enter these starved and broken pieces

I don't know I don't know I don't know. Managing to forge a "whole" work out of this mess, the operation keeps getting interrupted for long stretches of time. As always, the underlying intuition is that this is the whole, that there is nothing to wait for, here we are, etc. I withheld certain parts of the mix that I put together in May while at the Visual Studies Workshop, since I thought posting them would preempt any release of this "whole;" but now listening to what I had managed to put together, while taking account of what has been collected in the meantime, I know it will all change again. Or maybe I'm closer to the end than I'm letting myself admit. In any case, I've decided to post the significantly new parts of the bigger work here, given they will probably entirely change or be folded into a different continuum. Current misgivings annotated.
Possible Intro (1 min. 35 sec.)
well, even though it's intentionally clunky, for something that I've spent so much time on it's probably not an appropriate opening, especially since the pandering, sterile beat gives it the feel of a public radio PSA on monitoring your cholesterol.
It's the locality! (1 min. 33 sec.)
I love Williams' quote that art is not "putting sugar on cake." A crucial bit from the PennSound bytes. Exposition, exposition so . . . yawn? (one person has told me it's boring for those who already know Williams-- the core audience; evidence of constant my schizophrenia concerning who it's for and who will listen. But wait, it's not all sugar on cake, buddy!)
Have you ever been to Paterson? (2 min. 5 sec.)
Cloying? Also, when editing, I had a lot of trouble making the Carole Maso samples really sound like they fit; I still think they might be a little off, even though they provide some crucial connective material and diversity of voice (I found myself overusing Bob Perelman and Lytle Shaw throughout, so any chance I had to get other material in, I took it.)
Blocked (4 min. 31 sec.)
I think this section is the most successful at doing what I wanted the piece to be doing, a mix between informational and musique concrete elements. I do think that, as it goes on it succumbs to the banality of overused effects, which, while may have some place in a more live setting, I think falls a little flat here after a while. For some reason, I think the loops and delays and filter sweeps went on for so long because I wanted to get some particular sound bites in, but but by the time that they fade up into the mix, it already feels like they've been "said" on a subconscious level.

“no focuses . . . no certainty”

They took the Buick today, the Le Sabre that in 6 years I put an extra 100k+ miles and which, in the end, introduced me the the actual streets of Paterson. Looking at my notebooks, trying to reconstruct that first visit, I must have been driving a lot. A long series of pages on Deleuze’s “plane of immanence” signified the stasis of home in South Carolina, and the relatively untrammeled concentration of summer. Then follows some poem-notes about Milwaukee—was it just restlessness that brought me there? Something particular?—mentions of a meeting in Chicago, trying to sell a stock in Cleveland, some notes on bromeliad (which would seem to bring me back to Florida, but notebooks dictate the chronology of memory more than the order of fact) . . . neither Spanish, nor moss . . . Smithson on enantiomorphic chambers and Hotel Palenque “no focuses . . . no certainty” (and here, there is a time stamp with a entrance sticker from the Whitney dated 7/27/05), and then some poem-notes on Paterson when I first visited, at dawn “before the city remembers the psychosis/a thousand silky automatons/have cocooned its brain in . . . the cataract of the falls/like a stereoscope slide/in a restaurant dumpster./The Krishnas who turn out to be/convicts in bring orange jumpers/ Enlightened!”, relatively blank pages=NYC, a page on Lacan and angels—which again may have signified a return to home (Lacan: “the signifier is stupid”), but some notes on daucus carota led me to believe that there was also a trip to Montauk in there somewhere as the Buick always had camping gear trunked for spontaneous trips— that fine weed of summer, aka Queen Anne’s lace, was all along the way, but it was the end of Long Island where I finally attained its natural history.
All this, I guess, is vicarious living, since I haven’t been able to have that kind of spontaneous summer for a while (this is the third summer consumed by moving), although the Buick did some good work getting me from the South to Rochester and back (with stops in Philadelphia and Baltimore and Asheville) and then all the way to Seattle before conking out for good. It completely died on the BQE last year while driving with L______ back to Providence, but, against all odds was resurrected at an Amoco in Queens. This particular 88 Buick was called a “poem” by N_____’s mother, and many a day it got me through the poem-streets of downtown Paterson, sometime festooned with lavalier mics—a make-shift and moving talk-show set. Because Leonard seemed to like it, I picked up Gabriel Gudding’s Rhode Island Notebook recently, and I could neither relate to the poet’s problems nor believe the veracity of his accounts of them, because he begins with an unfortunate travesty of Buick owners . . . and he has yet to own up to the model of his car. He only calls it “my efficient Toyota” (it’s obviously a Prius). No I prefer the Cortázars’ red Fafner from Autonauts of the Cosmoroute.










In the last few days, as I moved the limping Buick from parking place to parking place to prevent it from getting ticketed as an abandoned car, it would billow smoke from both ends; since this is Seattle, people would stop and look at me as if I were a baby-killer.

RiP also Nishiki 91, which was usually strapped onto the back of the Buick, and which, also, on that first morning in Paterson, glided me in a way more effortlessly than the Buick could between my random parking place, the Falls and the factories. The Buick was donated to Youth Radio, and hopefully it will be transmuted into at least a flash audio recorder; the Nishiki, by virtue of its being left there by mistake, will have many a Gothic intrigue in the VSW haunted mansion of art.

Last days in the Badlands:

Old Dreams of the Void

In this performance and lecture given at Visual Studies Workshop on 5/7/08, the occasion was an invitation to discuss my Paterson work at the beginning of my residency (t)here (now almost over); for this event, however, I talked about the blog and Williams only after a detour into the alchemical work of Michael Maier, Jakob Böhme, Robert Fludd, with further divergences into UFOs, Robert Smithson, and Marlene Dietrich. If you want to skip around this big file (1 hr., 16 min., 327 MG), it starts with a laptop performance, which lasts about 6 minutes. Then , starting at 6 min. 55 sec., there begins a discussion of alchemy (under the assumption that in it we can find unexpected alliances with Williams’ work, as we move from the Philosopher’s Stone to the Williams’ less exalted rocks). At about 52 minutes, I begin the more plodding requisite rehashes of the blog. Maybe at one point, I'll encapsulate this lecture in something less bandwidth-intensive, less murky, perhaps something along the lines of what I did with "Theogony of the Parking Lot." Until then, process, process, process.

Two and Two with Language

Click here for the recording of our recent book discussion of Paterson Book I at the Visual Studies Workshop in Rochester, NY. We discussed numbers and mathematics; the archive as the condition of knowability; man as a city, woman as flower; nature and industry; as well as rehearsing some issues regarding Book One that weren’t recorded in our earlier real-space discussions of Paterson.

In sterquilinio putredinis

I am convinced that the future is lost somewhere in the dumps of the non-historical past; it is in yesterday's newspapers, in the jejune advertisements of science-fiction movies, in the false mirror of our rejected dreams.
--Robert Smithson

The essential starting requirement is in the shit-heap of our putrefaction.
--Morienus, the Roman

Somewhere between Smithson's kodachromed futurism and the epiphanies of ancient alchemists, one can find one's way through Williams' Paterson. However, in getting together some materials for another talk I'm giving on Paterson, I'm finding that trying to unify all these transhistorical strategies for perceiving the everyday has many rabbit holes to fall through. At one point, I thought it might be interesting to think about the univocity of being (as it manifests itself in German mysticism, Spinoza, Deleuze) as a way to think about the ways in which Williams confounds a clear notion of his own position, and its relation to the city and poetic "transcendence." That didn't really pan out. I think, in the end, things get too "profound," full of secret underlyings-- difficult to pin on someone who said "the surface/glistens, only the surface./Dig in--and you have/a nothing, surrounded by/a surface, an inverted/bell resounding." (124) This is a long cry from "aaa ooo zezophazazzzaïeozaza eee iii zaieozoakoe ooo uuu thoezaozaez eee zzeezaozakozakeude tuxuaalethukh"--a gnostic password that immediately gets one into VIP lounge of angels and archons.
In any case, throughout May I'll be working on the more large-scale portion of this project as a resident at the Visual Studies Workshop. Not sure how much of that will pan out in blog entries, but we'll see. I'm still hoping to get a reading group together in Rochester (not sure if this will happen yet either), and I bet I can find an all-female thrash band who will do the Marcia Nardi letters. One can only hope. Some more Paterson visits?: not sure. I think Richmond, Virginia is closer to Paterson than Rochester is, even though I fooled myself into thinking that Rochester would put me in close contact.
This much, however, I know so far about Rochester: chair 223 is a deathtrap.