Morte Balla

proposal notes

2008-01-06T03:45:00.001-06:00

Proposal points

- the liminal
- the institutions
- the racial
- the gender
- performance identity
o surivival or passing
o priviledge and play
o occupying social spheres
o confounding authenticity,,./;l
{“}\
o \

- the anthropology of self
- the white woman, the black man, and drag
- femininity / masculinity / inbetweening
- Chicago as liminal space (between east and west canons)
- vcs as liminal (what is critical about the visual : ambiconti)
- tricksterisms.
- Subliminal political
- The force of innocence (lacking ulterior motives)
- Documentating the process (de-secreting)
- Researching themes that arise.
- Process as force of form – project as investigative reaching, rather than aiming towards a goal.
- Allowing for openness. Encouraging it.
- As process is a living/dyimg/rebirthing thing – seeing and taking and moving with this as a series of steps toward else. In one sense – video
o ‘remaking’ paris is burning. Camera turned on the filmer too. All involved
o reality tv? Myspace?
o Hip hop – etc – cultural interstices

- research topics (legitimizing) (and articulating the trope of academic legitimacy)
o the fascination.
o The other
o Etc (al the above)

- border states. Just a little bit of the personal (contextualize it)
- why I am a part of each institution and yet apart from each.
- Ulterior motives / stated motivations
o To draw attention to the segregated racial state of this specific space (these) – Chicago spaces.
o Under that – a diversion into histories
o This is (primarily) racial. (next – personally) about performing others and others for personal gain (individuation? Socialization). Then – gender crossing.
• obviously – backing the performative, the fashion. Style, adornment, costume and consumption.

- and then – the process of organization. Collaboration. The learning process. The reason for grad school. Resources, networks, and how performance plays into the process of organizing performance.
-

back to life, back to reality.

2008-01-04T04:54:00.000-06:00

the 2008 list.

(not in chronological order or order of importance but first thought and then some. subject to undocumented expansion)

-write thesis proposal. write it well. write it soon. it's overdue. afterall.

-email patrick (beforehand aforementioned) to let him know the proposal is admittedly late but on its way.

-ummmm third reader. joseph? yes please

-email n.s. like now. but not now, tomorrow.

-upload video.

-(pay bills)
-(make money)

-ballin.

-keep in touch

-read and write and read and write and read and write.

-(do laundry) (clean room) (clean studio)

-(paint)

-all that other stuff.

-new york flights planning soon (birthday)

-nashville, she said?

-meetings and recordings.

-networkin and connectivity activities

-push push push it on and up and

-buckle down

-(swim) (stretch) (move)

Evolutions

2007-12-14T12:55:00.000-06:00

Postponed my flight to NY til tomorrow. Meeting with FLR on Sunday so there was really no need for me to be there tonight. Projects before parties. Much to do.

Thinking during last night's somewhat productive insomnia about how to answer the 'How is this a VCS project' $5000 question. Sure - first the usual justifications appeared (investigating and investing in the processes and production of visual culture / semiotics of performance and play / etc....) but then it seemed suddenly and quite simply obvious:

VCS is itself a battle of disciplines, a performance of paradox embodied, a masquerade of projects and shifting alliances. VCS has no fixed identity. It is what it is all the time. It's liminal, impossible, and exciting - it challenges assumptions and resists categorization. VCS is itself an occupant and antagonizer of the borderline. Its 'residents' fight binary'd paradigms because their activated space is that of being between / both / neither either/ or. Why...?

... Is it all in the name?
Visual Critical Studies?

I'm reading The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature, and one of its fundamental assertions is that - to paraphrase - the visual is not a critical faculty. Judgemental - yes indeed. But critical?

... I need to think more to articulate this better.

status message

2007-12-14T04:45:00.000-06:00

zephyr is flying to new york tomorrow
zephyr is awake late every night, nearly
zephyr is chemically enhanced
zephyr is learning the hustle and likes it
zephyr is busy busing and bustling
zephyr is annoyed that her stolen wifi is so slow
zephyr is hiding from toothy beasts
zephyr is a toothy beast herself sometimes
zephyr is sleepless in chicago
zephyr is hungry and full
zephyr needs a week's worth of massage
zephyr is taking a break... soon enough
zephyr is blustering about the USA
zephyr isn't sure what she's started but it's gonna be ...
zephyr is no tightrope walker.
zephyr needs to take a chill pill and call her in the morning
zephyr wants to breathe sea
zephyr is up for it, what the hell
zephyr is pocketing cash
zephyr serves you heavy metal mac n cheese
zephyr is good like that
zephyr needs to quit smoking. oh god yeah.
zephyr is all for the smoking ban
zephyr's hair smells like a bar
zephyr is tired but.
zephyr hates to have to walk through the long cold flat to the bathroom when she's already in bed
zephyr considers having a chamber pot but modern times say no.
zephyr is doing it for now and later
zephyr by the seat of her pants.
zephyr : like the red queen running the treadmill
zephyr is rather overwhelmed but whatever.
zephyr is awful at pool, snowboarding, and iceskating
zephyr must remember how to breathe.
zephyr wishes her computer didn't look so... electronic
zephyr is rather wired.
zephyr knows nostalgia
zephyr really needs to pee now.
zephyr : goodnight moon, goodnight room
zephyr hush

putting the BALL back in BALLA

2007-12-10T20:01:00.000-06:00

So my thesis has shifted from the morte to the balla ...

I've teamed up with Mother Solomon Infiniti to throw a House Ball in the SAIC Ballroom.

It's gonna be wild.
Shade will be thrown. But I'm no Jennie Livingstone... right? We'll see...
Mark your calendars: May 4th.

epoetica

2007-11-27T23:34:00.000-06:00

epoetica: an electronic literature symposium organized by davin heckman

my participation was grounded in the exploration of mallarmé's 'pour un tombeau d'Anatole'.

chris died before i could close out my comments.

googlegoth

2007-11-19T12:07:00.001-06:00

the death of a scene

how to be goth

fire up a gothic match

Though you probably can't stand goth music, you tolerate going to clubs because of the occasional Ministry and Misfits that they play and the hot people in vinyl and chains. Not that you'd ever have the social skills to date one of them, but eh, *something's* gotta fuel those masturbation fantasies, right?

What kind of goth are you?

gothic fakes

2007-11-14T13:51:00.000-06:00

Gothic is about the denial of depth and the insistence on the surface - on the mask rather than the face, the veil rather than what lies beneath, the disguise rather than what is disguised." (from Sedgwick)

"Gothic... possesses no original." Spooner, 32

The very notion of 'mock gothic' is... an oxymoron, because one cannot mock what is always already mocking itself. (35) (camp, and the misfits.)

(unchained melody: 9:23am)

2007-11-14T09:23:00.000-06:00

"the legacies of the past and its burdens on the present

the radically provisional or divided nature of the self

the construction of peoples or individuals as monstrous or 'other'

the preoccupation with bodies that are modified, grotesque or diseased...

Gothic has become so pervasive precisely because it is so apposite to the representation of contemporary concerns...

we should perhaps be careful of assuming that the Gothic simply reflects social anxieties in a straightforward manner - as a genre deliberately intended to provoke horror and unease, it plays to audience expectations and therefor is rather too self-conscious to illuminate our most secret fears..."

"There is no 'original' Gothic; it is always already a revival of something else."

Catherine Spooner

- Gothic as 'the passionate overthrow of reason' coming from 5th century Goths' overthrow of Rome

- Gothic as a retrospective architectural term for medieval structures embellished with pointed arches, grotesque angles, gargoyles, stiff elongated figures and elaborate detail... ignoring the clean lines and proportional curves of Classical styles.

"[A Gothic text should comprise] a fearful sense of inheritance in time with a claustrophobic sense of enclosure in space, these two dimensions reinforcing one another to produce an impression of sickening descent into disintegration..."

Chris Baldick

(etymological/historical tensions between definitions: gothic as transcendent spiritualism or corporeal horror?)

:Gothic text: past as a site of terror, injustice that must be resolved, evil that must exorcised. 'the past chokes the present, prevents progress...'

:Gothic (Revival) architecture: the past is imbued and invested with nostalgia and idealism.

Perhaps it is only secure cultures that produce Gothic texts...

it is only a society that has stopped believing in ghosts that is able to turn them into the stuff of entertainment.

liminal inks

2007-11-14T00:15:00.000-06:00

Written on the Body - ed. Jane Caplan

I've been getting all these new tattoos lately, and wanting more and more.

("is it the pain or the art?" dad asks.
"bit of both." and then the whole healing process - the crustacean ink, the itch.)

the tattoo is "an indelible insertion that is both visible and out of reach... an exchange between interiority and exeriority, 'a paradoxical double skin...'" (xiii)

infidel(ities):

You shall not gash yourselves in mourning for the dead: you shall not tattoo yourselves." (Leviticus)

much in the first few chapters about the etymology of the tattoo - the (disputed?) relation between 'stigmata' and what we think: ink.

stigma.

brian summed up (a part of it) well : tattoos are so temporary. disregard all the warning speak of permanence. these drawings die with me (except for: see Roald Dahl: Skin). unlike the paintings (crap paintings) that go nowhere except for into corners, the boxes of photos, of letters and books and books and books of drawings. art on the body to do nothing with but burn when body burns.

on the Obscene

2007-10-31T12:53:00.000-05:00

Main Entry:
ob·scene
Pronunciation:
\äb-ˈsēn, əb-\
Function:
adjective
Etymology:
Middle French, from Latin obscenus, obscaenus
Date:
1593

1: disgusting to the senses : repulsive
2 a: abhorrent to morality or virtue; specifically : designed to incite to lust or depravity
b: containing or being language regarded as taboo in polite usage
c: repulsive by reason of crass disregard of moral or ethical principles
d: so excessive as to be offensive (obscene wealth) (obscene waste)

1593, "offensive to the senses, or to taste and refinement," from M.Fr. obscène, from L. obscenus "offensive," especially to modesty, originally "boding ill, inauspicious," perhaps from ob "onto" + cænum "filth." Meaning "offensive to modesty or decency" is attested from 1598. Legally, in U.S., it hinged on "whether to the average person, applying contemporary community standards, the dominant theme of the material taken as a whole appeals to a prurient interest." [Justice William Brennan, "Roth v. United States," June 24, 1957]; refined in 1973 by "Miller v. California":

and from Corpses, Skulls and Skeletons by Bernhard Fibicher, in SFU (p.57):

The representation of the dead body in art can only be obscene in terms of the etymological meaning of the word as being 'away from the scene' and therefor 'not visible.' Making visible something that is supposed to remain hidden creates a feeling of unease..."

(the obscenity of diaries)

To what Degree can the Horror of Death be rendered Invisible by vesting It with Maximum Visibility?

2007-10-31T12:16:00.000-05:00

drawn to the gothic and the grotesque, the liminal and contradictory, the uncanny and the unbecoming.

by the way: it's Halloween.

responding to the community (in part)

2007-10-31T11:07:00.000-05:00

Reading Six Feet Under (Kunstmuseum Bern), this from Thomas Macho's The Return of the Dead after the Modern Age:

"Death does not occur in time but in space... Spatial arrangements reflect the event that is death, an event that negates all social order and therefor the spaces within which the members of a society usually operate... complex rituals and ceremonies, measures designed to defend and protect, are enacted to counter such a risk. All death rituals are first and foremost an attempt to realign the injured social space..."

I like the idea of thinking of loss as spatial rather than temporal, and it seems to speak to Matthew's idea of death as social rupture.

As an utter and total narcissist myself it takes some stretching to get past the (very American indeed) feeling (exactly) that that absence is mine...

collective mourning

2007-10-30T20:53:00.000-05:00

M. Wolf-Meyer writes:

I think the standard American model of mourning or sadness or depression is basically egocentric, i.e . it's about a You. Maybe there's a way to think of these things as a We of some sort. Because, I would argue (if that's not too strong of a word for this purpose), mourning, sadness, depression, et al., are social, they're reactions to loss, to a short (or missing) circuit in the network. It's never something that one does to one's self, but rather an external/secondary action that causes a reaction in the You. That maybe -- in rough fashion -- makes a new You. But that You doesn't really exist outside of the new (melancholy) collective, the new society configured through the lost unit (thing, person, place).

Thinking like this might be a way to connect disparate mournings, depressions, losses -- it might unify talking about the loss of a loved one, the loss of a monument (a home or other community site), the loss of a particular future or past, etc. New societies, new collectivities, new mournings -- it's all one and the same thing, right?

expulsion

2007-10-30T05:15:00.000-05:00

Writing theses under death.
Dissertation at Middlesex:
Thesis here. not really here or there or this or then...

Soft sounds and the smiths. Music which sounds like places. Morrissey that sounds like new kings road.
Forward ever backward never – but I want to write the past out.
Writing and history destroys memory. Is that the intention? I think it is sometimes. To displace it – replace it. Make room. Make space. And other spatial metaphors.
To land it elsewhere. To countrify.

Reliving the past relieving it.

To get to death I have to move through desire. To get to desire I have to get through what I’ve had (who) and where we’ve been. what I want back.

I do not want what I havent had I want again. Bringing the past back – because we are never there as we are now. And now is always looking forward looking back. And even when I am there – that moment – thinking Be Here Now it is because I know I won’t be long.

But sometimes – and those times – it’s feeling nothing but being there then. No space for ‘feel this.’ Just.

So we live – I live – seeking those moments. Abdications of anxiety – being in the body times so much there is no corporeality to fixate on, just breathing.

I used to feel like that when I rode my bike, but now I smoke too much and the corpus intakes sharp and mental.

At diamanda galas next to heidi at some point (one wail) I closed my eyes and what I felt then was loss of enni, more than chris or kelsey even. Because he lives on and change has killed us, not killed our changing. Because we killed we and no others. Because we live. And the living loss sometimes aches more. Ache. Ache. Ache.

Backache.
Brighton. When we got fever from the cold and the rain the wind and the waves coming up on us at the end of the point where the sculpture sits.

Scotland. Where we hunted for mushrooms hunched over and I sang camp songs the whole time because it helped me focus on the task at hand. And hands so cold I had to alternate.

Wales. For valentine’s day. Walking home from the restaurant talking about sex and back to the b+b to sound off and sleep. Before the pub the next day (the day before?) I said I think I’m leaving. But I didn’t. til I did. (but perhaps I shouldve)

And Ireland. For the last time. In and on the beach that day: ‘let’s get married. I want to have your babies.’ Give me a year, he said. I have. Did. And didn’t. but ireland was beautiful – all those islands were. But there was also the country in the middle of europe, not european, or unionized. And I never never felt like home was there. Although it was, of sorts. Like casa creativa, and the patio. The courtyard.

Remember the first time: there’s the stone wall, the little alleys, and there’s the gate. There’s the wind and there’s enni, key in the lock, opening. And I’m expecting something else- a hallway, I suppose, a room. We move inside and there’s the covered space, as I expected. An entryway, supposed. Or something. But around the corner the light comes on and then – mosaic’d stone ground, and a fountain. Grape grown walls and a full stone table. Home all around. This here? Yes, this castle. Welcome home, will you?
And so I got to know rapunzel.

Casa creativa was a haunted house. Still full of furniture. Paintings and sewing. And a swallow with a broken wing, sitting on my head and on my shoulder, the day we closed the door. When a door opened behind us banging and we just figured those were ghosts (good ghosts) giving us a ciao goodbye.

California calls because of family – ocean – blue and warmish winters.
Europe calls because
Well why because.
Because I found what I was and wasn’t there

I see us growing old… and growing old… and growing old.

And before that bong hits. With devo to hip hop and roots rock reggae. In the house on may by the high school.
And before that high school
School
And school
And years of schooling
Cooling it cutting it
Doing homework.

Rocky horror and I was magenta always. Had that loud lascivious kinda flip the hair dark eyes thing going on. Not quite so sexy but I tried.

Hip hop. A california thing. Bong hits and shows at palookaville, elijah driving. Elijah on my ipod bringing what I wouldn’t do. Musical phases and stages …
“do you go to parties?” said matt. Meaning do you rave? And I didn’t but I did with him.

The first and the last time at homebase in oakland. When the lights came on and everyone still dancing.
But devo’s truck’d been stolen.

Sleeping with a guy whose only tattoo says s h u t u p on his bicep.

And me I want many many.

Shallow days … hollow nights

Can’t write about chris, see.

Just telescoping the past into my moments here, reminding me of them and him and him and her. Expelling my memories – from retention to detention.

Like if I could get them all out then I’d be for now again.

But now is not important – impotent. But isn’t. but I’m enamoured with who and where and what who with I’ve been. wanna tell all y’all
I’ve been her
And here
And there and

It’s always been like this, since I began remembering. Don’t wanna theorize memory wanna live it again.
And he said she said I did we did what then.

I took my bike to brighton on the train. I walked it through gatwick on the way back cuz I needed to pee so bad. I’d crashed and drank a couple pints alone. I took photos and then I rode home. From london bridge... to chicago avenue. biking in the dark.

I want to turn it all out, histories.
I always have.
I don’t know what that has to do with studying.
But it’s true, it’s to lose my memory.
A cliché but: living out loud(ly).

decision.x

2007-10-30T00:10:00.000-05:00

in class today i decided (and i have decided so much lately, oh yes) to finally for now forget about theses in the sense of determining direction and instead allow that to arise - if it will - from what i read, write, exercise and experience in the next couple of months - and then interpret. i think i already said that's what i wanted - well. that's what i'm gonna do.

scribbling such to joseph grigely on someone else's notepad in the back of the exchequer later. approval. yes. i might see if he's willing to be my second reader... he suggested that i come up with a different word for what i'm doing here - blogging doesn't really cover it. undercut it.

more books (and reading)

2007-10-29T13:30:00.000-05:00

Phillippe Aries: Western Attitudes toward Death

Thomas Lynch: The Undertaking: Life Studies from the Dismal Trade

Catherine Spooner: Contemporary Gothic and Fashioning Gothic Bodies

Geoffrey Galt Harpham: On the Grotesque: Strategies of Contradiction in Art and Literature

Kunstmuseum Bern: Six Feet Under: Autopsy of our Relation to the Dead

(i went to the library)

I have a meeting with Terri on Wednesday to talk serious about this thesis. I feel no closer to what it is I want or need to/should do with it - do it for. I need to present timelines, deadlines, outlines and models. I am reading Mourning Sex and underlining often. But still my 'response,' my reading, is emotive and receptive rather than critical/theoretical.
Indeed, why do I separate these out, divide in binarisms?

Wednesday (halloween) is my day to present and receive on the text I just 'completed' for Beth Nugent's writing class. it's all narrative - and personal - narcissistic confessional - moving inwards and outwards, backwards and forwards, structured around dates of journals / comments / poemish stuff. hyper colloquial, and here.

My intention in presenting it to the class is to question the efficacy of personal narrative (relating to trauma + loss) and whether showing rather than speaking about the relationships between desire and death, and timing and memory and the breakdown of language, functions as a part of said text's reading (whether this is obvious - or rather, if the unstated is received as a part of the text's 'statement' as much as what is said.)

(including experimentations in form / image as part of 'text'. etc)

This is what I like to do. I wonder if it would be 'possible' (in a theses sense) to spend the rest of this semester creating and editing these personal narrative texts and then use the next to theorize or expound or analyze those as if I were critiquing (my own work) as an example of the concepts I do wish to explore 'academically' but feel unable to do properly at the moment.

Shit, I dunno. I wish I were doing an MFA instead. I wish I knew what to show Terri on Thursday. And I still need a third reader.

apple+shift+4

2007-10-29T13:26:00.000-05:00

snippets

2007-10-16T01:15:00.000-05:00

- Reading Julia Kristeva -- Black Sun -- frustratedly because the first four chapters (as far as I read until the weekend) address melancholia/loss/depression from such a psychoanalytically linguistic perspective that the communique was all but utterly obscured to a 'layperson' such as myself... reminding me of other linguistic frustrations (switzerland) but that this is supposedly my mother tongue. So - arguments for accessible theory - that isn't written like an AP address, either, but doesn't presume such elaborate prior education of the reader. Is that possible? It's a translative problem that I experience... psychoanalysis being both a rigorous academic discourse (and precise language) and a 'lingo' that has been extensively disseminated via pop-culture 'ensures' that terms such as autoeroticism / oedipal / narcissism / libidinal / neurotic / subject ... etc etc have double meanings, are actually unsure. And I have no patience to learn the true language of Freud and his readers - prefer summaries of Lacan to the man himself. (Much as I had no patience for German grammar... oh woe. Oh, failure.

- Talking to Joey from downtown to Division - his suggestion that one possible route (of all these many) to 'take' would be researching inhabiting the liminal - the divisions, as it were - the personal vs. the academic. the professor vs. the friend. the presentation vs. the conversation. acceptable vs. the invalid(ated). Meaning (I'm thinking) investigating the vs. itself - the ring time. When and where they meet and merge and how bloody fuckin emotional that space is - because we have no rules there, in the border (drag).

- I don't know if I can do this. There is no 'this' yet, really. I told our class today I was considering a leave of absence. I probably won't, I don't know what else I'd do. But I have no critical distance from my research now - to even call it research is ridiculous. I gag on Chris-lessness. I'm resisting my positioning because even though I wear the dark hair and Calaveras earrings / all in black I hate to be the poster girl for dead.

- The bartender tonight (sweet woman) thought I was her age. I knew she was older but propriety doesn't allow me to say that, does it? She's 35. I'm 27. She checked my ID and the joke was on her / on me - god I hate having a body these days.

Languages of Loss

2007-10-12T14:35:00.000-05:00

Most interesting for me, is this notion of language as a form of representation, unequipped in many forms to give a voice (or an image) to loss (death). I have been writing on desire, and that loss is a space which is not based in desire, which makes it an interesting starting point for looking at the limits of representation.

If representation is based in desire, and loss is not, how and under what circumstances do the two intersect, if at all? Here is a small section that I wrote last night in another attempt to write down my thesis topic. :) This is one of many, but the one most appropriate for the question of language:

This thesis is an investigation into the experience of artwork, and how certain modes of making work become an expansive experience, despite the limits of representation. The reason I have chosen to investigate this notion through loss, is because loss is that which is not based in desire: it is not a construct, but a reversal of construct. A diminishing of preconceived notions, a lack within an otherwise constructed self. If this is correct, then loss will be the process of undoing rather than doing, a space we can start over, where our positives are put into question in the face of the negative.

key concepts

2007-10-08T13:43:00.000-05:00

Potential avenues of inquiry to travel
which may or may not merge further down the road

1. Languages of Loss
how do we communicate flux and loss with language?
how is the 'fixity' of language disrupted in narratives of death?
naming with euphemisms - the way our culture speaks of death (or doesn't)
unsaying - or speaking around something - suggestive language
language of desire - fragmentation and sequence - editing
the testimonial compulsion - personal narrative - function and form
speaking silence
breakdown and progress

2. The Death Mask
'facing' death through masquerade/identity play
the carnivalesque/burlesque/grotesque
methods towards identifying with the liminal
towards integrating/experience the 'knowledge' of death-of-self by being 'not-me'
history of ritual mask-and-dancing
halloween - danse macabre - dia de los muertos
the fashioning of death (skull n crossbones) as an american way of making absence present
Six Feet Under - embodying (giving form to) death/dying/etc through television (actors as masks)
goth commodification
wax works, automata, marionettes and the Uncanny

3. Eros and Thanatos
sex and death - the pleasure principle and the death drive
decadence, debauchery and decay
body modification - tattooing
externalization of pain
attraction - repulsion
jouissance
violence

4. Performing Mourning
grief tropes - the 'stages of grief'
putting the fun back in funeral
the memorial theatre
role-playing
ritualizing change
acceptable mourning - 'good grief' - vs unacceptable responses
discomfort and embarrassment
public grieving - community
inhibition and transgression

(chant)

2007-10-08T01:47:00.000-05:00

(London 2005) (after Tom Phillips)

Abstract I

2007-10-08T00:52:00.000-05:00

Thesis I: first thesis proposal

This project first attempts an opening of language :

death dances. (death does dancing)

death dances... (the plural of what death does)

morte balla: ballare (to dance)
ballin' (to ball...)

The Online Urban Dictionary offers this definition of a balla: "A pimp or player. Someone who makes alot of money and can got anyone or anything that they want with no problem."
Death's a player - 'he' got anyone. got me good...

How does 'personal narrative' function in a text, and to what aim? To what end?

I wrote the dissertation for my BFA on the use of comics (graphic narratives, sequential art) to communicate the fragmentation of self and memory that follows from trauma and loss ...because my sister Kelsey committed (to) suicide just before the end of the program's 3rd year. Having 'finally' reached a point, or a space (this last past year) from which I felt able to revisit the rupture of identity and history that that experience effected - to articulate loss - I decided to move sideways from the identity performances of Ambiconti (and the decadence of Exuberant Corpse) to explore the connections between masquerade, doubling, desire and death. Towards articulating the heretofore ambiguous contiguity therein...

Then oh God a murder occurred. Can those moments even be said to occur? Time stops. A shot in the dark - *
And language imploded
again

*

*

*

Re-begin.

Because I find it impossible to look death in the face - for death has no face - I create masks, doppelgängers, to stand-in for the space of lack and loss, in order to hold (onto) the conversations I'm impelled to imagine.

Conversation implies language. Absence has none. Absence (lack, loss, and desire) must be cloaked in the guise of a presence to even be spoken of.

Masks, doubles (alter egos) and guises have been donned since the dawn of history in order to enact rituals of communication with death, loss of identity, desire, alternate realities and all manner of other ineffable experiences that are intrinsic to the human experience but alienated by the imposition of language.

Language is insufficient: communication must be embodied.
Bodies of texts: books, tattoos. Television.

I'm trying to do too much. I don't have to do it all at once. This is one paper of many. A deadline does not mean I'm dying.
I feel like Death's whore. Keeps sending me out to get fucked. Waiting in the wings. Pay up.

How can I possibly propose? I'm spoken for. What is it I'm going to do? I'm gonna die. You're gonna die.
Let's dance it. >Ball it.

Morte Balla (at http://portablemortal.blogspot.com) begins as a hyper-space project, an online documentation of my (and others') processes of (in)articulating the 'presence' of death in contemporary and historical artistic/linguistic discourse. Locating the 'archive' in the digital realm enables the development of a rhizomatic methodolody - and allows meaning to be produced in the space between time and place. The narrative that the project produces is both fragmented and progressive - simultaneously moving forwards and backwards, as each new 'post' pushes the previous further into the ground of the project's inception.

How will Morte Balla end? What form will it have taken, then? Its days are (yours and mine are) numbered.

What would you do if you knew you had seven months to live?
I'd write it out. Tell stories. Ride it out. Dance, laugh, fuck and play. Rite it. Get down with Death. Learn to die.

What's the point, though? What's a thesis? According to my dashboard dictionary, it's a statement put forward to be maintained and proved.
Statement: this happened. this happens. this happens all the time.
Inquiry: Once (twice/...) it happens, what happens next? How do our visual cultures equip us to face the facelessness of absence? The impossible certitude of our own expiration date?
Statement: we are armed with bourbon and jolly rogers' skulls. we adorn our selves with masks and makeup. we search out and eat the loss of others in order to glimpse our own. we need narrative. desire continuity. and desire -- reaches for what isn't.

So: I propose: to reach into what has no interior. To grasp at the formless, to quote the ineffable, perform permutations of reality and fuck the abstract.
So to speak.

So: to speak.

quilting

2007-10-07T16:51:00.000-05:00

also, it makes me really want to finish the quilt. so much of what
you wrote about so far has gone through my head (without reference to
academics) while cutting up k's clothes and piecing them back
together. it always makes me think of some essay i read in school, i
think it was in spanish actually about how in all elegies the mourner
disassembles what has been lost and recomposes or refashions it with a
new form and new representative function. metamorphosis and all. this
was talking about poetry, how objects and imagery forms around the
lack, but my quilt and your work are the same. i am close to putting
all the bigger pieces together, and then it just needs to be quilted.
[i am so in love with metaphor...i am pretty sure that the ability to
recognize and create metaphor is what most people mean when they say
god.]

-mara reynolds (oct. 4, email)

Bodies of Work

2007-10-07T15:56:00.000-05:00

from 'Critical Languages' in Bodies of Work, by Kathy Acker

1. The languages of flux. Of uncertainty in which the 'I' (eye) constantly changes. For the self is "an indefinite series of identities and transformations."

...3. Languages which contradict themselves.

4. The languages of this material body: laughter, silence, screaming.

...7. Language that announces itself as insufficient.

8. ...the languages of intensity. Since the body's, our, end isn't transcendence but excrement, the life of the body exists as pure intensity. The sexual and emotive languages.

...10. Language that forgets itself.

My ideas end in a void. There is no end - an end is something. No more nouning in that unplace.

I have been stricken of late with the utter unknowability of. The reach of the space beyond reach is unspeakable - quantum physical. The inability of the/my brain to even think about - much less write about - unbeing - dying, being born -

Why try? Afterall. Why not be one who writes after all without a disbelief of after or of all?

How can I write about death and loss if I cannot examine it within myself - the thing (unthing) that slips always out of one's vision. Glimpses and then gone.

I did not get over Kelsey's death - I learned not to look for it so hard.
I forgot. Incorporated.
That is what we do.

danzare con la tue morte: to dance with your death - to choose: the symbolic or the invisible.

This is (will be) a Thesis. I cannot, unfortunately, compose an invisible text of unknowing - (to dance alone). Must, instead, choose stand-ins. In (-its) stead. Embody the abstraction: give symbolic form. Create a language first...

To speak on death I cannot 'face' it.
To speak to death I must face it - give face.
To speak to the mask of death. Dance with Death's doppelgänger.

Arghhhhhh

filespace

2007-10-07T15:32:00.000-05:00

I've created a Google Group for the project - a space to upload/download files for now, and possible more later.

Feel free to join and share your stuff.

sightseeing.pdf is a text i wrote in nov. 06 : Sightseeing and Sidetrips Along the Death Drive.

"so what is the decay, actually?"

2007-10-07T14:53:00.000-05:00

to add to fresh bookmeat...

2007-10-07T14:12:00.000-05:00

Peggy Phelan: Unmarked
she is awesome, I mean come on:

"Unmarked attempts to find a theory of value for that which is not "really" there, that which cannot be surveyed within the boundaries of the putative real. By locating a subject which cannot be reproduced within the ideaology of the visible, I am atrempting to revalue a belief in subjectivity and identity which is not visually representable. This is not the same thing as calling for greater visibility of the hitherto unseen."

Peggy Phelan: Mourning Sex

Ernst Van Alphen: Caught By History: Holocaust Effects in Contemporary Art (horrible title, an even worse cover. But an excellent book!)

John Dewey: Art as Experience

Walter Benjamin: Theses on the Philosophy of History (his concept of 'acedia' is pertinent to loss and representation)

Ed. David Eng and David Kazanjian: Loss

I also just received De Certeau's Practice of Everyday Life. His chapter "Making Do" is awesome, expecially when he talks about perspective vs. prospective vision.

The challenge is how to fit it all into one thesis...

fresh bookmeat

2007-10-04T12:22:00.000-05:00

arrived from amazon.com today:

C.S. Lewis: A Grief Observed

June Knights Nadle: Mortician Diaries: the Dead Honest Truth from a Life Spent with Death

Kim Akass and Janet McCabe: Reading 'Six Feet Under:' TV to Die for

Mike Kelley: Foul Perfection: Essays and Criticism

Michel de Certeau: The Practice of Everyday Life

more soon.

dis/integration

2007-10-04T04:37:00.000-05:00

over coffee / tea at the bleeding heart bakery this morning with N - amongst other things:

suicide texts - not suicide letters per se but what is written in the space before or in the buildUP/breakDOWN towards suicide (premeditated, accumulated, deliberate - liberate?) - and the breakDOWN therein - the clenching of the text, the spacelessness. the limit and the looming... wreaking / knelling --

and i was thinking -- for THESE ARE NOT SUICIDE TEXTS, but are of a nearness and companionship with ... yet also, essentially (for this too shall pass) ever a moving away from (the schismrupture gaping echo chamber of) the Otherdeath --

--about reversal: in one, a text builds towards, or through, its breakdown. in the other, it breaks down as it progresses (into the past - towards what has already passed on).

and i can't help it. i miss it: the nearness of the implosion and wax-working of him and/or her was also, of course, a proximity to her and/or him.

meaning... if i can articulate it, i can't articulate IT at all.

inventory

2007-10-04T03:12:00.000-05:00

a long day, but 'long in a good way,' as i was saying...
now it's 3:15 am and i'm somewhat drunk and not quite ready to cash out to the darkness
...(due to: decadence )
meetings with N and Peg today
both good / each emerging new avenues
or attitudes - further fingers to outstretch it with -
(masquerades?)
hard to be in class this evening, though - just wanting to read or write
about my Own Thing... hard to intellectually involve myself with the pursuits of others now - selfish feeling
(I)
and then, after, thinking i'm gonna go home and write or watch or read some... but no
--wells on wells
--the cobra lounge
--drinking with berit and talking past and sex and laden memories. feeling when drunk like nothing but that matters: why there are alcoholics.
but boozy tiredness is so inhibiting to the articulation of the mad mass mess of.
reaching for time. desire and loss -- of or in the process echoes the intentions of the text... so full today of what all there is to put forth, to stitch and so together.
bourbon, on the rocks.
and lost.
revisiting michelle's thesis Stain last night and in my mind today. who woulda thunk it'd 'end'up so similar. echoes of experience and our mingled methodologies. then a text from the changing room: come see this dress. i'm on the left.
it's true i don't want darkness until the last possible moment. oblivion, yes... tossing waiting, please no.
gross

Acéphale

2007-10-03T19:37:00.000-05:00

also available:

2007-10-03T03:00:00.000-05:00

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See other domains like this.

Ambiconti's last post (patterns or premonitions)

2007-10-03T02:29:00.000-05:00

Monday, August 13, 2007
the missing link

I just started reading Death, Desire and Loss in Western Culture by Jonathan Dollimore. It's good - it's great - at least the introduction is.

Identity is experienced ambivalently, and the urge to consolidate it is complicated by the wish to relinquish it. The seductiveness of the idea of this death of the self has always been a part of Western individualism. And, with that energetic, perverse hubris so characteristic of this individualism, there will be those who seek death not only as the release from desire, but also as its object..." (xxi)

I've been trying to find/name/articulate the connection between the ambiconti-identities project and the continuous amphibious mourning projects... and here is, at least, a clear and coherent place to 'begin' the weaving-together. Also...

Now it is the belief that Western decadence can be overcome only through a non-rational, self-risking immersion in change. Represented most brilliantly by Friedrich Nietzsche, the concern is less to control change than to identify with it - ecstatically, sacrificially, and even masochistically... rather than escaping the world of change by succumbing to the death-wish, or by seeking to transcend it metaphysically, one had to enter into a Dionysian identification with it... even to the point of welcoming destruction and the shattering of self... an urgent need simultaneously to energize and to annihilate selfhood. (xxx)

Which is all very interesting, not least because (as Joey and I were discussing only somewhat facetiously yesterday) 'it's all about me' and that paragraph right there quite neatly delineates the trajectory of last year's projects - from decadence to multiplicity, via Dionysian routes, leading 'up' to the possible 'annihilation of Zephyr' (for a short while, at least -- at least, I think --) in favor of furthering the (duplicitously) gothic (rocknroll) ambitions of Jaqcuie (which are...?).

at 10:00 PM 0 comments

Posted by to joaovalenteaguiar to under Citations, Assay, Marxism, Alvaro Cunhal

2007-10-03T01:34:00.000-05:00

But the expectation of the death or a future of perpetual shades (that defeats intensify) calls the memory the past. What could have done so that my brother was not looser? It I did not only leave it a task that also belonged to me? E still… What was made of all this expended energy while still alive and so sofregamente sucked? What is - not of my body or my soul - what is of my shares of an entire life?

(translated from Portuguese by Google)

Red October

2007-10-02T23:44:00.000-05:00

death
+ indulgence
+ play
+ masquerade
+ tricks
+ sex
+ decadence

= halloween

reading: Death Makes a Holiday : A Cultural History of Halloween

such a simple recipe...

intention tension (rough)

2007-10-02T22:55:00.000-05:00

This particular virtual space is intended as a drafting place to map out / put up (host) / put down (insult?) ideas / notes / research / links / writtens towards the thesis for my someday-MA in Visual and Critical Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago...

a thesis which contains multitudes, while containing nothing but lack and space...

a rhizomatic exploration of mourning, loss, and desire - masquerade, play, and the trickster - personal narrative, affect and theory - authorship, memory, and text...

a work in progress
that wants to work backwards

muse'd by the Angel of History...

for epoetica this summer i wrote:

the first video work i made, i made from footage of kelsey’s funeral set to a soundtrack of billy idol.

My mom comes and brings a vhs recorded with Kelsey’s memorial service. Why do we call it hers? Ours, about Kels (’over my dead body’). None of us have ever watched it. I take it to school, turn off the monitor and dub it to DVD. Then watch it one night in my basement studio, lights off, lying on the futon, blanket on.

i didn’t know - and couldn’t be bothered to learn - how to rip right from the DVD. so i filmed it again on my (cracked) computer screen, mini dv camera balanced on a beer bottle and a stack of books - as am, often, i. an aesthetic was born: lo-fi, rascuache and hand-made-for-youtube style.

Editing. The more I clip and playback the further the distance between the white-faced 23 year old with the hollow eyes and skeletal shadows and the me that’s like, ‘hey Chris can you do me a favor? Film me dancing around and singing to billy idol? It’s kinda weird but it’s to edit over the film from the funeral… you know, ‘hey little sister, what have you done?’

i'm into all the the youtube tropes - the music videos, the narcissistic (self-conscious) metubes, the i.movie edits, the bedroom girls - and i can claim my interest’s academic (it is - somewhat - so i do) but the youtube context (which is a separate theatre from the one i set to screen these works in) also works to disable any academic reading (comments & responses).

one of the most intriguing aspects of contexts such as youtube - such as livejournal, myspace, blogspot and so on - is the publicizing of ‘the private.’

death is a private affair. aren’t most affairs private? don’t they often start and end in public, though? i upload the evidence of my romance with death to explore the connections between ‘our’ fascination with voyeurism (personal, pornographic, violent or vitriolic), ‘our’ exhibitionist, group-therapy think-out, ‘our’ cathartic acts of record and replay.

to revisit death by video, to edit loss, reflects my process of memory and memorial, and speaks to and about the process itself. it repeats and it distances. reminds and cuts out. i work with little intention (just make something, anything, from this) - rely on chance encounters with timing, tuning, imagery. there are moments when two tracks (or more) align just-so, seemingly at random, and sense is made, momentarily. that sense-making, meaning-making moment, motivates the next motion taken.

how to describe a process? to play it, and/or play it out.

To refer to death as a creative process does not imply that it is attractive or even ‘artistic.’ We humans have an instinctual aversion to the sweet, sickly effusions that decomposition produces. Yet this stage is necessary before the cleansed, aesthetically comfortable ‘bare bones’ state can be attained…

Mary Bradbury writes that the split between what is real and what is theatre is patricularly hazy in the social organization of death, as certain aspects of this organization are highly ritualistic in character: the funeral, the burial, even the embalming of the body are all performative traditions…

Academic attachment became elusive - instead, we reverberated, echoing the emotions of loss and reclamation that we purported to investigate impassively, and performing exuberant grieving as playfulness infiltrated the pathos and sadness that had marked our individual mourning practices…

All we may expect of time is its reversbility. Speed and acceleration are merely the dream of making time reversible. You hope that by speeding up time, it will start to whirl like a fluid...

The imagination is scarcely any better equipped to appreciate reversibility than the person who has never slept would be to appreciate dreaming. And yet we experience in it that electrocution of time we call predestination. The signs exchanged in the process are instant conductors unaffected by the resistance of time. Certain linguistic fragments run back along the path of language and collide with others in the witticism, dazzling reversibility of the terms of language. In this they fulfil an unexpected destiny, their specific destiny as words, conforming to the predestination of language.

-- Jean Baudrillard, Cool Memories

regarding the fragmentation compulsion

2007-10-02T22:16:00.000-05:00

the attempt or urge to disrupt sequencing and linearity
BECAUSE IT IS COUNTER TO THE EXPERIENCE OF MEMORY AND the narration of history
is itself OPPOSED to the experience of loss

WHAT is more linear then loss?

wait.

fractured and fragmented narratives as methods of memory recall
of traumas or griefs and PIECING togethers that
concurrently and are ever always
rebreaking apart

but

still STILL still STILL seem to function reparatively? a nearly unconscious function of the mind?
to reclaim through fragmentation and pieces
to disguise the full gaping never-more-
the goddamnit nothing
the 'good and' gone of it.
because

if i were (you we were) to tell it 'truth'fully'
just the facts, man
(attempt to induce the experience
in the reader: the lack)
there'd be no going back
and not even pieces - just
a shot in the dark and then -

*

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