Jane is sucking on her bottom lip. She does this when she is concentrating or afraid. When Jane was 8 her father fell off a cliff when he was hiking with her mother. He reached down for his water canister, slipped under the stiff afternoon sun. Jane has been scared of heights and the dry stare of scarecrows ever since. The ferris wheel was my idea.

Sitting in the lap of a fresh cut moon, our knees graze and my bones firework. Jane of the lemonade sweat, the bicycle eyes, the pear shampoo that turns me harlequin skinned. Our mothers say we are too young for bras. I see Jane’s nipples through her shirt and feel a fuse flicker in the deep sea of my stomach. A small fish swimming fast. A warm, wet fish breathing blood through the gills, growing a hot flood in my gut.
Our chair sways, rocking us to and fro. The tiny feet of Jane’s breath skip over me like a stone on water. I want to make a scarf out of her sighs, wear it like a noose. Jane’s knuckles whiten over the metal bar. I place my hand over hers. Her wrists are so small, they are smaller than the stars spilling silver on our faces and I am a full cup of truth, trembling.

*

Heights make me thirsty. I think of the stilted man in the giraffe mask, if he is ever scared of falling. The sound of stilts in soil much like the thud of wet firewood, the spit of splinters and tear of grass a lot louder underground. If he were to fall I would not hear it, trapped in the microwave music of the ferris wheel, spinning slowly.

The chair in front of us holds two lovers. She wraps herself around him like a glossy snake. She has been found by something that has not yet found me. He can smell it in her, it lives in the crease of her neck, that secret cave where he goes. I imagine I am an island, waiting to be discovered. He will be the one to explore me, sinking his fingers into my sand, turning my rocks over gently, claiming I am his.
We are at the highest point now, in line with the spine of the sky, dangling like a bright gem from night’s black neck. My ankles hang over a mess of rainbow machinery, of sticky fists and electric laughter. I am too close to the edge. There is a desert in my throat, a cactus crying. Violet puts her hand on mine and I watch the couple in front. One day soon, I will drop from these metal branches and burst.

Text by Annie DeWitt, images by Jerome Jakubiec

My mother never said, Don’t Usher The Good Times In.  She never took the pot from my hand and said, Don’t Beat On It With A Stick.  Don’t Make Noise.  She never threw up the window shade and said, Don’t Look Out.  Or, I Remember Chilly Scenes of Winter.

I remember sitting around the fire while my father sang a song about a railroad that stretched all the way from our living room to Kansas.

“What else,” I said.

“Oh,” he said.  “Never mind. Teach me to dance in the kitchen.”

*

“The bus dropped me off at the corner of 9^th and 10^th,” you said.

“I thought,” I said.  “You said that bus stopped in the Bowery.”

“I thought so too,” you said.

Or maybe you said, “That fair went on for a year.”

It kept going round.

The ride I meant.

“Right here,” you said before I left with my belongings.

“Yes,” I said patting the trunk.

You said, “I sure will miss it.”

You were speaking about the chair.

I thought, Maybe I should sit in that chair a little longer.  Maybe if I sit in it I will start speaking upwards.

“Sightlines,” I think they call it.

*

“You can borrow my name,” you said that afternoon in Reno.  “If you need it at the Motel.”  We were chasing down my Uncle again.

“Who’s following whom,” Uncle said when we caught him.  He pointed out the window at a neon yellow Thunderbird sailing down the highway.

“Birdwatcher,” you said.  “Sightlines, they call it.”

Maybe they call it night driving in the west.

Maybe they call it fishing for sticky.

*

I could say I did not keep dirty laundry.  I never took his shirts and folded them out so the pit stains were under my head.

“What’s this mean,” he used to say whenever he freed something from my body.

“Just a drop in the pan,” I’d say.

These sort of rarities.

I remember happy.  Just like that.  Old boating shoes.  Faded red sweater.

*

You said you would pack my knitwear and drive me there.

You wanted to do things that made you look humble.

On the highway you drove with your hands over your eyes when we hit those square patches of sun.

When we arrived we unpacked me.  There was an old woman sitting at the entrance to the clinic.  She asked what I wanted with her mess.

“It’s MISS,” I said.

Afterwards, we stood on the street corner just outside the riverbank.  I cannot say I didn’t wear that white sundress.  You kept your car running.

“I guess I leave you off here,” you said.

*

Across the river, that ewe was struggling, hefting her rear back and forth so that her tail looked like it was swatting at a horde of fruit flies in summer.  Her calf must have been half way down her chute.

“The problem,” I said, “Is finding a small enough dropper.  One big enough to stick in the corner of our mouths yet small enough that it doesn’t emit so much that our nostrils start to fill.”

*

We watched the backs of that ewe’s shoulders.  The way she held her small frame.

*

The old woman keeps the apartment across the hall from mine.   The night after our first meeting she entered my room.  She turned the knob with her palm – gripping the teeth of the thing hard against her.  All you could see was the tops of her nails tapping at the brass.

She said she was wearing the coat her Grandmother gave her.  “In here,” she said, throwing wide the lapels and drawing me close to her body.  There was a small silk label.  Dear China it said.

In the cleft of her stomach there was a small pit where she kept all her food.  It was fair and broad and when I looked out of it I saw the place where I used to be before I came out here.  That spot inMcLean’s field.

When I’m stood there in that spot I noticed a good clean breeze coming on.

“I never said,” the woman said.  “I wanted to gather my own stale air.”

Love is War for Miles

Aquarius Heaven…
Blu and Exile (letter)
(Quit it) Nat Adderley (Give me my month) Blake
(Mike and the Sensations) Nico Jaar
(Anything Goes/You used to think) Erica Pomerance
(The Idea of Ancestry) Etheridge Knight
Blue and Exile (Don’t be…)
(Tia) Arthur Nunes
Gonjasufi (Love of Reign)
(Black Christ of the Andes) Mary Lou Williams
(I only know (what I know now))Blake
(Black Swan) Nina Simone
(Hello to the Wind) Bobby Hutcherson
(Seasons) Blu/(Tom Waits (The World Keeps Turning)
Nicolas Jaar (Why didn’t you…)

Harmony Holiday is a writer, dancer, and sound artist. Her debut collection of poems Negro League Baseball was published by Fence Books last year. Brian W. Rogers is an artist, writer, and musician whose work most recently appeared in the London group show “A Sunken Trembling Recalled Dimly.” Together they have teamed up to form État de Siege (ÉSP) a production house whose work encompasses text, music, the moving image, dance, design, architecture, and curatorial platforms. In this project, they have focused their attention on the 70′s cult horror film Ganja and Hess, about an archaelogist who gets stabbed in the heart and becomes a vampire. The video below includes poetry by Fred Moten, and is a preamble to their forthcoming re-imagined soundtrack for Ganja and Hess. Below that is an open letter to Bill Gunn, the director of the film, regarding certain propositions raised by his film, such as how one extreme of motion can lead to paralysis and what one must do to avoid this, such as enacting a bridge between classical myth and modal myth.

The West is an insane asylum, a conscious and premeditated receptacle of black magic… every disappearance is a record (between checking-out and checking-in)
{Ornette Coleman- To Whom Who Keeps a Record}

1. Are there some things you would like to say, but have not been able to, because no one asked you the right questions?
[Être - Nicolas Jaar]

2. What are the politics of being ready to die, and what do they have to do with the scandal of enjoyment?  Of any action as one way ticket to the end of health? ‘The love-recovery cycle that Barthes maps in his works is an ever refining self-fertilizing cycle wherein nothing must be wasted as it is needed in the next phase of the cycle,’ impregnating the place where memory flinches and (esp.) begins and at once slows down and accelerates the metabolism of that commons, into the decadent non-territory of the idea of an “other” as an ego-ideal whom the self  can achieve through devotion. In those moments of precise forgetting, did you find the traumas and excitements that express the need for a modal myth most acutely?
[Moodymann - I can't kick this feeling when it hits]

3. The statues in profile featured in the title sequence remind us of an experiment that Derrida proposes. Do you know it? ‘This is an experiment of acting as if you were dead. […] But what does it mean to be dead, when you are not totally dead?  It means that you perceive the object as it is or as it is supposed to be when you are not there. To see the vessel as such means to see the vessel as it would be without me. If I were dead it would remain the same as it is, the colour, the same consistency, and so on. So, to relate to an object, means to relate to it as if you were dead. That’s the condition of truth, the condition of perception, the condition of objectivity, at least in their most conventional sense’ (Will you give up your death for me?) And so, if life is endless, why not try to relate in this way, what is the risk. What is the cost that we are not willing to pay? On the other hand what is the pleasure of mortality or so-called loss that we refuse to admit in order to keep it sacred and free from principal, free from the colony of false nobility?
[Rufus Harley - Queens]

4. If ultimately oblivion is abundant, one has reason to ask, ‘on what grounds does one critique and propose an alternative to the brunt of exclusion and the sense of social shipwreck one suffers from?’ Is it a form of suffering or a relief? Does our exclusivity relieve us? Are we absolved by a feigned turning against them—toward what? (‘I will not be punished, I will not be tortured, I will not be guilty,’ Hess decrees)— And from this can it follow that philosophy is a prison, that it destroys the uncustomary things about us? That the frontier is a prison? That the route past nothingness is to accept nothing in particular? That the vehicle driving us toward abundance is extreme stillness just as the route to paralysis is frenzied motion?
[Julia Holter - Introduction]

5.  What tole does the yearning for ritual in a culture where trends often supress traditions, take/give in your film? Ideas of oblivion and tedium often unite in the sublime (transcendence of limits of the human condition) their inevitable destination, where they are turned into a solemn abundance that often shows up as ritual and the place where ritual and addiction meet and do not diverge (at once forgotten and remembered needs). Do you believe that ritual should engage variation deliberately in order to separate itself from addiction, bearing in mind that anything repetitive becomes a need no matter how sacred or pernicious? How do we improvise on a ritual and re-tell it to itself again and again ad infinitum, what role does the sacrifice play in that coiled and elastic dynamic, where does it enter its disappearance and reject it, live on? You can’t enter into this dynamic except in exhalted states, elevated states. How do we conjure those states while at the same time resisting their capture? What is the economy of survival in Ganja and Hess? How is an addict’s labor different from a worshiper’s?
[Monks of Bhutan - Silnyen played solo]

6. Is eternity an impervious horizon and do the acoustics of blood allow us to at once traverse and return to the forever that the blue myth of life eternal lures us across? Is the film a myth of/for black America, of/for America in general, the sole (soul/sold) myth retrieved as the ‘terror and terrible lure of vacuum?’ Voices from beyond the event horizon, trying to out-mode our oppressors, to translate our motion across that border? Creating an impossible space between origin and dream/out-dreamt origin, unoriginal dream, the lucid dream everyone wants to learn how to possess but is afraid to enter, a certain amount of traveling, deferred. Choreographer Alvin Ailey believes that movement is molecular revolution, ‘blood memory,’ future anterior, and that any black body in motion has experienced centuries of war and pain ‘no casual pleasure brought about those features.’ Hess says of Ganja, ‘Some great horde of peoples have had to suffer’ to bring about her beauty. In grappling with erotics of suffering (the does-my-distress-arouse-you rhetoric) what did you discover about our agency therein? What is peace in this context? What is justice?
[Julian Priester - Coincidence]

7. One of the things that we are trying to inquire toward is the role of aural hallucination in Ganja and Hess. The way in which sound abducts away from the optic towards a kind of blind transversality, plothole in the lightsickness of the past three hundred years. This is to say that it (the one way border the recording is a portal across) is one of the conditions for the choreography of syncope, of possession, of being possessed and dispossessed at the same time. 1976: Julian Jaynes puts forth the Bicameralist theory of mind. If his formulations are just, it can be said that we have inherited a memory of experiencing ourselves as ghosts. We are haunted by exteriority only inasmuch as we fear (because we know) that we are a focalized twist of that exteriority, to hear is to be unbound toward it, that we are laced by it, that the real trauma is that we experience ourselves only as ourselves, rather than being no one. It’s not that minds changed, it’s that we evicted the ghosts. Hallucinatory fugitivity and it’s rush toward eternity; endlessness; devotional erasure; ambivalent rapture; the audial smudge; a voice followed to the other side of the event horizon–
[Theo Parrish- Love is War for Miles]

My new favorite blog is Bookshelf Porn, created by Anthony Dever. It makes me feel better that I had over 40+ boxes of books when I recently moved and makes me think that daydreaming about what my next bookshelves will look like (I haven’t unpacked yet) or hoping someone will buy me a Sapien bookcase for my birthday is normal behavior. I can’t lie, I have been reading on a Kindle as of late and this website makes me want to smash it with a hammer. (Once I finish what I am reading, of course.) I particularly loved the video from the Toronto bookstore Type at bottom. Way better than a toy store coming alive. That was always creepy. Postscript: If you live in this house below with the tree in the window, I would very much like to be your friend.

All Images re-posted from Bookshelf Porn

Here is a nice and slightly creepy series of Polish book covers from the 1970s and 80s to provide you with some visual inspiration today, courtesy of But Does It Float. Seeing images like this and reading websites like The Book Cover Archive make me realize the beauty and importance of the physical book. Cover design is truly an art (and not just because it was featured as a challenge on Bravo’s amazing-yet-terrible Work of Art) and it needs to be seen in the flesh in order to be fully appreciated. At baseline, they’re marketing ploys for what they contain inside, but the covers that are truly spectacular—the ones that make you say, “Wow, what a bizarre/amazing/beautiful cover”—transcend their medium. They make you stop, think, and appreciate them for the beautiful, visual objects that they are.

Sommer in Europa

Bären schleichen über gefrorenen Boden und kratzen an deiner Tür. Ihnen ist kalt und sie hören die Grille, die du um den Hals trägst. Gefangen in einem ausgehöhlten Kürbis. Immer auf deiner Haut. Warm und sicher. Ihr Zirpen erinnert dich an den Sommer. Die Enge und die Dunkelheit sind nur temporär, nur für ein paar Monate. Dann darf sie wieder gehen. Du sagst, das sei ein fairer Deal für euch beide. Und dass du im Winter auch nicht viel aus deinem Kürbis kommst. Du hast einen Felsen von Innen vor die Tür gerollt, damit die Bestien nicht herein können. Jetzt macht dir das Klappern der Schlösser keine Angst mehr. Ihre Pranken haben scharfe Krallen, aber du hast Holz und Stein und Eisen zum Schutz.
Neuerdings trägst du immer Holz und Stein und Eisen im Körper. Seitdem du durch das Dach auf den Haufen Schrott gefallen bist. Deine zerschnittenen Händen hatten rostige Abdrücke auf dem halb geöffneten Fenster des Taxis hinterlassen. Der Fahrer hatte die Scheibe wortlos nach oben gekurbelt und war davon gerollt. – Gegenangebot. Fick dich!- hattest du ihm nachgeschrien. Auf der Rückbank eines anderen Taxis konntest du dich nicht entscheiden ob deine Hände grauenhaft oder fantastisch aussahen. So cool! So abgefuckt! Dann wolltest du mir dein Bier über die Haare leeren und mir ins Gesicht schlagen. Alles was nicht nach deinem Kopf geht ist für dich langweilig. Ich hätte dich einfach küssen können, damit du bekommst hättest, was du wolltest, aber der Frieden war die Konsequenzen nicht wert. Du bist ein betrunkenes Einzelkind, das allen die Finger bemalen will. TOFU LOVE, GOOD TOGO, READ Y2GO, DUTC HRUB. Jon meinte, dass keiner mit Moral dir je eine Tätowiermaschine verkaufen würde. Dann hatte er einen unmoralischen Laden empfohlen.Vielleicht hatte er sich in dich verliebt. So wie sich alle immer in dich verlieben.
Unter deinem T-Shirt, das aussah, als ob du es schon in der Grundschule getragen hättest, hattest du keinen BH an. Du hattest behauptet, dass man in Mexiko und Japan zu Titten Chichi sagt. Zuerst dachte ich, dass du vielleicht zu viel geraucht hättest, aber dann war mir aufgefallen, dass du einfach nur ungeschminkt warst. Am liebsten hätte ich es dir gesagt, aber dann hatte ich es doch lieber bleiben lassen. Ich kenne dich nicht gut genug. Vielleicht wärst du beleidigt gewesen.
Du meintest, dass du dir heute Federn auf die Haut kleben wolltest, um dich frei zu fühlen. Weil du keinen Klebstoff mehr hattest, hast du dir über beide Arme Gummibänder gestreift und die Federn darunter geschoben. Aber du warst zu ungeduldig und dann sahen die Federn nicht mehr nach Federn aus und du hattest nur die Ärmel eines Pelzmantels an. Du hast mit einem Küchenmesser die Bänder zerschnitten und jetzt stehst du nackt zwischen zwei Daunenhäufchen und bunten Plastikfäden und deine Arme sehen aus, als ob du zu lange in einer Netzhängematte gelegen wärst und zwischen roten Striemen leuchtet getrocknetes Blut wo das Messer zu scharf war, der Gummi zu spröde und du zu hektisch und dein Kopfkissen ist leer.
-Warum drehen sich die Discokugeln in dieser Stadt nicht? – hast du gefragt und versucht einen Lichtpunkt in deiner Hand zu fangen. Je länger du weg bist, desto froher bin ich, dass du weg bist. – Das ist der, in den ich verliebt bin…äh, war. – und Asche fällt vor Nervosität von der Zigarette und – Es bricht mir das Herz so gehen zu müssen – wird zu – Hoffentlich können wir dann zusammen spazieren gehen – zu – Lass uns zum Mittagessen treffen – zu – Vor meinem Auftritt ist ganz schlecht – und kaum habe ich dich aus deinem Koffer steigen sehen wird es auch schon wieder dunkel. Trotzdem würde ich dir gerne eine Nachricht schicken und dir sagen, dass ich dich vermisse. Nur so. Um zu sehen, wie du reagieren würdest. Ich habe Kleister an meinen Fingern und lege sie auf die Kugel und drehe mich und die Punkte drehen sich mit uns und wir bauen ein Floß aus unseren Körpern und treiben auf dem Regen nach Hause und hören das Zirpen und das Kratzen und sind nichts als das Licht, das wir reflektieren.

This is another excerpt from a forth-coming book by Thomas Mader and LNY.

Text by Thomas Mader
Image by LNY

Hypergraph Fortress

A concrete giant tied down
on top of a blanketed cabinet of has-been and lest-we-remember.
Deliberately blinded.
Senses heightened through loss of others.
Located far from eye, far from heart.
Invisible through the trees,
exposed to icy winds,
bitten by frost.
Mutilated and crippled, limbs removed.
The limits of reduction pushed to extremes.
More with less.
Inside temperature: 36°C/96.8°F.
4 times 30 minutes of sleep every day.
5,5 hours sunsight, 0,5 hours sunclipse.
Alternating harmonizing units of total efficiency.
A complete documentation of all my actions every 15 minutes for the last 63 years.
Resourceful thinking means boundless harvesting.
I am the lone center of the cybernetic beehive,
the last inhabitant of the one-town-world,
the aggregate of all enemy experience.
I Gatherer.
I Collector.
I Universe.
I Phantom,
abandoned dysfunctional unit of total isolation.
Chained to my designated workplace,
left drifting in nutrient fluid.
My ears pierced with antennas,
my mouth sewn shut.
The silence is spherical,
the echo is sinusoidal.
The retina scan shows 1 image for every 1000 words.
Welcome to the Nano-cinema,
the chronofile of hypergraphic dreams,
the theater of dimaxion warfare.
It takes me away,
to the island of bears,
to a childhood that is not mine,
that I have never lived.
The cables snatch at me and pull me back,
before I can unfold the polyhedron
and run from continent to continent.
3 clocks for temporal orientation.
Washington, Berlin, Moscow.
I can hear the snow falling,
Waiting for an opponent I have never seen to make a wrong move.
In a world game that is long lost,
I Singularity.
I Orphan.
I Human.

This is an excerpt from a forth-coming book that is a collaboration between Berlin-based writer Thomas Mader and artist LNY. We have a few more sneak-peeks that I am going to post this week. Right now they are calling the project Borderlines but that may change before the book comes out.

Image: LNY
Text: Thomas Mader

Just as the weather starts to warm up a little, I am reminded of all of the things I love about Spring. New York City in the springtime is truly an amazing place, as everybody crawls out from their respective rocks they have been hiding under the whole winter and greets the world with happy energy. You also realize just how many people live here when everyone comes outside to play. Personally, I think it is the best time of the year to be a New Yorker, by summer we are back to complaining again about the heat or desperately trying to get out of town and by fall everyone is fearful of the imminent winter, but Spring is truly the season of possibilities. With that in my mind, I am posting some footage from a poetry reading my friend Stefan Bondell put together last year. He is busy organizing the next one for April and I can’t wait until it is again warm enough to sit outside and listen to some poetry in the greatest city in the world.

Here is Vito Acconci musing on light and dark:

I have no idea what Terence Koh is saying but it sounds awesome:

Anne Waldman has the greatest energy:

It is Stefan Bondell’s impressively large artwork in the background. The canvas is covered with shredded dollar bills and oil splats:

I love that Stella Schnabel is reading off her blackberry:

John Giorno is just pure awesome:

The very famous, very cute porn star Sasha Grey, who has worked with mainstream director Steven Soderbergh and appeared on Entourage, is publishing a book of her personal photographs called Neu Sex. Grey is well known for giving frank interviews answering all sorts of crazy questions, so a book of behind-the-scenes images seems natural. At first I thought it might be gross, but the above sneak peek image looks pretty awesome to me. I love everything from the showgirl outfit to the camping chair with a bag of potato chips to the fact that it looks like they are filming in a squat house. The book comes out in March but you can pre-order copies here.