smoking, singing, walking, are talking are the communal activities that bind humans. The Modern worker's activities replace many of the communal ones with typing, talking, negotiating, telephoning, and commuting. The colorless, grey world is one reduced to tonal values, darks and lights. Socializing is reduced to smoking, drinking, carousing, singing, and eating in bars and restaurants humanize the workers; it is the social activities that bind and separate these young twenty-thirty-forty-somethings who seek their fortune and self reflection in the telling mirror of society.

Images of clocks, file cabinets, typists typing, men working and smoking in their offices in white shirts, rectangular windows that render anonymous the beings inside and conceal their lives contain, protect, and foster the goals of larger economic livelihood and well being disassociated from the values and desires of humanity.Only a few times, as small Modernist painting appears as the sole artistic creation that is not associated with mending, cooking, typing, or tidying. Creative acts must have production for a common good attached to them. In one scene, a small mirror sits high on a small piece of furniture and shows only shadows of movement. It is such a subtle moment, one that is easily lost, and symbolic of the minute details of humanity that may count for something of great proportion.

Ozu's use of flatness refers to many aspects of his inquiry into humanity, its lack of depth, diversity, the tyranny of surfaces, appearances, just as pattern becomes the micro and macro versions of the same thing, and when viewed as the same, lose their own integrity. Everything seems perfect, untroubled, operational, working, and fully functional. (In French, fonctionaire is a worker, state employee. Fonction means to function, act as. I imagine in Japanese there may be a similar word.)

Ozu employs domestic objects, clothing, ambient sounds, and framing of spaces, and these become meta narratives and supporting actors: a torn pillow case, Western clothes suspended, costumes being put on or taken off or worn, books in stacks or books strewn, incense or cigarette smoke wafting and rising, glasses of milk or beer sitting or being gulped. Objects in their stasis are active, continuing to speak about the characters, the actions, and the space in which we find them. Activities also become meta narratives: the act of putting on make up and gossiping, the act of playing tiles and gossiping, the act of setting up or putting away bedding, packing or unpacking, the act of drinking and signing, the preparation of food, ironing, scrubbing a stain, combing one's hair, brushing one's teeth.

One's status and roles are multiple and play out in different contexts and are enhanced by objects, spaces, and ambient sounds. It is evident that we suffer the complexity of the obligations that contradict themselves and spar with our desires, fears, values, or dreams as humans, and here, whether a salary man, retired worker, father, mother, husband, wife, widow, old maid, married couple, dead child, unborn child, cook, cook, typist, invisible garbage man, secret lover. "Everyone' s dissatisfied." is a company director's words as he reflects upon the differences between one worker and an independent boss. Are either able to delay the mortality, loss, and suffering we all face at one time or another.

Against the sharp edges of crossword puzzle world of buildings, windows, newspapers, books, and tiles, our rounded tenderness is wounded, betrayed by emotional spills and cliche lipstick stains, both trappings and forensic evidence of our domestic systems and regulation, which fail to secure or guard personal or universal happiness.

"Goldfish" is a young woman-worker whose large eyes influenced her predominately male colleagues' pet name. Her independent attitude and ability to stray from the norms gets her into trouble. She is and further estranges herself as she develops feelings and inhabits a more deeply intimate, emotional realms; she becomes a fish out of water, as her colleagues find her swimming in an opposite direction from the others. She aligns with a married salary man, Sugi, who is married to Masako. Sugi finds something he lacks or misses in her company, as well as an escape from the loss of his child, perhaps the ordinary familiarity of his obedient, predictable, and dutiful wife, the overbearing nature of his vocal mother-in-law, and the tiny world at home that seems to e closing in on him. He has become dulled by the daily chore of routine, and finds Goldfish's exuberance refreshing, welcoming, and flattering.

Sugi and Goldfish strike up a friendship; the warmth and affection they feel for one another leads to a single-night romance and echo into the home and work lives, public and private lives of both, and begin to consume the imaginations of those nearest them. Later, Goldfish is invited to a noodle party, where she is greeted by an interrogation by colleagues about rumors of infidelity with Sugi ("Gossip links you two."), she fights to preserve her secret, and fights to protect herself. They taunt her and demand that she: "Try some criticism." and she consider how she would feel if she were the wife. One male colleague says" She needs to be told off. It's humanism." As if humanism can be bundled, categorized, and presented easily, or turned into punishment. This comments on ideals of justice and how distorted justice becomes when it is glued or hinged to revenge.

Ozu examines conformity as it resides in the obligatory crisp white shirt and pressed trousers or skirt worn by Modern Japanese office workers. Within the white shirt, we an locate contracts, marital vows, vows, the ladders and status, promises of a clean, orderly, and comfortable life where clothes are cleaned, ironed, and hung, ready to wear, ready to define our selves as we perform them daily outside and inside, privately and publicly. The white shirt, the most basic garments of Western dress since medieval times first appeared as a a chemise or undergarment, so it bears historical dual identity that perhaps is both combative and repressed.

The white shirt distinguishes a person from a farmer, factory worker, as someone who works in an office at non-manual labor where dirt is eliminated and prevented. The office worker remains tidy, respected, and salaried, can move up a mobile ladder of economic incentives and benefits, supposedly. What resides behind the white shirt, and near the heart. What does the white shirt reveal and conceal at the same time. The white shirt cannot stave off or prevent a less painful demise cannot cloak or cover the ugliness and decay of our mortality. The white shirt is not immune to stains, tears,(note tears and tears are the same), destruction, and are not enough armour to protect our hearts and souls from suffering, death, and loss. The white collar is as vulnerable to life as its wearer. Our clothes speak to our nakedness, transparency, truths.

Miuri, is a young friend of Sugi and others, who has been ill for over 100 days, and who eventually takes his own life with sleeping pills. We can only assume he finds his isolation from the world unbearable, as he begs Sugi to stay with him during a visit. In a way, Miuri symbolizes most profoundly the disillusionment and loneliness the film embodies, as he is scapegoated by his best friend, often alone with his mother to care for him, and incapacitated, so cannot participate in life in any way. But, perhaps, he participates in some other way, and becomes the beacon of light for his friends, a living conscience, a prisoner of conscience. He dies young in a sense, becomes hero and a villain, for he leaves those behind with the mess of the world, and becomes removed from the burdens, or so it would seem. We cannot be and not be at the same time.

"Life is ephemeral." is the most beautiful line in the film, and speaks to the undeniable truth and flux there. It questions the stability or usefulness, ethics and meaning behind standards and rules, and asks can we conform a human self to some ideal of economic, patriotic, or even domestic picture we want to frame and hold onto for posterity. Or is it true, we will will age, wither, lose our mobility, and lose our lives; our clothes, our jobs, our relatives and loves will not keep us together, yet we are bound together as a humanity, a collective being that will continue to be regardless of rules, or values, or anything we impose upon it.

wrapping, folding, multiplying selves in compresion

2010-06-06T11:29:00.001-04:00

End of 2009 thoughts

2010-06-06T10:55:00.001-04:00

I found this unpublished draft a small reflection from the end of 2010. How premonitory.

A silent snow falls, and past the window.

This has been a year of many blessings, including health, growth, ideas, and hard work. I work daily towards clarity, peace, and steady footing, so I feel ready for anything, flexible, fluid, and available.

My work continues to place me in proximities of creative work and thinking where multifaceted communication, language, experimentation, and collaboration are essential and thrive.

I continue to observe and locate tensions in our world, gaps, which I find immensely interesting;
places where incongruities meet and overlap.

Also, I noticed someone named anonymous is contributing their poetry as "comments", a kind of coded dialogue perhaps? I wonder if anonymous has a blog, too? I am so curious, why are you anonymous?

explorations of the body

2010-05-26T18:43:00.001-04:00

In these drawings (click on the image to view the whole thing), I am working with a model, L., who is moving slowly, constantly, throughout the session, changing poses, clothes, expression, becoming an extended torso or a more compressed mass, and I capture the energy and dynamics of the inner and outer experience. I want to embody the inevitable separateness of bodies, the interconnectedness between the interior and exterior body, the integration and overlap of parts, how forms evolve, disintegrate, warp, and invert. The body is an unpredictable terrain, where shadows and light collide and diverge, bury, consume, and exhume details and nuances of flesh, hair, folds, surfaces, porousness, liquidity, and hidden bone, blood, and organs.

Drawing becomes the lover of the body who blindly traces what is imagined, felt to enhance, cherish, and celebrate what it cannot touch. Drawing is an act of deep intimacy, attention, meditation, and awakens the soul. On a thin paper sheet, charcoal meets thicknesses, mounds, convex dips, teardrop holes between skin and skin, where the ends meet the endless. Lines morph and follow, degenerate and shift to become something else eventually in a play and shedding of realism for motifs and patterns that repeat, which the body itself disrupts. Subtleties emerge, unforeseen shapes surface. It is not in the knowing, and not the seeing places where one encounters questions and possibilities. The arrangements are infinite, as one limb exposes another while hiding still some other part, and complicit with light, exposes nothing and something at the same time.

Our attraction and fascination with the body beholds a longing to locate an essence, a purpose, a closeness to one another while yielding to that we cannot grasp, define, or determine. It is within those indeterminate places of the body we linger the most, as they captivate and anticipate our desire to surrender and not judge the body or ourselves. That acceptance and embrace of humanity is what sustains us in the most trying of trials, uncertainties, and challenges. Time is suspended in these moments, and each scratch of the crude instrument against a fragile fiber layer witnesses our potential, a longevity we crave and advance only by rejecting the will to control our direction, and listening more acutely for that which lurks and lives in silence. The enigma of creativity is that.

erotics of film

2010-04-10T09:13:00.003-04:00

I have entered a new phase of deep personal inquiry and am reading up a storm and watching films regularly. I am further examining my interests around clothing and the body, why we wear what we wear, how we construct identities and love them out, functions of the body, the leaky body, the feminine body, erotisme and Bataille, sex and death, aging, paradoxes of existence, wreckage, psychic ruin, collapse, slippage, relationship, correspondence, and more.

The following are interesting films that offer me insights and expand these interconnected discourses. We are of course engaged in viewing, seeing, gazing, and staring. I begin with two films today, and will post subsequent writings about others in the coming days.

What is our role as a viewer?

I believe we are passive and also complicit in our watching, our voyeuristic role, the role we are assigned as film viewer, audience, the role we eagerly take up. Our arousal means everything, and in true Bataille fashion, we can be brought to a climax only to have that dashed or degraded by gruesome events or brutal realities that strip the veneer of erotics, love and all of our fantasies. We safely play these (and our own real ones) in our head or mind’s eye, yet, now while watching actors and actresses dress up and pretend, those understandings of love and pleasure are so cruelly abandoned, crushed, and trampled, and we are forced to reckon with how we too, achieve this in our own daily lives. We are enlightened, tickled, sensitized by the drama and its unfoldings; life is undressing before us, and we are mesmerized, even if we have seen or experienced this before; we are somehow prey to repeat views, gluttons for replay; we are not brought to a place of joy or ecstasy, but to an understanding of our humanness in al of its failure, leaks, and decay. Our excess becomes our ruin, our leaps over boundaries we have labeled taboo become traps we fall into.

The relationship between men and women and combinations of those are always flawed; unions become separations, and pairings become splits, like cells that multiply. It is that reproduction that becomes a simultaneous life and death, creation and destruction, which the medium of film embodies. The photograph and moving image are a kind of death and obituary; as soon as the identity is constructed, its twin, the actor or the model is split off, no longer needed and replaced by the gloss of a flat or projected image, whose life is enduring beyond the contaminated and sacred dirt of life’s tomb. There could be a contradiction to that thought. Perhaps, the subject lives beyond, is given a new life, a still, reflective one, where the eyes will never cease to shine, and the skin will always be soft. The subject will live on beyond the vertiginous margins of the image. A pseudo-eternal life is generated in exchange for the one it cancels, perhaps.

French film director, Catherine Breillat was recommended to me by a photographer friend. Breillat’s films are remarkable and powerful. Her newest film, her version of Blackbeard, was release last week in NYC, a story she says, “is a metaphor about the tender and cruel relationship between men and women.”

In “Anatomie D’Enfer”, the lead subject of the film is a woman who challenges a man to “watch me where I am unwatchable" and to " just say what you see”. There are reversals and inversions of power, which merely cancel the sovereignty of either man or woman, neutralizing the potential for a dominant one. The male gaze undermined and celebrated, held up like an animal's severed head, becomes a force of a simultaneous rupture and construction of relationship, a triumph of nothing. A woman randomly picks up a man (or so we are led to believe) and convinces/teases/provokes him with various methods to watch her for a fee. We are confronted with the theme of presence and absence, hide and seek, play and life. He arrives at the predetermined destination of encounter at an an aggravating distance from the city, so both are removed from the eyes of others and society’s watch. Anything is possible, and almost immediately we are thrust into his ennui, and will continuously be exposed to the boredom that inevitably surfaces and replaces the excitement and power of a first look, a peek, or stolen stare.

Most of the story takes place in a stark, unadorned bedroom with simple furniture, bed, chair, dresser, visible bathroom, and a crucifix on the wall, a typical accessory for a European household. Though the man is exhibits an unwillingness, frustration, anger, and disinterest if not disgust, she says she can always hope for more. He makes no bones about feeling sickened by her, by her proposal, and by her body. We encounter Courbet’s image hauntingly gorgeous “The Origin of the World”, where we are at the point of entry and exit. Breillet exaggerates all associations we have gathered around a woman's most intimate nether parts to unfeathered, small birds in a nest, mouths open, wrinkled skin, large eye, randoms hairs that poke out, creatures that attract young boys trample or feed, or both.

Breillat's film launches into nothingness, brutality, and of course we are forced to witness Lacan’s mirroire. We see what we cannot see. Breillat dissects all the hateful and repulsive clichés, jokes, euphemisms, perceptions, visions, fantasies, taboos, and toxic language about women’s anatomy, identity, sexuality, role. She activates our human evolutionary link to primitive lifeforms, frogs, always slick and wet, poisonous to the touch, vulnerable, squishy, and attraction repulsion becomes impossibly paired and inseparable. Breillat observes and instigates Man’s desire to conquer nature, own it, toy with it, cease and seize it, always results in tragedy, thoughtful, gutless death with a smile. Batatille writes with vigor about how our self-loathing incites our self-wounding, and our nausea and laughter are responses to and symptoms of the same. Breillat depicts and studies a simultaneous horror and fascination women/girls may experience about men/boys and vice versa; these irreconcilable feelings are violent and separate and unify us.

What is informe, soft, moist is hell. The horror of nothingness. There is a despair, a loneliness that is all enveloping. All of the tendencies to witness women as false, made up, fictional, alien, inhuman, cruel, unreal, unclean, putrid, lying, s(mothering), deceptive, thief, insatiable, a black hole, a void, a nothing surface and those are thrown back at use, at the man, and at the women. That she abandons the house and the constructed relationship and wanted more, rendered the woman “no longer human” to the man, and perhaps to us; “nothing can be done over again”. The bed becomes a shroud, an empty nest, a foaming sea of nothing, and the drowning ocean of memory where our identities float as endless ghosts of an erotic shipwreck, love’s lost, and only death consoles us.

Fassbinder’s “The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant” is the story of a glamorous fashion designer who dominates and abuses her live-in girlfriend/assistant as she works to seduce and trap a younger girl, enliven herself and perhaps deter mortality, the destruction of her beauty by time, by dosing herself with the hormones and surges of blood that accompany an erotic life. She is filled with unrequited passion, longings, and unfulfilled desire. The story unfolds in a windowless claustrophobic one room apartment, where the bed is a stage for eating, sleeping, love, sex, communion, thinking, brooding, ritual, and even death. The bed is a site of tragedy, victory, joy, and dispair. From her bed/throne/pedestal/soapbox, Petra schemes and designs the fabric of her life; strategies become reality and her fantasy is the delicate thread she weaves. She undresses and dresses to try on different personae, working to find one that would attract and be most appealing to the object of her desire, and more beautiful to the eyes of the world who gaze upon her and await her next invention. We are riveted, too.

Bed/erotisme is where life is spawned and taken away, where dreams are had and crushed in one fell swoop. Bed is where we create and destroy ourselves, one another. Bed is where we communicate and dash hopes, stimulate desire and elevate fears; it is the locus of conversation and relationship. It is where we play, have sex, rest, and die. It is the center of the room, the center of our lives. Other objects and furniture such as dresses, shoes, dolls, mannequins, glass, mirrors, bags, tea sets, china, glassware, doors, walls, corners, closets are active props, life’s furniture and accessories. The objects and our relationships to them form identities and alternate ones we can wear and parade like costumes; they are complicit collaborators, they fulfill the aims of the plot, they give and take, they offer images of life and take it away. “Beautiful things don’t last”, Petra warns.

Suffering is as much a part of the erotics of our lives as the joy and sensuous contact we make, and people are fickle, they change, and they change again. The urgency of our feelings we encounter for one another are seething in Petra, who is so torn, and so desperate to love and be loved in return. We witness how reciprocity is severed, the claustrophobic nature of love as it quickly dissolves from affection and admiration into horror and rage. The film script admonishes, “You have to learn to love without demanding.” “One is alone with God.” And “You must have courage to believe.”

The women-girls (Petra, her lover, the new lover, her friend, a second friend, her mother, and her daughter) are seen playing at life, mimicking relationships, fantasizing and writing their own story of life through and with one another; they build a life of the feminine. Men are excluded in the cycling of generations; they are mere conveniences or inconveniences; they are living wallets, names, providers, property owners, status symbols, a social tie or a living noose. The girls-women engage in ritual tea parties, dress up games, teasing one another, quarrelling, fussing, weeping, sobbing, caressing, grooming, drawing, dressing and undressing, typing, telling stories, gossiping, tidying, arranging, preparing something, reading, eating, drinking, sewing, playing records, dancing, chatting on the phone and making plans, and talking to mamma; these girl activities are inverted or upgraded to adult experiences, or shown as infantile and adult at the same time. Play is how we test out life as children and as adults; we practice the self we wish to construct and face the world with. The consequences of play/life are more dangerous, fatal, and flawed as adults, perhaps; meaning is more profound, disruptive, and deadly.

In Fassbinder's beautiful tableaux, a moving painting, photograph, and mirror, we experience and confront the nuances of horror and pleasure, the extremes of the feminine, identity, and aging. We witness the unformed, growing unwieldy virginal body and its queasy-making quasi-innocence of adolescence to the cultivated looks we construct to defy age's wreckage upon our visage, skin, smoothness, moistness, and availability. Fassbinder's long steady focus on the body's energetic shifts which surface as emotion, relationship, and futile ritualized activities we concoct to slow the progress and betrayals our mortality won't allow us to escape. He traps us in the room where we are conceived and die, where Petra conceives herself and dies.

Dress and psychic adaptation are strategies to create and alter our perpetual human drama. The overlaps and interchangeable parts there are visible and unspoken truths we cannot deny. A women's identity splits and accesses realms beyond her biology; she navigates the murky depths of gender, identity politics, mortality, and her own raw humanity, which does not pair well with what society expects, determines, or promotes. These splits and woundings are prodded, irritated, and exacerbated by an awareness of contradictions, perceptions, social codes and mores, and undone by the body’s fate which rests in its continuous discontinuity; a cycling of life-death, death-life. Once again the bed/body/ becomes a grave, an empty hole, where the folds reveal nothingness, and departure is freedom, movement, life.

Another year, another film, another book, and a whole lifetime of experiences

2010-02-22T11:15:00.000-05:00

Another year since my last post. I don't think that is what Blogger had in mind. I will write with more regularity as I extract myself from commitments and work that distracts me from the passions.

Reading Burroughs now (read Junky last week: all you did not want to know about heroin, and actually, not much about the high, more about the sickness, a kind of Artaud scream in slow motions), also Burrough's interviews, and Ginsberg's journals, too. I am desperate for reading and writing time, and plan on making daily room for that after my exhibit is installed end of this week.

Gearing up for Natural Overlaps, an exhibit of collaborative works with my friend Susan Newbold, which will be at Silvermine this month until April. A long trek. Many other developments, new friendships, and new callings. I wrote essays for Susan Bickford's installation in Fall 2009 in UMA in Augusta and Carrie Scanga's installation this month at Vox Populi in Philadelphia.

I am gearing up to unleash a new body of work and let it spill from my soul, which will include drawings and writings on many subjects from aging to desire's eye, from the transformative moments of loss and surrender to the bliss of breathing. Back in a flash........

it's about time

2009-03-02T18:54:00.005-05:00

Greetings everyone,

This was a post I drafted almost a year ago, funny it almost relates to now. I am just busier. Enjoy!

Last year:

It's a winter wonderland, we are buried in snow on another Monday. I haven't blogged since summer, as my teaching responsibilities, community services, and a few exhibits have kept me very busy. I am learning a great deal about how to navigate personalities, politics, perspectives, and gaps of the unknown. Life drawing took a break in winter as drawing room geared up for an exciting exhibit at Jameson Gallery, who hosted us this year very generously. We represented many artists and twenty-nine of them from age 10 to age 65 and up sold works in variety of mediums and formats on the theme of "gathering". The holidays took over shortly after. Hardly space to breathe, and the next semester began, and I was asked to participate in The Funnies at Whitney Art Works, which had its run this past month. Everyone here is thriving, and laying low.

I began a review of Burn After Reading, and have yet to finish that, and will post it as soon as I do.

I am writing a piece on the work of Shephard Fairy, whose exhibit is in the Boston ICA until August.

One thing I really enjoy about teaching is being near to what students are thinking about, or not thinking about. Many are investigating subjects I grew up with that seem unresolved: inequality and discrimination, the depletion and pollution of our natural resources and environment, economic recession, oil politics, Mideast conflicts and war, and the benefits of going green and farming/eating organic. These are decades old!

How can we tell truths to one another, be beacons of light to lead the way for one another, and speak with words that heal and guide,

Bukowski Heaven

2008-07-20T06:49:00.003-04:00

I have discovered Bukowski for myself this summer and am reading everything I can get my hands on. I am remembering what it felt like to be ten and read as much as possible, drink in the text, and breathe in the words of some book, only to crave more from that author or one like it. I have not felt so keen on an author in sometime, nor moved to think about a person's work in this way.

So far, I have read Post Office, the third volume of his letters, Factotum, and am about to embark on some of his poetry soon. Last night I watched a film called Born into This with amazing footage of him and Linda Lee drinking, smoking, and talking about writing, women, and woes. He describes his childhood, which I have been reading about in Ham on Rye this week. He is most disturbed by the razor strop beatings and his boils which plagued him for a long time and left his face and body scarred for life until he died. Linda Lee says when he died he had skin smooth like a baby, that everything relaxed and was freed.

Why have I become so absorbed. Perhaps, the reason he became so popular and so valuable. Some may hate his work, I wouldn't understand why. Perhaps only fundamentalist Puritans would despise his works. His raw truths and harsh sorrows are bound in tales of sloppy, drunk slapping of bodies, eager bets at the tracks, lots of cigarette lighting and slurping from glasses and bottles, and the clackity-clack-clack of the type, which we hear silently when he reads from the catacomb-expansion of words. Some might feel plunder or beaten up by his verbal lashings, or tickled by the sounds, sights, and texture.

Personally, I feel revived by the pain and humanity. I appreciate he howling, the wounding, the screams.

It's all in there, they are all in there. Artaud, Bataille, Laure, Rimbaud, Abe, Kakfa, Dostoyevsky, Nabakov, Plath, Wolf, Stein, Rumi, and others. Screams and howls come in many forms, and I know that is where the essence of our life lies, this is why the thinkers, writers, composers, and artists and others who take risks and express the scream are often smothered, shut down, with a great pillow of society on their heads. But not for repose, for the denial of our animality, our baseness, our endless lament, which gets in the way of productivity as constructed commerce would have it.

Bukowski's chain of useless work and day jobs, or night jobs, where he assembles or loads, carries or hauls things for others to consume is a wonderful metaphor for the cycling futility and ridiculous spin we have placed upon our existence. What is this productivity, what is the economic boom's result upon our souls. Can we ever recuperate our selves at the end of grueling hours where we give our time away to others. In Factotum, this is depicted in many ways, and in many ways does he try to convince others the work is aimless, and that drinking is a much more productive work as it leads to writing, getting it out, living, freeing the bluebird inside.

Bowkowski wants to drink and release, drink and release. It is the drinking paired with the release that was important his whole life. He lived during prohibition, what stupid thing, which apparently started right here in Maine. How ridiculous that we continue to have rules around liquor its consumption and purchase, which only cause it to be more interesting, and certainly does not stop people from finding it or worse, damaging alternatives. Humans will always be self-destructive, and that self-loathing is inherent. It is the very skin we live in, that makes us so uncomfortable and is so essential to our survival, our ability to contain our insides and not spill into the streets, physically and metaphysically. But we spill into the streets anyway, and our societal structures cannot bind our contain our humanity, our will to spill, leak, and become raw sewage that infects our clean pathways.

When will we accept the raw footage of our lives, the blisters and boils of our unsavory thoughts and decay of of desire. It's a struggle everyday. Bukowski, you said it.

2008-07-11T07:22:00.004-04:00

dream: dreamt of a large, long cat whisker

My days have been full with art and teaching and social interactivity. I am thinking about many issues and ideas from lines and journeys to how people learn, observe, and think. Yesterday I imagined an ongoing project of a teacher's diary: photograph myself each morning, write down what I taught, what I ate, what I learned, challenges and obstacles with students, and what students are excited about, or complain about. Could a nice long project, life long. I am collaborating with my friend Susan on drawings, and we are sending them back and forth. Tis is one drawing I did and overlapped with another before sending them to her to work on and use.

I am challenging my own perceptions, tendencies, and inclinations. I am more present and in the moment, soaking everything in.

My brain piece is finished and installed in York at the George Marshall Store. I was invited by Gail Spaien to collaborate and contribute a piece to be on view for six or so days on the theme of "Garden Archive", and there are always two artists in rotation who exhibit with her beautiful work. It is quite an honor and privilege to be a part of this amazing creation, and her generosity and thought is remarkable, making art and art making more interesting and interactive.

I placed two drawings of brains, right and left, above a disassembled child's spring mattress where I embedded seed packets with titles and authors' names from books I have and have been influenced by. The small drawer on the side contains extra packets with titles for visitors to take with them in the spirit of community and exchange. Glassine is archival and used to wrap paintings. It seems fragile, but I treated it roughly, stitched into it with colored thread and assembled a variety of poached and invented images on one brain (right brain) and text with a girl meandering through the words on the left brain. The text is freely associative writing about the garden and its meaning, as well as my experience of it.

Now I am wrapping up a week of fashion illustration for teenagers, and will post a few drawings soon.

garden of the mind

2008-06-20T06:54:00.005-04:00

Dream: I lived in this place where a flood was coming, and we were preparing to leave. There were frogmen, who were diving to secure things underwater.

Thank you for your feedback, and I will look into the suggested readings and ideas for future postings. After six months, it is wonderful to receive comments and I am grateful for the conversation. I have been with my head in the classroom, as I mentioned back in spring. I am avidly working on drawings in the studio, writing up a storm, but nothing ready for publication just yet. Also, my website will be revamped this fall and new works added then.

At life drawing, I am losing interest in working the whole figure, and am curious about creating parts from parts, and working with transparencies. I use a combination of glassine to make drawings that can combine with other drawings, overlap, and blend them. I am able to work smaller and in a portable way, using remnants of paper, and working quickly to create multiple works that operate like a puzzle without a specific fit.

I have been squirreling time between academic and other artistic endeavours to work on some new drawings using the shape of the brain and filling it with all kinds of things one might find residing in there.

I have been musing on gardens, gardening, and what that means.

I notice that the vocabulary of language and thinking is much like that of gardening:

to seed, to plant, to grow, to cultivate, to root, to uproot, to weed out, to tend to, to stem, to blossom, to pick, to fertilize, to nourish, to thrive, to decay, to live, to die, etc.

Our personal compost is often the greatest source of information about ourselves, fears and desires, and the compost we make for our garden reveals what choices we make, how we eat, and what we nourish ourselves with. I had a bad experience drawing weeds a month ago and got about twenty-five bad bites. I must be allergic, because I awoke with welts and don't recall being bitten while drawing. The weed drawings are nice, I'll post them later. In the meantime, i am preparing for an exhibit that revolves around the practice of archiving the garden. I decided that I really don't spend time in the garden, or outdoors much. Exactly because I get bitten, hounded by bugs. I do spend a great deal of time in the garden of the mind, where I romp, wander, look at the flowers, take in the sun, look at the clouds, and let myself roam in the bumps, nooks, and crannies.

The brain is a peculiar shaped thing. The mind is elastic subject to injury and growth at the same time, easily destroyed and so resilient. The Language of Flowers describes the sacrilege of the flower and how flowers create their own meaning upon which we superimpose our own. We have developed symbolic gestures and rituals around the flower and its blossom, which Bataille asserts is the aspect of death, and its aroma, the scent of a cadaver. I think this is a perfect example of why Bataille is relevant and important; he exposes the contradictions and shortcomings of our hierarchies of preferences and locate the simple origins of our behavior and views, our codes and methods. Based on his premise, a gifts of flowers is the gift of death, so we are celebrating and loving with death, and our verticality is compromised by the plants deeply rooted in cow manure and crawling things in dirt. I realized those garden plots are like living graves, the flower bed is a cradle of life and decay.

head in the classroom

2008-04-23T06:50:00.005-04:00

Some have their head in the clouds.

I have my head in the classroom.

My dreams are swirling with syllabi, strategies to stimulate questions and growth, exercises in composition, and pedagocial ponderings.

Found books of poets Zagajewsi, MacLowe, Kenji, and Simic to cool a head that is perpetually in the classroom.

2008-04-02T05:58:00.002-04:00

I woke to the light of Magritte

half day and half night

silhouettes of crows in the trees

branches buoying them, rocking

they scatter

they laugh, they caw-caw

a nasal haha

haha

horizon slathered with orange and blue

streaks and the veins of dark trees

move with the thick Van Gogh lines

and light opens Rene's sky stripes

those round bodies curving

crooked, crook-ed on arbor tips

harbors, habored

weighing and swaying

what are they saying

those limbs move like waves

and those birds swoosh and bob

dodging the spray of March bluster

like early surfers at Crescent or Higgins

catching spring winds and wooshing

whirling

waiting for day to make its call

bouncing on the edges of a landscape

and holding fast to

vertiginous margins

messages in water

2008-03-25T11:14:00.000-04:00

Dreaming about collaboration, the feeling it generates and the sense of belonging. I also dreamt about an enormous house my mother had, almost as big as a small medieval town in Tuscany.

a catalogue of elimination: a surreal fishbowl

We are turning our life into a really distorted surreal, science fiction horror movie.

(I wrote this when it happened a week or more ago now)

Yesterday we were hit up by the media with reports of contamination that confirm our drinking water has unfiltered amounts of medications, and if that news wasn't bad enough, a Governor has been soliciting the services of an expensive working girl. Coincidentally, during the same day, the Pope pronounced his additions to the list of seven deadly sins, including prejudiced and biased crimes against one another, pollution, and use of drugs. Honestly, when this all happened, I was searching for weather reports to learn when the next snow would be.

Reports came in that our water is contaminated, drugged, contains has residues of sex hormones, anti-pain medication, psychoparmaceuticals, and other legal drugs. Our local media avoided the subject of how these enter the water system, and did not even mention a cause. The national media only showed a flushing toilet, hint hint, can you guess how we get these drugs into our water table. The use of this image without verbal explanation exhibits and confirms our Puritantical refusal to address our waste and excess openly and honestly, and shows our squeamishness and self-loathing leads us to the use lethal avoidance tactics. A little Twinky and then some Pepto outa cure all the anxiety those talking heads cause with their sensational reports and lack of constructive solutions. We take another pill, and then go eliminate it without a thought about what we are sending down the drainpipes. We are complicit in our own demise and harm others too… again.

The Pope proclaimed that using drugs, polluting the earth, and committing acts of prejudice against one another are also sins, and has added them to the famous list with Gluttony, Sloth, and Avarice (cupidity). Will this help us treat our neighbor as ourself, and will it invite us to take another look at how we are abusing one another through our drugged water tables. Hmmm. Interesting how these news items overlap. Our over mediacted and medicine-dependent society might look again at prevention and the costs of certain choices.

The history of the chamber pot and the way in which we empty it is a long one, and speaks to economy, boundaries, taboo,language, and all the juicy discourses that make me rub my hands. These are the ones we avoid. So now, we have a new chapter in this history that glimpses our habits, our additions, our failures, and our avoidance of the consequences of our actions. Maybe the message is in water.

The flushing toilet has been a blessing and a curse. Our economy is based on circulation and elimination, and if you think carefully, the company that take away trash and handle waste are some of the richest in the world. In History of Shit by Dominique LaPorte, we begin to understand how a French king’s taxation on poop and demands for its disposal in the provinces generated a whole new economy, language, perception, and set of rituals. Think about who today lives near industrial waste or toxic dumpsites. Think about how we view people who live on the fringes of town versus those in town, and how we build our cities around these premises.

Prior to the disposal of waste outside of our cities, people would dump their chamber pots and throw their bones and scraps on the streets outside of their own houses. This is also documented in Susan Strasser's Waste and Want, A History of Trash. This method of casual dumping in the proximity of home and hearth, contributed to health and sanitary concerns. People were awash in the stuff, and it flooded streets where animals and people traveled, and scented entire cities with smoke-filled air and soot. In Terence McLaughlin's Dirt, A Social History as seen Through the Uses and Abuses of Dirt, the English equated water with evil and would not wash. Consequently, they developed many illnesses and plague. Imagine wearing layer upon layer of wool and living with the things living in that wool and on your skin. So then we dumped it out the window, then carted it to the edge of town, and now we dump it everywhere, basically. We have created all new types of contamination and pollution, sin and crime, and we are good at it. We create products to conceal our waste, and those become waste and contaminants, too.

Seems like we have been contaminating and contaminated for centuries, though we love our perfumes, aromatic soaps, deodorants, powders, and Glade air fresheners. Who can forget the constant reminders women get about how smelly we are. There are never matching products for men. Hmmm. Where does this rant lead to. I am always looking for ways to examine the way we shape our identity and polish our image.

The best way to look at ourselves is not through others, but by sifting through our own rubbish and dung heap, real and personal, physical and figurative.

The shifts in the history of elimination, trash, and dirt, we learn that what we avoid, ignore, and overlook becomes that which we are forced to contend with and confront. We cannot avoid the plethora of liquids, gases and solids we dump into our oceans, skies, and earth.. We can learn from these histories, and see that in one hundred years we have tidied and cleaned not with elbow grease, but toxic remedies that eat away at everything healthy in the process of cleaning up grime and germs we fear and want to be rid of. Our consumer addictions have us frantically buying into al of the snake oil ads and products, so our cabinets are living death traps for ourselves, families, and animals. We have thrived on gasoline and plastic for a short, but long enough time to forget that we could ever live without these things, or realize how devastating they can be. We only think about our immediate comfort. This has been going on for a s long as I can remember. We already had an oil crisis and recession in the seventies, and people recycled, used less, rode bicycles to work and made healthier food choices. And we wore bellbottoms then, too. What happened since then.

I recently had to pare my diet down to water and rice. I decide to use the occasion to learn something about myself, to become more aware of what and when I eat, how what I eat affects my ability to function, think, etc., as well as, my ability to let go of a difficult and uncertain health situation, and to become more aware of what I ingest and when. I learned I can live without sugar, butter, cheese, and other extras. I could feel quite energized with a bowl of miso and some shavings of carrot and daikon radish for breakfast, a light bowl of rice for lunch, and maybe some broccoli for dinner. No snacks in between. Eight or more glasses of water keep me awake and fluid. I realized I did not need or want that evening glass of wine anymore, or carve that two dollar coffee with sugar and milk, that rots my teet, churns my stomach, and adds to my middle-aged tire.

In the few weeks I had to pare down my diet, I have become more appreciate of everything I eat, of the value of those foods. I have been growing chives and grass for my cats, and have learned how long it takes something to grow. It is a crime how we manipulate plants and animals to make them grow faster, so we can feed the insatiable appetites of the world. I have also learned that fat does not develop being sedentary alone, but really, it is constructed upon the endless source of indigestibles we casually take in, such as potato chips at a party, a pack of Twizzlers on the go. I learned in a grammar book with its clever sample essay on the dangers of over-produced foods that it is the hydrogeneated oils that are dangerous. I think these foods are addictive, and once you stop taking them in, you lose the craving. I feel safer and more at peace in my body. In the end, we are what we eat, and our world is what we dump into it. I believe that we could make a difference with small shifts, better daily choices, and more compassion towards our neighbors, including the fish.

decay on my mind

2008-03-25T09:34:00.000-04:00

dreams have been busy

So, based on the date of the last posting, I have been away from this blog for too long. I have been writing daily, but keeping it in my notebook or computer.

Now, as spring emerges, so must I. I'll shed my snowy mantle, and slough off damp layers of soil, and bust through, stem, blossom, and all.

What I have been reading: Rebecca Solnit's Fieldguide of Lost Things, and Elizabeth Royte's Garbageland were my books of choice in January and February. I have not finished them yet. Now I have been picking up The Tears of Things, The Melancholy of Physical Objects by Peter Schwenger. I am forming a book list for specific study to embark on a new writing project with a long history. Some of the authors I'll look at again are Vladimir Nabakov, Kobo Abe, Julia Kristeva, Gisele Prassinos, and others. I am also thinking of Borge and Rimbaud whose works I have never read.

I have been musing and writing about many things, especially my favorite subjects: dirt and decay, remnants and loss, simultaneity and juxtaposition, the liquid and the body, process and indeterminancy, etc. Of course, Bataille is ever present, (since I last wrote, the blog site has added new features and details and I was able to upload this image, which I made last summer. It is inspired by two toys from my collection.) I have been working with a mentor, who is working with me on writing exercises and helping me through this process of beginning in ernest. I have always written, but now the call is urgent, and I can no longer ignore or relegate my writing practice to some dark shelf. It has to be addressed now. Writing is of the body, fluid movement of language that flows through me when I wake, and when I go to sleep. I am constantly thinking of words, making lists, writing in my head. Now it is time to put it on paper, pen to paper.

It amazes me how urgently the writing calls, and how powerful it is. Is it the gloss of metaphor, the hide-and-seek games of overlapping meanings and juxtapositions. These are things I learned in college, and perhaps in eighth grade, my first Shakespeare, As You Like It, with Mrs. Whitely, right up here in Maine. She must have been in her mid-seventies and had such a passion for the stuff, it was infectious.

One thing I have been working on is to examine the works of two artists who use the natural to talk about boundaries, simultaneous growth and decay, cycles, and inverting conventions to expose the contradictions and ambivalences humans experience around existence, the body, and nature. We are not comfortable in our own skin, yet we depend on it to keep us intact, alive, and fluid. I am also writing about a contemporary, surreal film I saw recently that deals with life, cycles, games, journeys, exchange, language, and the mind, and will complete my review and thoughts soon to post here.

the Passenger

2007-12-23T07:47:00.000-05:00

23 December: dreams of paint, thick sleep like thickly slathered paint.
Viewed Antonioni's film, the Passenger. Maria Schneider, a boyish waife in gorgeous mid-seventies cotton skirts
that flow flowers,a looker and hard to not look at, literally attaches herself to Nicholson, who's character, we discover,
takes the identity of a dead man, and in doing so, kills off his own identity. This work is full of post-modernisms, gorgeous cinematography/photography, and post-existential writing. A post-structuralist wet dream, perhaps.
For me, it bears all the greatness of Italian film-making, and a good combination of cinema verite', 70's French Connection drama/chases/car scenes, and backdrops that might have come from Richard Misrach's Desert Canto's.

We are complicit in all we see, as viewer/voyeurs, and so, on the journey of life, we can have many roles as we are passing through, touring, traveling, moving, searching, looking, discovering, covering, etc.
We could be simultaneously at the wheel and also passengers.

One of many questions this film asks is, who are we on the journey, what are we doing, and why. What is the journey. Does it have a beginning or end. What if the journey is simple an endless circle, a driving around, a gita or tour. What are the contingencies. What are the interdependences, and interrelations.
Are we the drivers or the passengers in our own lives. What is the role of driver, passenger, tourist, policeman, hotel manager etc. These banal roles have very specific implications, and their borders blur or become more exaggerated as they come into proximity to one another. The subjective relationship is always in flux.

What happens when we become someone else, how do we handle the questions and dilemmas, tasks, and charges of someone else's life. How do we judge others, and would we do any better in their shoes with all the acoutrements of their life then they did. Could we survive their life, could we save the life of another by living it, and perhaps changing its course. Is revival possible. Is a resurrection possible. What are the consequences of a possible resurrection, what are the responsibilities, contradictions, impossibilities. The film also asks us to ask ourselves, what do we do when we learn of some horrible crimes against humanity, do we remain detached and watch it like a movie, or do we change our lives, take a stand, take action, become involved, act differently. Again, all of the film metaphors are questions in and of themselves in what becomes a circuitous game of questions and answers, truth or dare.

Here the medium is the content, and the character and narrative are supports for a self-reflexive journey. Gelatin and light, delicate and sophisticated, temporal and maleable. Characters are actors as stand-ins for people, are reduced to documents and costumes, which can be switched, disposed of, and only a cover/covering. Language is also analysed and becomes pure medium, pure cinematic paint to slather on the veil of the screen, where layers of time, place, and people are peeled away and become transparent.

Meanings multiply and reproduce themselves in this liquid medium of film, and through fluid metaphor and use. The dialogue is a licking or tonguing process, always erotic, always moist, so counter balancing the dryness of daily life and perhaps, moistening, postponing the cracked, hard, and dust of death. The desert is all consuming, and vision occur so we cannot tell if what we see is real or a mirage, an appearance. Our lives and societies are structured around the visual, and those appearances, and the rule of the day determined by our perception of those things, which derive from our fears and desires at the moment. So the plot and characters are vehicles for truth, as they can shift in appearance, yet carry the same or different baggage or passengers.

In the film, there is a wonderful display of cars, including the Citroen (the Lemon), the Renault Quattre, the Cinquecento, the Ape, the Peugot sedan, a small Fiat, and a regular van, they are all small, modest, everyday transportation seen in many European countries. The only anomaly is the American car, which Nicholson drives, white with bright red leather seats and a top that exposes the faces and heads of tits passengers. The automobile is the mode to get the self from one place to another, to shift gears, to go backwards and forwards in a seemingly linear fashion, confined to roads, yet able to deviate. Cars are not always able to overcome the slipping, arid sands, however, and in the end, one might have to walk and survive the elements without speed and comfort. Such is life, bumps in a road, curves, unexpected holes, other traffic, and other dangers and risks.

Relationship is also under scrutiny. We construct and deconstruct our own lives daily. We throw the dice and take chances, we make sacrifices and compromises in order to survive and also get our needs and wants met. We must create strategies to overcome fears and challenges that thwart our chosen path. If we live in isolation, we will not confront ourselves, our true humanity, and it is in relationship, that we can live and die more fully. Then, sometimes, the meaning of life seems irretrievable, lost, and simply out of focus. How can we extend life and live it fully, when there is a danger around every corner, some road block or impediment to our movement. Futility cannot override human being's longing and need to live whatever the circumstances. This existential questions never seem to become answerable or more palatable.
I find them fascinating and infinitely ponderable, rather than frustrating.

So, The Passenger is intellectually and visually orgasmic, and after the petit morte, bathed in the light of these filmic projections and lingual stimulations, we are left with our own conversations, relationships, and battles, our own identities from which we cannot hide, run from, or cover with wardrobe accessories, or change, unless we dig deeper into our own humanity and personal compost. It is up to us to work the film of our own lives, look and frame, cut and paste. If we want to. Or, we could watch and replay what's there, editing only the most salient bits, and leaving out the long hours of waiting, acrid sweat and rancid cigarette breath smells, scratches of dust and sand in sensitive nostrils, eyes, and mouth, the sting of a desert insects, and the endless thirst for water of life.

2007-11-30T16:01:00.001-05:00

30 November: dreams about drawing.
Today I received a flattened foxhead in the mail.
It is an artist's submission for our drawing room call for art and exhibit, SPLIT, happening in December 2007 in Maine.
I was both shocked, horrified, and fascinated by its lifelike quality, its resemblance to my own cats, its nicely preserved fur and colorings, uber real, without eyes or teeth, and a black button nose, flat. Inside the triangular book which it covers, is a text written in a foxy brown ink. I haven't read the book all yet, but I saw references to roadkill and transformation. How does this piece relate to SPLIT, I wondered. Is it merely the splitting of text, or the severing of a head from its body. Really, the most unusual mail art I have ever received.

This is an example of why when there are fewer rules and driected guidelines, there are less expectations, and people feel more free to explore, experiment, and they become more open to the possibilities of self-expression. One does not have to make art that looks like art, rather, one makes work to delve into some unchartered territory, and it becomes a way to respond to ones surroundings and ones feeling. I think this piece, which admittedly I wanted to discredit somehow at first, is growing on me as a compelling response to the theme, provocative and certainly, laden with meaning. Thank you artist, for inviting a range of feelings to surface, for the simplicity and complexity of this work, and for taking risks on so many levels.

roadkill
animal human relations
animal as fur
animal rights
animal as resiurces and useful material
commodity
vanity
speed
highways
car culture
SUV's
boundaries/territories
our disregard for nature/our craving to domiate nature/our carelessness
our awe of nature/our fear of nature/ our passion for nature
our constructions of nature
our constructions or what nature is
our ambivalence

2007-11-27T07:47:00.000-05:00

27 November: heavy sleep, heavy rain.

Collecting, what is the impulse to gather, accumulate, amass and store things.
Collecting is related to collecting, collating, assembling, order, disorder, chaos, presentation, shelving, display, content, production, reproduction, economics, information, language, property, possessing, power, sovereignty, ownership, territory, bounadries, identity, things, thingness, stuff, junk, having, memory, trace, nostalgia, loss, desire, fear, waste, elimination, categorization, sacred and profane, materiality, diversity,decay, fantasy, circulation, circuitousness, exchange, give and take, the gift, association, autobiographical, political, geographical, environmental, religious, social, temperal, indeterminate, ephemeral,remants, parts,external, internal, cultural,preference, projection, self-creation, subjectivity, intersubjectivity, interchange, multiples, orginal, authenticity, orgins, longing, space, time, arranegment, installation, identification, classification, series,contradictions, difference, simliarity, artifacts, relics, scraps, remains, archives, label, stacking, surface, value, power object, aesthetics, index, model, matrix, objects, intimacy, communication, paradox, meaning,ambivalence, simultaneity, continuity, discontinuity,frameworks, sybmology, symbols, mythology, stand-in, personification, links, existence, humanity, transformation,evidence, testimony, absence, presence, reflection,history, legacy, fragment, texture, construction,heterogenity, homogeniety, icons, strategies, composition, interpretation, found objects, mnemonic, experience, control, articulation, extension, practice,mortality, immortality, transition, the metaphysical, place, the melancholic, process, death, life,
......to be continued

food

2007-11-25T13:50:00.001-05:00

25 November: no dreams.

Our food reveals much about our relationship with our bodies, ourselves, animals, nature, as well as our relationship to one another, our cravings, and our squeamishness. We create specific associations, we draw lines between sacred and profane, we establish rules and codes of behavior that conform to our categories of clean and unclean to avoid contamination, disease, and death.

Does a sacred cow save us from our mortality. Can peeling our fruit bridge the gap of horror, can we temproraily stave off the formlessness that we are thorugh the separtion of an outer layer, a crusty, brown-patched, cadaverish skin from the inner smooth, juicy, expansive, pink flesh.

The scared does not exist without the profane, and in fact, they are interchangeable. This is difficult to accpet, because it means that there cannot be a difference, and the catgories are facades. Our human identity is shaped by fears and desire.

2007-11-24T10:38:00.000-05:00

Gertrude Stein and Alice B Toklas

24 November: woke up from a dream about poodles that were the size of thumbs, brown ones.

Read some Gertie Stein this am. Read the food section. "The change the dirt, not to change dirt means that there is no beefsteak and not to have that is no obstruction, it is so easy to exchange meaning, it is so easy to see the difference." (Roastbeef, Food, Tender Buttons)

Gertie really uses writing as form, content, and context, she explains what she does in a way in her piece compositon as explanation. She asserts she is beginning agian and again. In Composition as Explanation, Stein expresses the cycling of everything, implying that appearances are unreliable, andthat which is most reliable is change.

We generate meaning by our acceptance or refusal, she asserts, of our experience of something, which is sublimated by our assumptions. Gertie uses our assumptions of writing and reading to her advantage, and we slip and slide around in her slathery verbal meanderings. She really enjoys walking the dog, Batch II. The outlaw she writes of is herself, and we could be outlaws too, if we let go of what is rigidly accepted and adhered to, to locate a new experience of something, and one which might be fascinating, enthralling, liberating, wonderful.

Gertie's inversions turn writing on its head, she makes it into a meal or a passionate kiss.