See, for instance this picture. You know, creation is what put that dog there, and creativity is what makes us see a chicken on his hindquarters. When you think about — you know, I was born in Brazil and grew up in the 70s under a climate of — political distress. My first job was actually to develop a way to improve the readability of billboards, and based on speed, angle of approach and actually blocks of text. And they also decided that I had to -— to give me a very ugly Plexiglas trophy for it. And another point — why I’m here — is that the day I went to pick up the Plexiglas trophy, I rented a tuxedo for the first time in my life, picked the thing — didn’t have any friends. On my way out, I had to break a fight apart. Somebody was hitting somebody else with brass knuckles. They were in tuxedos, and fighting. It was very ugly. And also — advertising people do that all the time — and I — well, what happened is when I went back, it was on the way back to my car, the guy who got hit decided to grab a gun and shoot the first person he — it was me. Luckily, it wasn’t fatal. And, even more luckily, the guy said that he was sorry and I bribed him for compensation money, otherwise I press charges. And that’s how — with this money I paid for a ticket to come to the US in 1983, and that’s very — the basic reason I’m talking to you here today: because I got shot. Well, when I started working with my own work, I decided that I shouldn’t do images. You know, I became — because when I decided to go into advertising, I wanted to do — I wanted to airbrush naked people on ice, for whiskey commercials, that’s what I really wanted to do. But I wasn’t into selling whiskey; I was into selling ice. The first works were actually objects. It was kind of a mixture of found object, product design and advertising. And I call them relics. This is the clown skull. Is a remnant of a race of — a very evolved race of entertainers. This is the Ashanti joystick. Unfortunately, it has become obsolete because it was designed for Atari platform. This is the pre-Columbian coffeemaker. The idea came out of an argument that I had at Starbucks, I insisted that I wasn’t having Colombian coffee; the coffee was actually pre-Columbian. The Bonsai table. The entire Encyclopedia Britannica bound in a single volume, for travel purposes. And the half tombstone, for people who are not dead yet. So I decided to do work with clouds. Because clouds can mean anything you want — this one looks a lot like Mickey Mouse’s praying hands. But I was still, you know — this is a kitty cloud. “The Snail.” “The Teapot.” I started taking that into the realm of landscape. I made these pictures called “Pictures of Thread,” and I named them after the amount of yards that I used. So this is a lighthouse. This is “6,500 Yards,” after Corot. “9,000 Yards,” after Gerhard Richter. And I don't know how many yards, after John Constable. And by manipulating sugar over a black paper, I made portraits of these children from St Kitts. This is “Valentina, the Fastest.” “Valicia.” “Jacynthe.” So chocolate is very good, because it has — it brings to mind ideas that go from scatology to romance. And so I decided to make these other pictures, and they were very large, so you had to walk away to be able to see them. So they’re called “Pictures of Chocolate.” Freud — here’s Freud — probably could explain chocolate better than I. He was the first subject. And Jackson Pollock also. And it was quite wonderful, because I had an interest — an early interest — in theater. And in this, you’d have like a — something that looks like a cloud, and it is a cloud at the same time. So they’re like perfect actors. Actually, I once paid like 60 dollars to see a very great actor to do a version of “King Lear,” and I felt really robbed, because by the time the actor started being King Lear, he stopped being the great actor that I had paid money to see. On the other hand, you know, I paid like three dollars, I think — and I went to a warehouse in Queens to see a version of “Othello” — by an amateur group. And it was quite fascinating, because you know the guy — his name was Joey Tribbiani — he impersonated the Moorish general — you know, for the first three minutes he was really that general, and then he went back into — I think he worked as a plumber, I think, so — plumber, general, plumber, general — that’s why we pay to go to magic shows and things like that. As one might expect, then, the expert team for the energy phenomena from Belgrade has performed the measurements which have shown the identical values for the electric fields, ultrasound and the level of the orgone energy at the Bell Tower and the Bosnian Pyramid of the Sun. The connectivity is obvious and not only by the energy. Namely, the Bell Tower is spread two kilometers to the south, then half a kilometer to the east and it ends in the greatest pyramid anywhere, ever. The “energy ringing” starts at the Park “Ravine 2” exactly at the Bell Tower. The purpose of the hollows, tunnels and (resonant) chambers is to amplify existing natural energy sources created by the underground water streams and quartz crystal. As one might also expect, Sam and Becky don’t yet know when they can return to Miami. So after the press conference she asked me if I wanted to drive with her to Malibu to watch the pelicans. What about them? I asked. They can’t land right, she said. That’s why I am doing the chairs, she said. Legend has it that she had already been a concert pianist and a highly-ranked tennis player, and at twenty-eight had become — was one of the main precursors of what was later named “scatter or abject art.” Her battered shirts with Polo logos seemed like an extension for her enigmatic tarpaulins. Which reminds me to ask: why do so many homeless people have blue tarps? I would visit her often. She always had pizza and beer. Then she pulled a Pynchon and simply vanished from the grid.
What’s on Your Mind Hi Good Morning How are You?
In Gaza, half of the population is under the age of 18.
This poem will give you a brown vagina.
Pindar is my favorite poet.
Which is how Bubble Wrap is made.
So don’t think I’m trying to sell some VR headset that will give you spiritual vomition. I’m just trying to say the world is real, and is always available in all its perfect impurity. Which is why I made a tunnel into my bed, to a story about how we were born inside a transparent sphere. “Incidentally, I could really use some nachos.” “Please.” In Time the Wind Will Come and Destroy My Lemons: wood, plaster, nails, and white paint. These forced migrations are captured with a new weapons-grade surveillance technology that can detect the human body from 30.3km. Blind to skin colour, this camera registers only the contours of relative heat difference within a given scene, foregrounding the fragile human body’s struggle for survival in hostile environments. Alluding literally and metaphorically to hypothermia, mortality, epidemic, global warming, weapons targeting, border surveillance, xenophobia, and the ‘bare life’ of the stateless, Mosse’s use this tech serves as an attempt to reveal its internal logic — to see the way missiles see. Following the narrative sequence of the film, the book presents still frames from footage of a live battle inside Syria in which a US aircraft strafes IS positions on the ground, to scenes showing refugees boarding rescue boats off the coast of Libya or gathered along the shores of Turkey under cover of darkness, or making the dangerous journey through the Sahara Desert, and and and. There then follows an exposition of how this object develops through the consecutive phases of ‘force’, the ‘realm of laws’ and the ‘inverted world’, before culminating in the ‘infinity’ that prepares the transition to self-consciousness. This process reaches a climax at the end the chapter where Hegel overturns our naive notion of ‘appearance’ in favour of a more dialectical conception, which he phrases as
Shit
is
still
fucked
up
and
shit
‘Cosmos
=
chaos’
The
yoga
of
the
scream
And
so
you
are
going
to
hear
the
dance
of
TUTUGURI
The
full
‘body
without
organs’
emerges
The
spherical
body
ERASING
THE
LINE
Kré
kré
pek
kré
e
pte
a shout, a voice, silence, static, galloping and The Lark Ascending played triple-speed nine octaves up like rain on a steel bin-lid over a rave synth line. You need to read it. “Just too big. Firstly way too big. And then just right.” These experiments and others like them have shown scientists that plants change in important ways when they’re grown at elevated CO2 levels. Within the category of plants known as “C3” ― which includes approximately 95 percent of plant species on earth, including ones we eat like wheat, rice, barley and potatoes ― elevated CO2 has been shown to drive down important minerals like calcium, potassium, zinc and iron. The data we have, which look at how plants would respond to the kind of CO2 concentrations we may see in our lifetimes, show these important minerals drop by 8 percent, on average. The same conditions have been shown to drive down the protein content of C3 crops, in some cases significantly, with wheat and rice dropping 6 percent and 8 percent, respectively. Earlier this summer, a group of researchers published the first studies attempting to estimate what these shifts could mean for the global population. Plants are a crucial source of protein for people in the developing world, and by 2050, they estimate, 150 million people could be put at risk of protein deficiency, particularly in countries like India and Bangladesh. Researchers found a loss of zinc, which is particularly essential for maternal and infant health, could put 138 million people at risk. They also estimated that more than 1 billion mothers and 354 million children live in countries where dietary iron is projected to drop significantly, which could exacerbate the already widespread public health problem of anemia. There aren’t any projections for the US, where many enjoy a diverse diet with no shortage of protein, but some researchers look at the growing proportion of sugars in plants and hypothesize that this could further contribute to our already alarming rates of obesity / diabetes and cardiovascular disease. Another new and important strain of research on CO2 and plant nutrition is now coming out of the USDA. Lewis Ziska, a plant physiologist at the Agricultural Research Service headquarters in Beltsville, Maryland, devised an experiment that eliminated the complicating factor of plant breeding: He decided to look at goldenrod, a wildflower extremely important to bees. It flowers late in the season, and its pollen provides an important source of protein for them as they head into winter. Since goldenrod is wild and humans haven’t bred it into new strains, it hasn’t changed over time as much as, say, corn or wheat. And the Smithsonian happens to have hundreds of samples of goldenrod, dating back to 1842, in its massive historical archive — which gave Ziska and his colleagues a chance to figure out how the plant has changed over time. They found that the protein content of goldenrod pollen has declined by a third since the industrial revolution — and the change closely tracks with the rise in CO2. Scientists have been trying to figure out why bee populations around the world have been in decline, right? Who out there is not worried sick about the bees? Did you know that the skies over Kansas used to be filled by birds with teeth? Then follows a sustained flashback of a Roman orgy. Gladiators enter the set, and De Mille dissolves back to girls boxing. “Doesn’t this doughnut remind you of a life preserver?” Also, I have to do blood work constantly so “See doctor for blood work” is all over my calendar, but google autocorrected it to “See doctor for blood worms” once so now when I type in “See doctor” it automatically fills in “FOR BLOOD WORMS” and I should probably fix that but I’ve decided to keep it because uh excuse me
Come down here right now / & get your snot off the ceiling!
Which is not the kind of thing we normally say during the High Holy Days or when we’re on the Hajj. Next year on Nibiru! Did you know that each December the Earth and sun align with the approximate center of our galaxy? Or that
at any moment the poem might be riven
by lightning/smell
of burnt sugar (onion?).
With the brainmeld apparatus,
peace be with you,
and may also
also be with you, out of
control. Until they form and live
inside a blister. It’s an app.
Now think of the following use of language: I send someone shopping. I give him a slip marked “five red apples”. He takes the slip to the shopkeeper, who opens the drawer marked “apples”; then he looks up the word “red” in a table and finds a colour sample opposite it; then he says the series of cardinal numbers — I assume that he knows them by heart — up to the word “five” and for each number he takes an apple of the same colour as the sample out of the drawer ... ‘But how does he know where and how he is to look up the word “red' and what he is to do with the word “five”?’ — Well, I assume that he acts as I have described. Explanations come to an end somewhere. — But what is the meaning of the word “five”? — No such thing was in question here ... “Do you know what a piece of Vonnegut’s face is worth?” the woman asked. “Nothing,” he said. “His grave is state property, protected —” “Now. But not before the relic-hunters got to it. His fingers alone went for millions on the dark web.” So no, Acker actually didn’t study with Herbert Marcuse, Roman Jakobson didn’t read her undergraduate papers. Yet, as Kraus writes, “To lie is to try. Like most fabulations, the story contains a kernel of truth, or at least of desire.” Then I took a thing from my car that wasn’t supposed to be there. I stopped bothering to say hi to my white neighbors because they never say hi back. Block me or I’ll block you first. I mean, I can’t believe someone came over for a visit and looked in our fridge. The second time? It was worse ... I couldn’t breathe ... I was conscious ...I couldn’t move! I couldn’t speak! It’s hard to remember details ... I was shocked you know. Most people have no memory of the whole process ... this would become true of me ... but this time ... Jesus ... I could hear them talk ... their laughter ... there was no reason for them not to laugh ... they were ... they were ... compassionate ... but I couldn’t move ... I couldn’t speak ... it’s hard to remember it all! I’m digging deeply here for you dear reader ... the anesthesia ... the shock! Most people have no memory of the whole process ... I did. I was awake. That first time ... that terrible vision ... told you that ... my passion for repeating myself ... can’t remember the vision ... only the fear ... that I got ... I tried to hold on to it ... that vision ... but I couldn’t. After the treatment you are totally . . . what? Are you fucking kidding me? A fly can’t land on a fruit tree without permission first from its insurance provider. Time is burning. I don’t know what that means. Something is burning, tho. It isn’t really me doing it. That’s the new thing. Don’t you think NASA should hide this? Behind the bookcase, there’s a wall and after that, a door. A woman shouts, and dozens of us hear her and ask her questions, but she can only use a stone to tap in response. I just keep thinking that it’s so easy to run without getting out of breath. That’s when Kevin stood up, unzipped his pants, and unfurled his penis. Kevin’s penis unfurled like a banner at a parade. Bill looked at Kevin’s penis. Kevin’s penis was at Bill’s eye level. “What do you think of it?” Kevin asked. “It’s a philosophical problem,” Bill responded. “May I try something?” Bill asked. Bill finished his coffee and stood up. Bill unzipped his pants and also unfurled his penis. Bill and Kevin’s penises faced each other. Bill took the uncircumcised foreskin of Kevin’s penis and covered the circumcised head of Bill’s penis with it. This is called docking. “It did not work,” Bill concluded. “What were you trying to do?” Kevin asked. “I was trying to overcome the distinction of phenomena and noumena, but it appears I’ll never get to the thing-in-itself,” Bill said. “Maybe if my penis were in your butt,” Kevin suggested. “Well,” said Bill. “I just heard we may have to destroy South Korea. I mean North Korea. I probably mean both, actually. So maybe after that.” To quote Kimberlé Crenshaw, not really quote her, who the fuck is Mark Lilla? His critique of identity politics is not new. Indeed, it can be traced to the repudiation of Reconstruction itself. The lethal critiques trained against the Freedmen’s Bureau and congressional efforts to create a national commitment to eliminate widespread discrimination against former slaves sought to discredit and dismantle equality projects by framing them as dangerous pandering and insidious favoritism. It was, in effect, a critique of identity politics, with the Supreme Court intoning that black men should relinquish the status of special victims and stop making a federal case out of everything, they should just let a weaponized five-oh chant over their prone smashed bodies, “Whose streets, our streets” ... To quote Sean Bonney for the umpteenth time,
for “I love you” say fuck the police / for
“the fires of heaven” say fuck the police, don’t say
“recruitment” don’t say “trotsky” say fuck the police
for “alarm clock” say fuck the police
for “my morning commute” for
“electoral system” for “endless solar wind” say fuck the police
don’t say “I have lost understanding of my visions” don’t say
“that much maligned human faculty” don’t say
“suicided by society” say fuck the police / for “the movement
of the heavenly spheres” say fuck the police / for
“the moon’s bright globe” for “the fairy mab” say
fuck the police / don’t say “direct debit” don’t say “join the party”
say “you are sleeping for the boss” and then say fuck the police
don’t say “evening rush-hour” say fuck the police / don’t say
“here are the steps I’ve taken to find work” say fuck the police
don’t say “tall skinny latté” say fuck the police / for
“the earth’s gravitational pull” say fuck the police / for
“make it new” say fuck the police
all other words are buried there
all other words are spoken there / don’t say “spare change”
say fuck the police / don’t say “happy new year” say fuck the police
perhaps say “rewrite the calendar” but after that, immediately
after that say fuck the police / for “philosopher’s stone” for
“royal wedding” for “the work of transmutation” for “love
of beauty” say fuck the police / don’t say “here is my new poem”
say fuck the police
say no justice no peace and then say fuck the police
and by fuck the police mean
Fuck the politicians
Fuck the bankers
Fuck everyone with power
May cockroaches fill their pancreases (pancree-i?) with their eggs etc
But this is an insult to cockroaches
Etc
Etc
Etc
Yeah! I know Gudetama. I bought a cheap phone case off ebay with an image of Gudetama falling out of a shell. But it began to peel almost immediately, and the paint came off in my sweaty hands. So it was Gudetama falling out of an egg and shivering but the image was scabby and quickly disappearing. The case sucked also and I was at a show in Philly where the floor was concrete; the phone slipped out from my hand and the screen broke. Then I had to keep the Gudetama case until ALL the paint peeled off because it was too perfect with the broken screen. So many broken eggs. I mean, since your epigraph invokes a foundational component in the thinking of Nicolas Abraham and Mária Török, the concept of a transgenerational crypt, whereby the undisclosed, unprocessed trauma of one’s parents (or, more broadly, one’s preceding generation) produces inherited symptomatic responses in the present, could you discuss how the tacit legacies of European colonization, the forced assimilation of Indigenous peoples in Canada, the agonistic multilingual / multicultural heterodoxies of Quebec, and / or the Benjaminian historical wreckage concretized amid Montréal’s architectural textures manifest within The Obituary’s highly distinctive discursive form?
[Note: Sources: Vik Muniz, TED talk, at TED, 2003; JBR; Sam Osmanagich, accidentally deleted email rec’d 12 Sept 017; JBR; Vik Muniz, “For Holt Quentel Exhibition at the Aspen Art Museum, Nov 15, 2013 – January 19, 2014”, at Vik Muniz, 2013; JBR; Vik Muniz, “For Holt Quentel Exhibition at the Aspen Art Museum, Nov 15, 2013 – January 19, 2014”, at Vik Muniz, 2013; Alex Cruse, “Shortening the Kill Chain”, at Poets Reading the News; Jennifer Nelson, “Lovers Don’t Read Kafka”, at The Offing, 29 Oct 015; Jennifer Nelson, quoted in “‘Any Concept of ‘Purity’ Is My No. 1 or No. 2 Enemy’: Jessica Tolbert in Conversation with Jennifer Nelson”, at Ugly Duckling Press, 19 Apr 016; unknown, quoted in Dennis Cooper, “Sealed Air”, at DC’s, 11 Sept 017; Jennifer Nelson, quoted in “‘Any Concept of ‘Purity’ Is My No. 1 or No. 2 Enemy’: Jessica Tolbert in Conversation with Jennifer Nelson”, at Ugly Duckling Press, 19 Apr 016; JBR; Oki Sogumi, “The Longest Month”, at Queen Mob’s Tea House, 18 May 016; John Ashbery, quoted by Geoffrey G. O’Brien, quoted in Amy King, “And the Occasion Changed: A Tribute to John Ashbery”, at Poetry Foundation, 13 Sept 017; JBR: Nela Pavlouskova, Cy Twombly: Late Paintings 2003-2011; blurb for Richard Mosse, Incoming, at MACK; JBR; Aninda Bhattacharya, “Force and understanding in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit”, at bat02.0, 20 May 011; JBR, quote-paraphrasing the only slogan I can remember from Occupy; Jay Murphy, Artaud’s Metamorphosis: From Hieroglyphs to Bodies without Organs, TOC, at Pavement Books; Antonin Artaud, “To Have Done with the Judgment of God”, at Surrealism-Plays; Jay Murphy, Artaud’s Metamorphosis: From Hieroglyphs to Bodies without Organs, TOC, at http://www.pavementbooks.com/artaudsmetamorphosis Pavement Books; Antonin Artaud, “To Have Done with the Judgment of God”, at Surrealism-Plays; blurb for Stuart Calton, Wimpy and Andre, at Materials, Jan 017; Helena Bottemiller Evich, “The great nutrient collapse: The atmosphere is literally changing the food we eat, for the worse. And almost nobody is paying attention”, at Politico, 13 Sept 017; JBR, but see Michael J. Everhart, Oceans of Kansas: A Natural History of the Western Interior Sea; Kevin Brownlow, The Parade’s Gone By; Jenny Lawson, “They’re like snow peas, but with less carbs. I assume”, at The Bloggess, 15 Sept 017; JBR; Tim Atkins, blurb for his On Fathers < On Daughtyrs, at Boiler House Press; JBR (Nibiru is an invisible planet that certain numerologists, Bible code types, etc, tell us is going to destroy the Earth; the next date predicted is less than a week from the moment I write these words); “Beyond 2012: Why the World Didn’t End”, at NASA; JBR; Catherine Wagner, “How to make a poem to communicate using electronic mindmeld apparatus”, at Datableed 8; JBR; Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (tr. G.E.M. Anscombe); N.K. Jemison, “Henosis”, at Uncanny Magazine, Sept/Oct 017; JBR; Anna Ioanes, “Please Be Nice to Me: Navigating History, Mystery, and Desire in Chris Kraus’s ‘After Kathy Acker’”, at Los Angeles Review of Books, 18 Aug 017; JBR; Cynthia Arrieu-King, “In 5000 Years None of This Will Really Matter”, “Very British Problems”, at The Tiny (?)Sept 017; FISHSPIT, “An Excerpt from a Zine on My Electro-Convulsive Treatment”, at Scab 1; Howie Good, “In the Dust of This Planet”, at Scab 1; JBR; Robert S Costic, “The Foreskin of Finitude”, at Scab 1; JBR; Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, “Mark Lilla’s Comfort Zone”, at The Baffler, 14 Sept 017; JBR; Sean Bonney, “ACAB: A Nursery Rhyme”, at Abandoned Buildings, 31 Dec 014; JBR; Bernadette Mayer, “To a Politician”, at https://thebaffler.com/latest/two-poems The Baffler, 25 Jul 017 (“a response to the health-care vote”); JBR; Oki Sogumi, quoted in “OKI SOGUMI interviewed by Cassandra Troyan”, at Tripwire 13; JBR; Andy Fitch, quoted in “GAIL SCOTT interviewed by Andy Fitch”, at https://tripwirejournal.files.wordpress.com/2017/09/scott-fitch_tw13.pdf Tripwire 13]