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.

I’m not very good at New Year’s resolutions, but this year I do have a few. One of them is to make more lists. I enjoy making lists, but my laziness sets in because once I make a list I feel I have to execute it, so I’d rather not make them. That being said, looking back through old lists is always funny to me- to see which things carry on and never get done, popping up on multiple lists, which things were so stressful in my brain but turned out to be so easy. Liza Kirwin, the curator of manuscripts at the Archives of American Art decided to compile a book of lists made by famous artists of the 20th century, called Lists: To-dos, Illustrated Inventories, Collected Thoughts, and Other Artists’ Enumerations from the Collections of the Smithsonian Museum. (The title is so long, I might add, that it completely confused the WordPress tagging system resulting in a million tags for a single title.) The book includes lists made by Pablo Picasso, noting who among his contemporaries should be featured at the 1913 Armory Show, and architect Eero Saarinen, listing his wife’s attributes. (Below.) I know this book came out this summer but who wants to make lists in the summer? In the spirit of a new year and a cold winter, I thought this was the perfect book to inspire creativity and organization. My favorite is Adolf Konrad, who for a trip to Cairo in 1963, drew his complete packing list (Europe on $5.00 a day) and made sure to include himself in his skivvies. Also amazing is he looks a little like a pale version of Pauly D. from the Jersey Shore.

Above: Adolf Konrad, packing list, ca. 1962–63. Adolf Ferdinand Konrad papers, 1962–2002. Archives of American Art. Smithsonian Institution.

Left: Eero Saarinen, list of Aline Bernstein’s good qualities, ca. 1954. Aline and Eero Saarinen papers, 1857–1972. Archives of American Art. Smithsonian Institution.
Right: Grant Wood, list of economic depressions, November 1931. Grant Wood papers, 1930-83. Archives of American Art. Smithsonian Institution.

Oscar Bluemner, list of works of art, May 18, 1932. Oscar Bluemner papers, 1886–1939, 1960. Archives of American Art. Smithsonian Institution

Benson Bond Moore, studies of ducks, undated. Benson Bond Moore papers, 1895–1995. Archives of American Art. Smithsonian Institution

When you mate sounds, poems and pretty pictures, the result is Dirty Baby, a new release by Delmonico Books/Prestel . The publication is more of a multi-media sensory explosion than a book. The collaboration brings together sixty-six paintings from artist Ed Ruscha’s rarely seen bodies of work incorporating censor strips, sounds from composer and Wilco guitarist Nels Cline and ancient Arabic ghazal poems from writer and record producer David Breskin. In the spirit of a vinyl record, this exquisitely packaged art piece is divided into sides, A and B. Included are four CDs of more than an hour and a half of new music and spoken word to accompany the pictures and text creating a beautifully emotional dialog between the mediums.

All images copyright Ed Ruscha

But, Mathews gets it.  He sees the reflection of one person in the words of another.  Now, I wish that I could continue to refer to the twin couples as A and B, but that would not be true to the tale.  In the second act of the play, the audience learns that these people not only share a wall, but they share names, as well.  Mathews deliberately makes it confusing and it’s incredibly frustrating.  In the first act, we meet a statuesque, silver-haired Charles and Helen.  Then in the second, we expect to meet the next-door neighbors—a Mike and Jane, or a Jack and Kate.  Instead, we meet a nimbler, bubblier, raven-haired Charles and Helen.  Is it merely a coincidence, different people with matching names?  Or, are they the same Charles and Helen forty years prior?  Probably the former, but there’s no certainty.  Eventually, one becomes numb to the frustration, and he or she can (hopefully) admire the artful mind-game that Mathews is playing.

Upon meeting the Older Charles, we quickly learn that he was once a professor of ancient civilizations.  He speaks more tenderly about 5th Century pharmakos than he does his son, Philip.  As for his wife, well, she is more than just “Helen” in his eyes; she is his proclaimed Nausicaa, amorous with the face of a goddess.  Quite a lofty comparison, though perhaps it would be somewhat believable in years past.  Today, Helen is timid, reluctant to speak her mind.  Sixty-five years of experience has taken its toll, but she is, undoubtedly, a beauty still.  With her eyes burning blue, one wonders if anyone has ever mistaken her for Vanessa Redgrave.  Charles, on the other hand, is no Odysseus.  Heroism isn’t his forte, and one would be wary to believe that such a calculating man could ever be vulnerable to something as sensational as seduction.  So, a strange likening, indeed.

It should be noted that the name “Nausicaa” presents itself twice in the play, so it’s not exactly a salient point.  But, it does set a tone for the play.  Charles’s idea of life is clouded with the grandiose schemes, legends and pure fiction of men who lived thousands of years ago.  The world in which he thinks and feels no longer exists.  And his dissociation with reality is only reaffirmed by Younger Charles, who along with his girlfriend just occupied the apartment next door.  The 30-year-old prattles on about the dual definition of the Greek word eleos (which means pity, or butcher’s table; go figure) and the way in which high ceilings are conducive to writing.  So, we thank the heavens for Younger Helen, for she is a swish of fresh air in their empty yet somehow stuffy space.  In her peasant blouse and floral skirt, she appears to be more Mother Earth than Helen of Troy.  She sprawls across the floor, whispering to the plank boards, insisting that an apartment is not a home until one speaks to it.  She dreams of having babies with Charles, for whom she is a fool, and though her lover rolls his eyes, she insists that he hang an embroidered sign that reads “God Bless Our Home” on the wall (diagonal from a death-mask of Agamemnon).

Understandably, Younger Helen may be pinned “pedestrian” or “flakey” by some, but she is real.  She is the character for whom we should be rooting—vivacious, expressive, and excited for life.  Unlike her elder counterpart, she spars with Charles’s snobbery, referring to his books as “sandbags,” defenses to keep others out—his own death-mask in a way.  She refuses to be her boyfriend’s Nausicaa, and nor does she want to be his Penelope—a silly “sod” who knits and waits until her husband returns from his adventures without her.  While Charles believes that it’s the routine of Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday that kills an individual, Helen wishes for just that.  It’s not a life for “people like us,” he says.  She sees it, though, the same as Mathews: “People like us are like people everywhere.”

If only it weren’t too late for Older Helen.  Perhaps she would have been stronger, perhaps she would have proved to her Charles that she wasn’t the one who needed some sense; if anyone should have been living in a block of white walls and white linens, it was he.  Then, maybe, she would not have succumbed to the tragic, meticulously detailed exit that Old Charles believes is the nobler way out.

Exit/Entrance is a part of the 1rst Irish Festival 2010. It will be at 59E59 Theaters until October 3^rd.