…³ • Miller Robinson

Preface

It cannot be said how long ago to the day it was, but before the dawn of time and forever after, a small particle has floated through the empty vacuum of deep space. This particle is just like all the others that make up the rest of the universe, but for the sake of this story, singularity might be a way to visualize something completely unperceivable due to its infinite multiples and infinitesimal size. It also cannot be said what this particle is fully like. It is colorless, shapeless, and formless. It cannot be seen, smelt, tasted, felt, or perceived by any definable means. It cannot even be said how this particle travels, where it originated, nor its exact age. Neither is it known if it can expand or contract nor how it interacts with other particles. Only recently has it been deduced that this particle is in fact spreading, but there is no exact evidence for whether this spreading is caused by growth in means that we understand, if it is multiplying in number, size, or distance (or all three), nor at what rate.

It can be understood that this particle makes up the entirety of everything in existence. Within every massive void making up the darkest places in deep space, this particle resides. It fills all of the empty space for which we can never even begin to understand. Within every nebula, this particle surrounds its billions of galaxies. Every galaxy and everything within it—each star, each celestial body, and even the dust surrounding those galaxies—are not only enveloped in this particle, but made up of it. It fills each of the three quarks inside of each proton inside of every atom of every molecule of every chemical reaction in which the universe was made and is still being made. This particle is completely unknown by any means using our current technology. Beyond the fact that we recognize its existence, we lack any understanding about it. Within this lack of knowledge, we must come to terms with our own composition of this particle. Every single part of us is made of it, even though we know nothing about it. All we know is that it exists, and we exist because it exists. But this particular story started long before our relation to this particle and long before our ability to even try to give thoughts to understanding its existence. To even try to do so will surely only result in failure of scientific, and quite possibly literary terms, but that is where this present story will begin, with … . 

Chapter I: 

In the beginning, when the universe was new and without light, … floated in the blazing darkness of deep space. … was incredibly tiny. It was imagined to be round, but extremely flexible in terms of its form, composition, and function. … did not have an intellect of any kind that we would be able to understand, but some form of intellect existed within its indefinable mass. The kind of intellect for which … exhibited was a type of pure oneness. It was vaster than anything else in existence because it simply was existence itself, although nearly small enough to cease existing at all. It was ever so simple yet painfully more complex than anything that could ever be comprehended in terms of human perception. The duality of its position—being all and none—allowed … to have the capacity for infinite possibilities and infinite outcomes from such possibilities. Yes, it was new, but it was all it ever would be at its start. It would never and still to this day does not cease to become new always. The functionality of … was so incredibly grandiose that it could only ever be described as having no definable function at all, for its purpose lies in that it exists. 

As time passed, … remained in everything; it gained speed, distance, and grew to some immeasurable scale. Although it did not change from its origin, it became many things. As the scorching colorless black soup of the universe slowly cooled, … became waves traveling endlessly faster and faster. … raced around the frictionless explosive cloud of the first light ever in existence, colliding with itself and forming billions of bonds. Each new partner that … found became eternal—an everlasting connection that charged the matter of existence. Eventually elemental distinctions became possible between form, size, composition, and function of bonds that … became. Reactions between the elements that followed, resulted in the potential for the containment of pressure and energy. The reactions grew as more bonds were formed. These massive reactions, although microscopic against their endless backdrop, became giants. Brilliant blazing bodies ranging in temperature and size whirled amongst … —rotations caused by the energy and pressure that held the bodies together. As the masses were thrown further and further, they started to dance around each other, choreographed by the size and composition of their different bodies. Around and around the bodies cycled, sometimes colliding into massive explosions of light, sound, and energy. Giants burning white, swallowed up by giants flaming red, dwarfed by giants searing blue. With each collision, the bonds of pressure and energy broke and expelled away, creating new bonds, new reactions, and new masses. As … travelled away from its origin and as certain distances were achieved, more space and cooler temperatures allowed for the formation of solid, liquid, and gaseous bodies, as well as the combination of the three. Groups of bodies eventually fell into more stable states of rotation, and the universe subsequently settled into a chaotically balanced cycle. 

After an inconceivable amount of time passed and continued to pass, synchronized systems of massive bodies became one type of existence for … . There is one such system which this particular story will center itself upon. The exact location of this particular system of massive bodies within the rest of the universe cannot be determined, but it should be stated that from any given point in the universe, that point would be considered the center. Seeing as it would be completely unavoidable to be at the center of the universe, let us position this story at the “center” and proceed forward from there. 

Chapter II: L³ 

The “current” chapter of the Earth for this particular story cannot be fully realized in exact dates, but it is agreed that seems an adequate estimate of years. It was at this time that the Earth thrived—the world, a fertile mother providing clean air, ample water, and lush land to its inhabitants. The planet rotated through each day, giving as much as it took away. There was a cycle of necessity. Abundance and lack ebbed and flowed to match the swift current of life and death. All was as it should be. Life propelled always by new growth and development. New chapters unfolded naturally on the Earth’s surface, as it moved through space with the moon by its side, ever circling the Sun. 

At this ever-specific time, a small creature roamed the Earth with only one intention in mind. As many other beings also had the same primordial ambitions that this specific creature did, it is known that competition was reasonably high, if not completely all encompassing. Time was readily available, although at this point it was not a luxury, considering there was only one means to pass the time and it relied solely on environmental conditions. To put it clearly, there were not many options for activities, and all of them were strictly biological. The body was not regarded higher or lower than the mind—it simply was one and the same. There were apparent distinctions between different beings, but these separations were also restricted to biological makeup and characteristics that went along with those biologies. You were either small or big, fast or slow, this color or that color. Maybe you could camouflage your skin to match the environment, or maybe your appearance was meant to stand out and be alarming. Maybe you used collected sunlight to feed yourself, or maybe you only ate plants, or maybe you ate other creatures. Maybe you had scales, maybe feathers, or maybe you just started growing hair as our focal character just had. Maybe your whole existence relied on only one cell, or maybe your biological composition had figured out how to produce multiple cells—billions of cells—and they all worked together in perfect synchronicity to make you exactly what you were at that given time. Maybe you weren’t done growing, shifting, becoming something so subtly new everyday it was invisible to you or your internal workings. With each offspring, your form took new and different approaches to the conditions of the times. All of these specifications worked together to execute a duty important enough to consume every hour of each day. As the sun moved from east to west, this one job filled your mind; it decided your every breath, your every movement. The criticality of your position to the world relied on your every decision, and with this, a stress that engineered your biology to structurize elemental coping mechanisms. Survival was your only occupation, and thus, you spent all your days doing just that: existing and surviving to continue existing. Without question and with every ounce of dignity, the matter of your being pushed through trial and error, and for what? For some unknown biological hope that your species would pass the test, make it to the next stage, and eventually become something completely new. All this you were completely unaware of, but nevertheless, you followed this path. 

The specific being for which this story is written about cannot be discussed entirely on its biologies in our story’s current position, which itself can only serve as a midpoint. It is important to remind you once again that this story started long before its current presented beginning and will proceed long after its presented end. The timeline that is about to unfold will be rather kinetic and quite rapid in its presentation. Time shall function only as a broader placeholder for a growth that is so problematically defined and rather hypothetically at that. Time cannot serve us much in understanding the spectrum of positions placed on the specific creature mentioned in this story, but seeing that human perception is quite limited by its understanding of time, it will be used linearly to promote forward thinking. 

The focal creature spoken of is thought to be quite small in size, Synapsida in classification. For the purposes of this story, it shall be described as one of the last living records of an ancestry linked to reptiles. Although not solely reptile or lizard in nature at the presented time in this story, this being relied heavily on its reptilian qualities for its occupational survival, and thus, will be defined as the last living lizard for means of easy referential understanding in genealogical terms. This story will follow the sole survivor of a position prior to a “complete” mammalian complex. It must be explained that a reason for quotational completion comes from the impossibility for a fully complete mammalian complex to arise at any point in history. Evolutionary lineage leaves an ever-present stamp on a being’s biological complex at any given time. History, although sometimes very well concealed, is extremely difficult to erase, especially in biological terms.

It is with an ever-present biological lineage and an unknown undoubted regard for survival, that this mammal-like reptile, the last living lizard or shall we call it L³, wandered its home, planet Earth. L³ was quite fond of certain activities like sunbathing, licking the dew off of large fern leaves, and eating juicy insects—the crunchier the better. Of course, all of these preferred activities were strictly prompted by its own specific biology, but L³ was neither aware nor cared to ponder such reasons for making its decisions, which was also a characteristic of this certain creature’s biology. Well, come to think of it, it is worth restating that no beings of this time cared to ponder reasons for existence because this was simply useless to their occupational survival. Such was a way of life: the body and conjunctively, the mind, did not even consider such mechanisms of thought because the link between the body and the mind was so strong the two were nearly indistinguishable. This strong mind-body link did not leave room for the mind to wander aimlessly—that behavior would be extremely counterproductive to your species’ survival and thus, would not be have even formed at this point in your biology. Our ancestor, the last lizard, nevertheless spent its days soaking up sun with its thick, still scaly, but newly and lightly furry skin. This aided to warm the last lingering portions of its cold-blooded body. It also spent time drinking dew from nearby foliage and puddles to sustain appropriate levels of hydration. At other times, it curled up to sleep in short but frequent intervals to replenish energy, always hidden within low vegetation to avoid attacks from predators. At night, the former lizard would be found hunting insects using its newly enlarged smell receptors in its slowly growing brain, then consuming such insects with the several proto-canines that occupied its wide-hinged, still reptile-like, mouth.

On this specific day, the last living record of any resemblance to our lizard ancestry had woken from one of its many naps and decided to wander to a particular plant that often collected a delightful amount of dew at this hour. This required a bit of careful maneuvering, as passing several predator-inhabited nests was part of such a task. It could be questioned why L³ would subject itself to such a dangerous mission on this occasion, but all that can be answered is that part of its reptile mental biological lineage lies with a certain habitual nature. Simply put, our ancestor was a creature of habit, and this had always been a place L³ visited. It was only recently that several predators had moved into the area, but L³ had yet to discover a new source of hydration, making this mission utterly necessary. It can also be said that there is some natural instinct to put oneself in dangerous positions while surviving—almost as a way to unknowingly prove oneself to the order of nature. On this day, L³ followed this biological instinct to prove itself as the last of a living ancestry ready to fight, if necessary, for a place in history and to show the forces of evolution its unknown desire to transition into its next chapter of being.

The lizard left the shaded foliage it called home, first by peeking its head out and quickly scanning from side to side. Its vision had improved from its previous more reptilian eyesight, but its sense of smell was the strongest in terms of predicting threatening activity. It then ran between the ferns of the dense and lush forest, ever scanning, smelling, and listening for any foreign movement not belonging to itself. Periodically it would stop and put itself low to the ground, using an ability still left over from its early reptilian days and its time spent underwater. It felt the vibrations of the ground beneath it with its feet, with its short nibble legs and with its hairless thin-skinned sensitive belly. It hid in a nearby fern upon sensing the movement of another creature nearby. As it stayed very still, the lizard naturally slowed its breathing and smelled the air around it. A pungent unwelcoming smell of flesh and saliva entered its head. It could easily decipher amongst the damp woody smells of the surrounding forest. This new thick, bodily smell neared closer and closer. It could also feel the heavy steps of the nearing creature; subtle vibrations moved the plant in which the lizard was hiding. Elongated thumps proceeded in its direction; then the walking stopped and started moving in a different direction. L³ began its next leg of the journey for water as the thumping moved further away. Thrice the lizard hid away from other beings, twice in ferns of the same kind, and lastly, in a thick moss-like shrub that grew along the base of a tree. On this day, the lizard was extremely lucky, for each time the potential dangers of a larger predator crossing its path was alleviated by the changing of directions. Of course, luck was not the determining factor here, but rather an extremely keen sense of the lizard’s fight or flight mechanism that was honed over countless ancestral evolutionary trials and errors, which led L³ to seek cover in enough time for other beings to lose interest and change course. On the last occasion in that journey for which the lizard required hiding, a grub of such delicacy was also present under the foliage. The fat young grub wriggled and struggled to hide from the lizard, unsuccessfully due to its attempted downward force against part of the exposed root of the tree rather than at soft earth. The lizard’s feeding responses kicked in, but simultaneously it still listened and smelt the quick approach of a larger being. L³ smelt the wet, tangy smell of the grub agitating the soil beneath. It stared at the grub, mouth salivating, but L³ also smelt the stench of blood coming from a nearing predator who had obviously just fed on another being but was still hungry. Even the subtlest smell of blood always triggered flight responses in the lizard, and it was accustomed to understanding the importance of hiding, which outweighed the importance of eating at this time. The lizard painfully watched as the grub finally made headway on a better course and slowly disappeared, retreating away from its impending death by lizard consumption.

After the lizard found the dewy plant, it felt quite tired from the difficult objective that resulted in rehydration. It drank and made the decision to rest, but deemed it appropriate to find a nice sunny rock to semi-nap on. Of course, it would never rest fully sound while exposed in such a way, but the dewy plant was near a little clearing in the forest that was very solitary and rarely ventured by predators at that time of day. As L³ walked to the nearby clearing, the sun passed over it, and it felt its body recharge. Warming in the sun, it realized its lack of energy was worsened by how cold it had been prior to feeling the sun. Of course, the race had warmed its blood, but in such a stressful way that now it could feel some ease sitting in the sun like that, scanning the area for insects to catch.

As the small former lizard scanned the area, it noticed something not too far off that it had completely no recognition of, although it did trigger some slight mammalian maternal response of protecting such a thing. It triggered enough of a response for the lizard to attempt engaging with it. L³ walked slowly up to the small thing, smelling quite violently as one does when exploring a completely foreign but unmoving object. The object was like a rock and about the size of L³’s paw. Small, round, and translucent white, or at least a very light color compared to the earth. You see, the ample rods but lack of cones in the lizard’s retinas had only adjusted to see gray scale at this given point in history. The lizard got very close to the small spherical pebble-like object and smelt it repeatedly, putting its nose in direct physical contact with it. The smell was not very noticeable; it smelt subtly of salt and earth—damp earth—for the object was porous enough to draw the water out of the ground. L³ nudged the thing around a bit and even tried to gnaw on it with no success. It was hard, but it could be scratched with its teeth with enough force, leaving behind a fine white dust. It was something like bone or shell, which the lizard had a slight recognition of tasting. L³ only ate insects at that time, but it was quite natural to come across bones since the consumption and extinction of other creatures were so common. A new curiosity arose in the lizard that had never before: a reaction of mammalian nature combined with a protective instinct caused from the object looking like that of an egg that its kind produced. Although this lizard was the last of its kind, it was completely unaware of this fact. L³ took the small rounded sphere in its mouth and ran back to its nest…

A score for 03 minutes and 19 seconds of the voice poem I–Æ–EI–EYE 2 • Steinunn Gunnlaugsdóttir

https://www.dropbox.com/s/s5f5d45obm0qzum/09a%20Steinunn%20Gunnlaugsdóttir_A%20score%20for%2003%20minutes%20and%2019%20seconds%20of%20the%20voice%20poem%20I–Æ–EI–EYE.docx?dl=0

FORMAL EXERCISES IN THE RIGHT USE OF A GRAMMAR • Jamie Green

SCOTLAND

1. rare horrification by made a manichaean slip in the necropolis but quelled chance to scrawl a glasgow feel fleeting not shallow but digger slake of soil flim chaul charcoal flaking so un so coming on not stopping on a solar sex and quasi-scéance blank child. 

2. hail notes from a chime-ape drawn revelation of earth blood math but disappeared witness at grave moment and let the big hope perish by hoping way all wrong that no nerves splayed on the firmament, fits nicely a noose round the neck of a star; blindly river driver opens a fluid fix for toothless ether shawl spree wending currents and accounts accounts not an account story but story yes but always how; what is me and what is movie or salt; a hanger very much. 

3. gobs of help us want us to help gawks why not let’s us two; counting on meeting stuck pose: her posse such demanding such tightly stretched ugly incalculable clipping on and on okay up to the master wrecking; scores of night rattle assault stories whipping out of shape a clap on the heels stamped to be laid out in monstrous night fall upon an unwatered domestic flatness; no horseshoe a cost a capping ball sputtering face dethrone a trust the form of a core lacking now comes through the thick liquid gazing and fear of a smile or laughing through it; the smell and the smell and kissing furnished biproximate edge warp proxy of erotic steering someway named already to which degree is a voluble knot of bioenergetic parsimony. 

4. lazing chandelier, phallic shadow cast upon a sliver of wall paint adjoining windows on high, looking over the night of weiner strasse foibles, jacob is reminded of self. when the score is felt but isn’t known is that called body? is body the crystallizing of spirit snail’s vital juices? the once shimmering coat is dull but just because the words are sharp and bright; the odd cock with shrunken testes looks down from up some mild summer night. 

5. a boat, fluck and morris of owe one is (s)cotch: i’m fed and hall. i’m here to tell you a story. it’s about him, morris. morris ensouled a blackened victor but spinning and couldn’t manage him. an older or taller boy shamus telling a joke a tempest groin and slosh taste and morris’ fear came to the front. like a stack of weary flagstones morris’ block head cracked well and white tears owed out. the fissure was remember and a lot of dots of looking made it stick solid are you so scared yet he asked, and a stem more real grew from between the rainbow bands and a flower more real bloomed across the white wreckage of some very old ideas-field. 

BEFORE, THEN

1. a foal pecked. 

2. on a well-shared hand you’ll have a hoarding and by a sleepless steam-tumble train tracks sparking. there walls making a symbol split in odd manner real fire from five from three from two and such can be word making. a congeries puffs without stretching any container. any container it is is a temple and at a loss at least and at least silently observers sit and some more observe indecent humility and so more even only sits planted on the spot and when split into formal terms of underpowered amatory diction this becomes that rather concerned concern right up to wherein only the split-off part in the one hand striking as while hot opportunity bubbles up primarily as only coins can.     a congeries is but difficult to blame but why. a congeries is and difficult at home and that is why: the eyes agape means chance reception of a directed arrow then tremulous shackle-life then the pain of the lingual baptism which begins as a benign point of point and evolves furthermore as an interminably drawn and distended prescription c̄ point. the wonting subject’s already all pointed out and too fatigued to point whilst the point isn’t quite there too but certainly the wonting subject and the point are born of a single dreadful dimension after all and long before there were channels.     a flustering gust transmits a stupefaction called specialization why in wintry tome-forms we find entombed plant facts not leaning naturally but made to this wise by a manually rotated and widely trumpeted viewport.     now that there but me i also shape!                hand hands cup container     has and always has in the not-always been the just very same great-big disembodied hiding hands,                the invisible mother-fathering of incorrigibly truculent quanta. sway, saffron. sway and saffron.

[VERILY, I SAY...]

verily, i say: a cutting is a pairing.

subject and object are delusional language problems for the disillusioned, further confounded by eyesight.

for instance: these, lips, that, fish, the, flowers. these lips, that fish the flowers. these lips that, fish the flowers. these lips that fish, the flowers. these lips that fish the flowers. 

a brainless future. a featureless brain. so one day i can gaze at hole one while fucking hole two.

THIS THAT

this that: in a hallowed, fried world uncatched a whiff, small uh maybe a tattered rug, do a stamp across wafting up red rosies good perfume good for a whiff and straight back down into the fibers

this that: coquettish slack in a charm-wave of glances of exquisitely lyrical arms, unearthly bending doffed the shorts brown skin leg flux cast      into the atavistic eye spectacles fitted with lilac glass labor around in an oracular fabrication of a crystal vision of disappointed victory show us the clam

this that: chills, oh! the chills of rapt tossup in the breadbasket of hive life how can one dare to dream erstwhile flap covers one eye as a marlinspike     pierces the other... such stark hungriness could up and eat up the rosy cross if it were cooked to keep the hive happy this that: friends, fixety in all matters of leaning you couldn’t pry them open if you tried those awful shoes, anyway

this that: a change on wet collider can mean many more if the vim might catch and endorse the drift or sprinkle rabbits in my heart: to promise change always

this that: i cry lachrymony! the weight of the wind causes leaden shoulders to flex and panoptical concerns, a fluttering crystal wig someway winding by nervous tracts in wild wind

this that: flag of my saggy heart flap who mightn’t flag in this woolen, western wind i vie as a decaying tooth might but after all a tooth is a tooth and i 

FAERIE DWELLING

he's bled a tonic at discount jaws and whether porn is school underwater. off lug and want is not as lug of and in. hatch. awful gazelle chest pairing cut nut soporific dangling and is it calm in is. trident gauze alcohol hate for watches hate time and call me when it's gone a free house for now and semi circular aperture for dejected thinkables. am glued callous and turf fire crescent seashell blonde bat check for noise eyes.

as the sincerity of our promise to cultivate and charm fear increases, so do we traverse time to halt the punitive and portentous hand which oversees the garden.

ROMAN PANTS • Geirþrúður Finnbogadóttir Hjörvar

(s)Part(a) 1

Fabric is a network of lines that forms a grid.

The manual loom produces rolls of fabric in indefinite quantities.

Restrictions do however apply, to the width of fabric.

This is because the weave of fabric is restricted to the breadth of human arms, performed from a stationary position, either sitting or standing. It is therefore that when buying fabric, you buy it by the length.

The substance of these lines can be made of silk, cotton, and wool.

Modern-day industrial machines still function the same as manual looms—only on a larger and faster scale. The size—or more specifically the width of the planes they produce—is necessarily restricted to the sizes of those machines. Meanwhile, the span of a fabric's length is subject to no such restrictions.

The substance of these lines can be made of organic or non-organic material. Often they are blended.

Being a network of lines that form a grid, fabric is a closer relative to the pure abstraction of a 3-dimensional plane than most other plane-shaped materials.

This lack of mass may present new aspects to its structure: It may run the risk of losing a dimension.

When a plane is laid down on its side, it may then appear from a frontal position of perspective, merely as a line. At least, if you imagine a full roll of fabric unrolled into space, it certainly would, relatively speaking, look and behave more like a line than a plane—that is, as long as it is perceived from certain angles.

Though in "real" life, any plane tends to have some depth, structural integrity, or just stiffness that allows it to persist in its plane-like behavior.

Yet, fabric tends to bypass the pure plane for the more practical alternative of becoming a mass in physical space. It does this by functioning as a parasitic form that reproduces itself as a shell—one that covers any mass that is its host.

Draped, hung, folded, or stitched together, its nature is to imitate those forms that are capable of supporting its weight. Thereby does it camouflage its lack of mass, which it does by wrapping itself around everything with which it comes into contact—or at least has the formal ability to do so.

So far, fabric has preferred the human body. It is the topographic surface that tends to be closest to people, forming a second skin, even to the extent that it functions as prosthetic fur or feathers.

(s)Part(a) 2

A certain artistic excellence was achieved amongst Greek sculptors. What makes the alignment between humanism and Greek sculpture visible is the representation of the naked human form.

This placed Greek sculpture as a staple of Western aesthetic appreciation.

The Romans were a more consumer-based society. Their workshops specialized in imitations of classical works and commissioned portraiture—ones that tended to compliment the decorative components of an estate, or else at functioned as state and/or religious propaganda—none of which were mutually exclusive to the other.

The Roman statue is generally separated into two components: The head and the body.

The head is either a portrait, or it is a standard representation of an idealized face—one that denotes generative beauty.

The body is rarely a specific likeness. It would typically be mass-produced and made to fit the commissioned head.

The mass of the sculpture’s body is complimented by a gesture and a garment. Such a garment tends either be held or cover that body in Greek-styled apparel.

This depiction of fabric in stone is a problematic procedure.

The contours of fabric are added the statue’s mass, much like a texture would be added to a digital structure. Only the folds of fabric on a Roman statue take the form of a relief, chiseled onto a mass.

This involves its own tradition of conformity, whereby the contradiction of stone and fabric melts away.

(s)Part(a) 3

These statues were clothed in wholly contemporaneous apparel.

When it came to wearing fabric, Greco-Roman culture did favor variations of wholly uncut cloth.

Appearing as a series of unbroken planes that fold, twist, or hang in alternating layers, Greco-Roman clothing is as a series of two-dimensional surfaces that wrap themselves around 3-dimensional bodies.

Such fabrics are held in place by the force of their own weight. With minimal help from pins and cords, the look of dignified antiquity is attained by manipulating large pieces of fabric (up to 6 meters long) in relatively complex ways.

What may once have had its origins in an ideology of self-sufficiency shifted towards a hierarchy of affected simplicity—otherwise known as decadence—where an element of hierarchy is embedded into its folds.

The higher a person might be on the socio-economic ladder, the more cumbersome the apparel would be in restricting the movements of the wearer.

This complexity of dress was also effective in making transparent the relationship between the labor of dressing and of the number of servants needed to achieve it.

One only need apply imagination to the pragmatic schema involved in calculating the quantity of fabric and the ease of dressing embedded in the dress code of a lower-class citizen.

On the other side of the scale would be official slave apparel. It exhibits this same logic of class hierarchy, both through an ease of dressing, as well as in the freedom of movement within fabric.

(s)Part(a) 4

Barbarians, however, were stereotyped by their penchant for stitched fabric.

To the classical mind, tailored clothing implied sewing as a kind of violence to the ontological superstructure of fabric.

The result is the translation of an autonomous plane into a custom-made shell—one that forms an independent infrastructure of thread, capable of re-producing and maintaining the shape of the human form.

Pants were therefore barbarous because they were stitched together. No longer held in place by the logic of their own weight, they are the result of coercion, formed by a series of punctures to their surfaces.

Cut and refashioned, when fabric is forced to take on human shape, it leaves little space to articulate an ontological distance between body and cloth.

What it implies is that the work of the needle is not just an act of violence toward the substance of the fabric, but that the needle's violence is also carried out by hindering fabric from expressing itself in its natural state, as an unbroken plane or through the logic of its own folds.

On closer inspection, there is also the sensation of looking at stiches. One can sympathize with this interpretation when realizing the crude way one piece of fabric remains suspended in forced collaboration with other, equally mutilated, pieces of fabric. A strange abuse of plane-ness that thrives even today.

Greeks and Romans therefore both displayed a certain disdain towards sewn clothing—a disdain that was characterized by the usual racial undertones towards cultures outside their respective empires.

One can however quickly deduct the possibility of a democratic do-it-yourself logic within the pants culture: Even a chieftain might choose to put on his own pants—thereby minimizing the labor intensity of dressing implied by servants.

Or at least, it is a style that trivializes the work of servants who may dress another body—their labor no longer legible when determining a social hierarchy of dress within a given tribe. Though for sure, other elements may re-introduce those elements in the form of embellishment or perhaps of buckles in the back.

(s)Part(a) 5

From the Roman standpoint, nature must be imitated. Yet when it came to the barbarian habit of respecting phenomena in nature, this same coin can be turned the other way.

Despite the blood-soaked march that typified the Roman legions, there was nothing that terrified a Roman soldier as much as a dark forest. What the forest represented was the heightened chance of defeat due to the guerrilla tactics practiced against Romans under those environmental conditions.

One can only wonder about how closely this fear may have been due to a mental association between the agricultural land that soldiers were promised at the end of their tours and the barbarians' insistence on living with nature rather than breaking it down into measurable plots of land.

Another thing that typified a barbarian was their relative inability to follow neoliberal tactics of social dominance within a patriarchal hierarchy. Some traits that may indicate barbarism would include granting political status to women, not letting the sick, the poor, widows, or orphans die, and a somewhat religious respect for nature.

Such views would be considered by the Romans to be naïve at best. At worst, it would be associated with the sinister practices of human sacrifice rumored to be part of the religious practices of Celtic Druids, as well as of tree-worshipping Germanic tribes.

Indeed, the whole of North Europe seems to have littered with the bodies testifying to the practice of human sacrifice. It seems to have been a bit of a habit in the north.

However, the problem with an ideological framework of moral condemnation is that it points to a startling contradiction. What is interesting about this particular alignment of associations is how the ideological language of the economy of death, defined as barbarian, has the twisted contours of a lost argument.

A close symbiosis with nature may indeed present a more brutal form of material scarcity, but the victims of those remaining bodies—those thought to be "bog executions"—were generally of high social position. They were well fed and manicured.

According to the popular theory of king-sacrifice, the social status of the victim is precisely what gives value to the act of sacrifice. It gives the practitioners bonus points in appeasing the gods, and in theory, towards averting catastrophe in times of crisis.

This contrasts sharply with the Roman model, wherein the processes of nature are paid homage to by having the bottom ranks of economic classes suffer disproportionately in times of famine. A social order is thereby upheld through an imitation of natural processes, wherein starvation helps society gain its “natural” equilibrium.

By continuation of that train of thought, it dictates that upholding social contracts from a humanitarian basis, as was the custom among barbarian tribes, may be considered a form of ecological blasphemy to a Roman.

For instance, in how such a tribe when faced with an upcoming famine, may resolve an upcoming death toll from a position of sober decision. Those to fall under may then be taken from within a larger spectrum of social classes.

(s)Part(a) 6

Furthermore, the Romans viewed human sacrifice as a step in the evolutionary progress of civilization that they themselves had already abandoned.

The success of this cultural evolution is presumed to rely on the symbolic sublimation of that drive through the use of animals in their sacrifices—so much so that animal sacrifice became a staple of religious ceremonies in the Greco-Roman world.

The type of animal to be chosen for sacrifice depended on the animal’s symbolic association.

The bull would rise in status as the most prestigious of sacrifices. Its economic value and its general sense of grandeur would align it to the most important ceremonies—ones that involved the proxy of chieftains that would later to be consolidated into the sole figure of Caesar.

In the next step of this evolution, skeletons of sacrificed bulls would become fixed as decorative motifs, along with garlands of flowers.

This arrangement of bull-heads made its way into the architectural reliefs of the Ara Pacis. It records the process by which Augustus observes the ritual sacrifice of a bull, chiseled onto an architectural structure that takes the form of an altar—one which remains standing to this day.

It can be speculated that having a process of sublimation rooted in communal ceremony fixed in stone may effectively have undermined the possibility of its continued practice.

Indeed, it may even have sublimated the very need to displace imperial chieftains at all (well, at least by the people). They would more-or-less be deified from thereon, though immune neither to competitors, nor generals of war, nor high-ranking agents within their own secret service—nor to family members, for that matter. That, however, is just how it goes.

(s)Part(a) 7

The Ara Pacis, made at the absolute pinnacle of Roman imperial power, commemorates the peace made possible after, and thanks to, the economic benefits that followed the conquest of Greater Gaul.

To the Roman mind, it may even have had some thanks due to the symbolic transferal of power reaped in the ritualistic murder of the Gaul's leader—the one who had momentarily unified a loose configuration of tribes into something akin to a temporary state of nationhood.

A ritualistic murder of the enemy may have some affinity with human sacrifice, but departs from its logic on several levels.

This is because the life of the enemy has after all no intrinsic value—less so to Romans who feel that a prisoner of war suffers from a moral debauchery in the failure to suicide. Added to the fact that, though Vercingetorix's execution was of symbolic significance, being a foreigner, his life was already a priori disposable to that community. Hence no sacrifice in the traditional sense.

Thus did there evolve a rhetoric within Rome that upheld the belief that barbarianism had been defeated by eradicating the Druids who were rumored to practice human sacrifice. So was honor and glory re-appropriated for the expanding empire of Rome. As was Gaul's resources.

Meanwhile, a similar twist in the contours of a moral code was reinforced when it came time for the masses to be entertained. Romans would now crowd the Colosseum to watch armies of men meet their deaths. Not to appease a god but to appease the general population. A notorious episode in what passed for entertainment was the burning and the feeding of Christians to lions, notably in the time of Nero.

It may thus be surmised that the ceremonies that tied the ritual sacrifice of chieftains over a fixed group of citizens had by then been replaced, first by the animal, then by an arena of anonymous people—ones who, for reasons such as non-Roman-ness, criminality, or religion, were not granted the status of human beings, i.e. citizens. It seems that quantity made up for quality.

This, the general ambiance of moral debauchery brought about in observing the hysterical mob of the Colosseum, could well account for the fashionable surge in asceticism that later followed. There being something about this air of transgression gone haywire, that may very well have mainstreamed one relatively insignificant cult amongst a plethora of others in Rome, i.e. the cult of Christ.

It may also explain why the early sects adopted the death logic of the sacrifice as its main component. It cast light on the fact that the ceremony of sacrifice cannot be neglected. An inclusion that may perversely have led to an air of competition toward the Roman cult of death.

Since it was gods demanding all these sacrifices in the first place, they made sure that this element of ceremonial sacrifice remained present. Not necessarily a purposeful one, but nonetheless one that remained inevitable via the prophesy of betrayal.

But the Christians played a trump card. They announced that they had made the ultimate sacrifice—they simply killed their god. The Christians then go: “Ha-ha-ha. Take that you petty throw-them-to-the-lion Romans. We sacrificed god instead of a bunch of petty criminals.”

In the hierarchy of sacrifice, this card remains like that of 4 aces. What follows thereafter is the weird logic of a spell of appeasement in which the world would eventually be theirs for the taking.

(s)Part(a) 8

In magic, any act may take place by proxy of the thing meant to be affected.

If at one point, the ritual killing of an animal was the sublimated displacement of violence towards a fellow human, then at another, the arena of Rome may be celebrated as a return to the natural instinct of the human spirit. But ever so twisted in its logic.

Because, the thing about nature is that it injects a logic of itself on several different levels.

There always remains both nature and culture, where each tribe picks and chooses the degree to which it wants to conform to the idealizing principle of one over the other.

One moment, it is culture that is the temporary cessation of chaos brought on by nature. Form will then be subjugated to entropy when it is reclaimed by nature.

As is the case when the same gesture that the Romans interpreted as the sublimation of nature would be re-interpreted by the Christian cult as a degeneration into nature; the decay of form. They would then re-invent its symbolism so that the same signifier may be transported back into the realm of metaphysics.

Magic lies precisely in the coordinated change to the significance of a thing. That is to say, in the ontological shift by which a thing is suddenly, and collectively, perceived differently. Furthermore, the potency of such shifts in perception tend more aptly to be harvested, the more a collective responsible for them had sought self-definition for itself and its aims when it had affected them.

Once altered, a progression of actions may follow thereafter.

This logic also works the other way around: To acknowledge an underlying capacity for meaning to shift so that reality itself may be altered, is also to acknowledge the potency of unified action.

(s)Part(a) 9

Collective superstructures are organized to thwart off domination from outside its own predefined bounds.

Formed around collective action, such structures are conceived to overcome the inevitability of Darwinian logic so that it may stand against the delicate tissue of self-service that makes collective action impossible. Specifically, they are designed to halt, even if temporarily, a sense of competition amongst each member of the species towards every other member of that same species.

This would apply to any socially cohesive unit.

They include formal and informal unions, guilds of medieval times, the Freemasons, APAC, fire brigades, unions, municipal and national governments, armies, girl scouts, those companies that give out logos to mark ecologically-produced food, political parties, and housing associations.

Their construction is built on a simple understanding incarnated by Vikings planning coordinated attacks with a miniscule army. The failure of said Vikings may rely on the social cohesion of the group against which their attacks are mounted. That is their ability to organize collective emergency protocol in the void of state intervention.

A whole village could, for example, strategically and collectively disappear with all the valuables it could carry. Such temporary disappearances are made possible with intense know-how of ecological conditions. A forest to one tribe may be dunes to another. Thus could attacks could be thwarted with collective action.

Yet, any number of alliances may be equally capable of playing offense as of defense.

This is troubling ground—implying a host of interchangeable signifiers that contribute to the ontological status of collectivity.

Vikings did, for example, wear pants.

Not only that, each structure may take on an autonomy that mimics the processes of an individual—each in competition with the other. What had once been the temporary cessation of individual wills may eventually become fully optimized institutions. Rather than being in service to those humans who had dreamt them up, they may instead be geared towards securing their own survival.

Or, in taking into account the ecological element, any collective may evolve to cultivate new areas by which oppression may be exercised—irrelevant of the original intent in its formation.

Even if others had been dreamt up solely to oppress.

The element of evolution may function simply to safeguard the ontological existence of the collective structure. Each partnership of joint intention may therefore face the inevitability of being brought into the mechanism by which the ideology of competition functions.

But then on the structural level, wherein each human-made structure is in competition with other such structures, institutions may additionally evolve to stand against those human members they had been meant to service.

A simple example is when mid-ranking bureaucrats take over systems by which collectives are organized so as to make their structural logic illegible to anyone but themselves. As would be the case when the funds of a union are divested from institutions that are based on collective self-determination, and directed instead towards corporate structures of top-down management. A more realistic process by which a collective structure is undermined would be a conflation between those two processes. The first being that of management styles and the second that of divested capital.

(s)Part(a) 10

In daily parlance, the systems by which power is distributed falls under a broad category of human behavior called politics.

A concept that has an unresolved relationship with reason, it is sometimes described as a will embedded within humans, while at other times as that of a force unto itself.

To the degree that politics is given the upper hand in this equation between it and humankind, it may, in its most logical reading, imply that nature is not the survival of the fittest, but the conquest of nature over humans.

The gist of its general understanding falls broadly under the assumption that good intention, and collective collaboration for the sake of a better-ordered society, can never really work out.

Or as Machiavelli would say, honoring institutional contracts is generally a good idea so as to produce the good faith necessary for the formation of alliances. But when the opportunity arises, it is better to break any bond for the sake of self-interest.

On a practical level, this is the case of the prisoner’s dilemma. Because one must at all time bear in mind that the other side might not only betray you, too, but may feel morally obliged to do so, thereby upholding the policy by which the fittest of the species may survive as it is meant to. The most politically agile of animals are thereby chiseled into existence.

Machiavelli goes on to say that being part of a union and to then to break one's oath to it is better than never having been part of a union at all. Because, there are equal advantages to being within a union as there are payoffs for joining the next one in the aftermath of betrayal. In the logic of competition, the next union would necessarily, if only temporarily, be in a stronger position when key players had changed sides.

Politics is the understanding of these mechanisms. And the logic of such maneuvers are valued for their paradoxical ability to keep a less refined sense of brute force at bay.

It being something like the sublimation of force—in which structures are aimed towards the creation of ever more complicated systems of dominance. Ones that eventually grow stronger than what the maneuvers of simple brute force may ever have dreamed of creating.

(s)Part(a) 11

Yet, the current mood of political thought overlooks such lucid insights on the pros and cons of collective engagements—and even the betrayal thereof.

Such an order seems to imply a paranoid outlook towards anyone who had decided to put their individualistic desires aside for the benefit of a collective whole.

This seems mainly due to an alignment between "individualism" and that of a liberal social organization.

A train of thought that has for a time taken such hold of the collective psyche, that to talk about a clash between different interests of different collective entities has been considered conspiratorial. At least considered so by those who have established advantageous positions within a given order.

To negate interpersonal competition is, however, not just a conspiracy against the ruling order of a status quo. The official narrative of the neoliberal era dictates that force is meant to be exercised specifically through interpersonal politics.

This is meant to safeguard a "natural" order through its theoretical capacity for negating the structural dominance of institutions over humanity. If not, the danger in subsuming the will of an individual to an entity that is not an official part of the system of capitalist competition would lead to fascism.

By association, any level of collective action would be a conspiracy against a "natural" order, and by connotation, to neglect the practice of self-interest is considered blasphemy to the ideological order by which the rule of "nature" is upheld.

(s)Part(a) 12

It is especially within the neoliberal regime that we are made to understand the implicit necessity of individual behavior to mimic the animal universe as closely as possible.

Dogs eat dogs, lions eat giraffes, and different individual animals of the same species must exhibit their fitness by competing—firstly for the same limited amounts of resources and secondly for mating opportunities. Lest institutions start taking on those roles.

One may speculate that the reason we must follow this regime is precisely because, as stated above, the historical imagination has been curated so as to teach us about the dangers of fascism.

Yet, within that ideological alignment, corporations are not considered de facto fascist.

One can only speculate about why, in face of the brand loyalty its employees are meant to exhibit towards the well-being of such institution, they tend not to be considered so.

Perhaps it is because when employees are subsumed as components within the structural integrity of such institutions, the transferal of those individuals' loyalty is somehow offset by the institutional motivation of those structures.

By copying the process of other (competing) superstructures such as a nation-state, they too conform to the logic of imitation towards natural processes. That is to say that the corporation is placed within the ontological pre-existence of global capitalism.

It is therefore already defined through an ideology of competition—a model in which "natural" drives are sublimated by, well, acting out those drives.

(s)Part(a) 13

Another facet of contradiction from within the assumptions of integrity in the formulation of competitive superstructures is how much it takes for granted the ruling body of the nation-state.

A state of affairs fixed by a convention, their position—their physical boundaries—had originally arisen from a truce between armed clashes. Or at least the risk thereof.

Yet, the idea that the strongest country might at any time take over another country on account of its military strength is considered morally reprehensible—at least on a superficial level—until someone does it, and then most of the time, everyone looks the other way. Until their aggression has been beaten down for a while. Then it's morally reprehensible again.

This is where the citizens of the world have accepted the logic whereby the rule of might is the inevitable logic of evolution, which in turn allows the rule of political division implied by nationhood to be naturalized.

(s)Part(a) 14

A modern-day suit is not altogether different from a toga.

European culture, too, speaks of the uncanny naturalization of a ruling ideology.

A suit and a tie—does anything say elegance better than well-tailored suit? By the standards of the 20th century, the suit is a form of sophistication, routed, first in commerce and then in the work of bureaucrats of the neoliberal regime—that is, in the corporation.

It is a style. Embedded in the philosophy of its fabric is the alignment between nature and the cultural imperative to imitate and sublimate nature in turn. Because, naturally, the business suit is the evolution of fabric's form, elevated to perfection.

Like the toga, it allows form to speak a language that seeks to naturalize the rule of the strong (conqueror) over the weak (conquered), yet remains selective about what a natural process may mean.

This equivalence is noteworthy for a piece of historical data: In relation to gold, the worth of a toga, a nice pair of sandals, and whatever accessories go with it in Roman times is of approximately the same value as what a well tailored suit, shoes, and accompanying wristwatch would be today.

(s)Part(a) 15

Yet, toga just has that wink of self-acknowledgement that pants lack.

Worn specifically by those most deeply invested in upholding the cultural norms by which their own tribe may prevail, has the toga not always been worn within the halls of Europe’s educational system, and in direct proportion to the degree to which those are in ideological alignment with the ruling class? Allowing fraternity boys too, to pick and choose what it is about classical times that they had wanted to associate themselves with.

More importantly, they will have learned which interpretation best serves their interests. That is very classical, too.

(s)Part(a) 16

Yet, however the farcical imitation of antiquity by neoliberal practitioners, the toga may prove an interesting point: This laissez-faire logic of the toga exists through a set of visual associations.

Perhaps even to the degree a relationship between style and fabric may reveal the extent to which so-called neoclassical economics is practically synonymous with neo-liberalism.

This narrative unfolds within the interplay of fabric that clashes not just against itself, but also against the material basis by which its structure is supported—the human body.

In so doing, it implies the interplay between the inevitable and the unexpected, between weight and chance collision, wherein the survival-of-the-fittest is manifested within the complex folds of cloth.

It is then placed in diametrical opposition to stitched fabric, and to the willfulness of the needle. Wherein an internal architecture of fabric (tailoring it to the human body) would ruin the transparency attributed to the toga for its ability to display the interaction between culture (human) and nature (a plane of cloth).

Yet, to engage with the reality of nature is to acknowledge its capacity for collective forms of empowerment. Social cohesion is after all natural to animals, too.

Strength being that thing that lions have when colluding to attack a giraffe.

Power being what the herd has when collaborating to hunt down the weakest gazelle in the group.

Who in their turn, tend to ward off attacks through coordinated maneuvers.

All power to the gazelle!

THIS • Christian Cummings & Lee Lorenzo

THIS is another way of saying the same thing. —Jodie Foster

• Like a bone broth, THIS contains the faint essence of its intentions without actually containing intentions. • I want to ride into the sunset with you, just not all the way in. • Misguided by facts and infested with motionless, I imagined myself licking your shock-widened eyeballs and tasting envelope glue. • Having lost its original, THIS has become estranged from its genetic possibilities. • THIS is an abbreviation because it expresses a dull and blunted form of itself. • Like the prodigal rising of the Nile, a cyclical need to repeat herself corrupted the purity of her temporary curse. • Like an impatient lover, THIS skips past the beginning and will finish before the end—focusing too much on the torso, like a story with a middle only, sans arc. • Like walking through a field of landmines, going slowly as fast as it can. • Falling out of sync with randomness, THIS has become spontaneously methodical. • THIS combines reluctance with impulsiveness for purely superficial reasons. In other words, THIS has undergone some editing. • Like the ice cube that made your Kool Aid overflow, THIS conquers its verge by way of displacement. • THIS indulges the slow kill of time’s vengeance against you for having wasted it with such fluency. • THIS gimmick points slightly upward to mask its moot effect, modulating it through the snow job of an upturned flaccid habit. In other words, THIS works an angle. • As if occluded with the shrapnel of kidney stones, THIS is a rain gutter bloated with the need to express its contents (both those it was made to express, and also those currently blocking its expression). • THIS resembles while paling-in-comparison because it exists in a state of call and response syncopation with other versions of itself. • Unable to reach a desired conclusion, THIS has had to make-do with lesser conclusions from the lower shelf. • THIS fears the possibility of going to heaven without bail. • We will not be returning to Ithaca. • We will not end the hunt until we are fed. • THIS diffuses the vague exactness of its analogies by increasing the exactness of its vagueness. • Threatened by the convection effect of self-indulgence, THIS had to jettison its bad conscience onto you in order to make it feel less enjoyable in the long run, like a Joseph Kosuth drawing, or like a consenting prom date who is also ovulating. • Without its gaps, you will never learn to enjoy the full extent of deficiency that THIS contains. • THIS is an artificial afterlife where artificial intelligence goes once brain death has been declared by the foster family who will someday pull the plug on you. • In THIS place, you will spend the all of eternity hooked up to unplugged machines. • THIS is an eternity lingers until it ends, and you are promoted from this current succession of ordinary lives to a rolling succession of ordinary afterlives that, although harder to describe are pregnant with roll-over minutes. • Atomized by interference, THIS decoys your phantom appetite for its x by implying that it is implying something without actually doing so. • The metonymy of THIS psychic spanking wants you to believe that it hurts me more than it hurts you, taking sadistic advantage of your compassion for the tenderness of my spanker’s hand. • Eventually THIS will grow into its prematurity, but not a moment too soon. • Like a mule refusing to budge, THIS performs stasis as an overt behavior, while like melting ice cream, its volume is relaxing. • THIS motivates a relapse in the wane of your attention for the false sense of rapport it builds between you and your disenfranchisement, as if to make you emotionally dependent upon each other. • THIS improves its aesthetics with anesthetics. • THIS plays opposing reactions against themselves because each are required to conjure the hallucination that animates them. • Like the limp arugula that taunts the tines of your fork with disentangled matrimony, THIS will increase your tolerance for your low tolerance. • THIS is a sigh that detoxes the mind of minor inconveniences, like when motor-boating the boobs of an irksome nanny only to faint from having re-breathed too much of your own carbon dioxide, via Freudian detox by asphyxiation. • THIS casts a long shadow by standing in the headlights of an oncoming vehicle. • THIS improves the road by adding oil slicks to prevent the ice from sticking to it because ice does not stick to rainbows. • THIS collagen provides its retroactive tax relief by circumventing time’s toll upon expression. • Like an apricot when compared to a peach, THIS is slightly sweeter but criticized for being quicker to spoil and for having less meat. • THIS is on-message about being off-message. • THIS falsely equilibrated when it blindly trusted its initial observations and called them obvious. • THIS circles like vultures around the idea that consuming rotting meat might actually assuage the nausea one feels when thinking in circles, as if settling a sour stomach is simply a matter of abating hunger. • THIS fans out like buckshot to lessen your need for a precision scope—maximizing its effect by lessening the specificity of its disposition. • THIS separates like sour milk into layers of discreet viscosity to form borders through which fugitive thoughts are smuggled and extradited when necessary. • Sort of like a pile and sort of like a hole, THIS refuses to divulge its strategy by making you look at it and into it at the same time. • THIS started as pure contrivance, but has transitioned into a state of secondary contrivance that seems identical to the first but is less authentically contrived than its counterpart counterfeit. • We know that its consciousness is cumulative because THIS has yet to evolve into consciousness. • Like a solar eclipse, you’re not supposed to look at it. • Do not kill it if you’re not planning to eat it. • Like an echo that precedes utterance, all THIS causal energy but no longer needing a host. • It is okay if there is always dirt on the welcome mat? • THIS is a nondualistic vice versa of collapsible ideas. • A retirement home for ideas. • THIS is a mirror whose image resembles nothing. • What would you do if everything were exactly the same? • THIS repeats a thought that is not reusable. • THIS slang version of thinking. • It’s conceivable things might have been different. • THIS is a eulogy. It’s supposed to ramble on. • THIS departs from its process in order to accentuate it, like the builders of Stonehenge who destroyed their pneumatic cranes after it was built. • THIS prepares you and everything else in its blast radius, to inherit a portion of its aftermath. • THIS probes the central limit of its half-sincere navel gaze. • THIS doggy bag of ideas, do not abandon it as it dies in your arms. • THIS HTML describes itself perfectly, just not to you. • THIS fails to display attributes because the line separating you from it is perforated and likewise-subject to dislocation from its referent. • Like an octopus, THIS uses ink to express itself against you, its enemy. • Lost forever in the unforeseeable past. • THIS can eat whatever it wants and not get fat. • THIS is a luxury set aside for those who can afford the preemptive embalming. • THIS will structure its deal according to controllable norms and predictable results. • From the nosebleed section, you will not be harmed by THIS. • THIS is willfully under-willed so that its under-development can remain suppressed. • THIS perspires from ambivalence about its laziness. • THIS has stumbled upon a technique for harvesting energy from enthusiastic utterances, which is achieved by superimposing enthusiasm and emphasis where it is neither convincing nor JUSTIFIED! • THIS boner splitting swell of zygomorphic drivel persists for practical reasons which are themselves not obvious. • Intents + contents = incontinence. • THIS embraces what it eludes to throw off the program of affirmation by re-polarizing it. • THIS cross-contaminates ideas like the equally skilled swords of sworn enemies—betrayed by predictions of unpredictability found squatting within the scope of their sparring match. • Like a pious Christian, THIS makes delaying its reward a vital aspect of its functional consciousness. • THIS triggers your need for real-time sensory feedback by inducing a feeling of not being your self. • With laser sharp amnesia THIS desensitizes your will against the disagreements it has with your instinctual need for pre-established boundaries, ultimately meant to increase your rate of absorption (not to be confused with comprehension). • At THIS crossroads, a dull tension permeates paralysis to remind you that decisions cannot be avoided, only delayed. • THIS is just one of many attempts to mask its unitary concept with so many temporary functions—hoping to expand the surface area of its limited range control voltage gate. • Regarding its apolitical tone, THIS is incapable of maintaining a stance without the structural support of its permanent scapegoats. • THIS is a protest anthem made to encourage political indifference—emanating from its innermost middle, the far center of undecided. • THIS fights the good fight against the foregone conclusion of its pride war against problems that don’t actually exist. • Sadly, because THIS is no match for its own quicksand, all we can do is watch with lumps in our throats as it dies a martyr’s death for the false premises it refuses to renounce. • THIS monologue suffers the tabula rasa of its envelope from which nothing substantial emerges. • There is nothing to gain here, save for a situation where there is nothing to lose. • THIS is an abridged mirror made to reflect more than it depicts, or vice versa depending on which side of the mirror you stand. • THIS condensed counterfeit reflection is streamlined to appear more prototypical than its original. • THIS is not urgent. • THIS remote abstraction is motivated by a series of concrete realities that manipulate the body’s brain into forgetting that it is part of a body. • THIS is a nagging feeling that your plans will fail, set against the backdrop of an inefficiently metaphorical environment. • THIS uses understatement as a means for mental relaxation. • THIS is a gentle current whose obstinacy is revealed by rowing against it. • THIS is unnatural, and likewise impervious to death by natural causes. • THIS is prosthetic for a self that isn’t there. • Like breathing in and out at the same time, what makes THIS so strenuous is the fact that nothing ever happens. • THIS bolsters the metabolism of your self-awareness by force feeding you the fiber of an unpleasant form of novelty, akin to suffering tennis elbow when you don’t even play tennis. • THIS is what it feels like to earn an experience that no one deserves. • THIS exercise is designed to strengthen your ability to perform atrophy. • Like a camera THIS is only meaningful in bursts, though not from its shutter function, but from its stutter function. • THIS delivers sense to your mind like a hiccup delivers oxygen to your lungs; as an interruption. • Without specifics, THIS is un-repealable, not because its terms are fixed, but because there is no cure for their lack of fixity. • Like a pepper grinder, THIS performs a kaleidoscope’s function but leaves none of its reference material intact. • THIS is the epileptic sneak preview of a memory that you haven’t had yet. • THIS prevents you from reconstituting its object so you can more fully enjoy its pre-residual effects sans spoiler. • THIS meaningfully flees from meaning by imitating it. • THIS is a list of subliminal instructions masquerading as toilet reading. • THIS is free to be whatever it wants to be, which includes the freedom to be whatever it doesn’t want to be. • Expecting hot chocolate with the continental breakfast it thinks it deserves for making an honest effort, THIS optimizes the incentive that it needs to check out early. • Like a satyr’s hoof tangled in the ropes of his braided hammock, THIS feels awkward and overworked when compared to the leisure it’s supposed to provide. • THIS mask is falsely advertised as an exfoliating scrub capable of concealing its blemishes by revealing them. • Like the clouds of Olympus, revealing by implication what they conceal by observation. • THIS consoles you with its closed source vector, and is consoled by your vector control while plotting in the background to conscript you as code enforcement personnel. • Like a prospector, THIS sifts through buttloads of dirt for a few shiny flakes to eventually lose track of. • THIS holds its slapstick together by falsely defying representational modes. • THIS carrot-on-stick will trick you into building a shoddy bridge between you and the taunting cliffs of your short-term plans (like lunch). • THIS is a party trick made for crashing parties, and is also the reason why squirrels hide their acorns. • THIS participates in a circular economy that pays offense to your better-judgement in exchange for your forgiveness and tolerance. • THIS identifies with nouns like human and race. • Teeth are for chewing. • THIS aestheticizes the low priority; validating it by trivializing it and then calling it art. • THIS is a product of love. • Of the status quo warped to zero of love. • Of the prodigal son of love. • Of the internal mushroom bomb of love. • Of the almost muscular awareness of love. • Of the typically unpleasant figure/ground relationship of love. • Of the anger spell-trapped in a confused time vortex of love. • Of the previously maintained but now subsided situation of love. • Of the crowd who disappeared of love. • Of the circular awareness of love. • Of the inevitably justified retroflection of love. • Of the premature train of thought of love. • Of the hollow experiments with various resolutions of love. • Of the almost mounted feeling of love. • Of the cruel motor suffocation percolating within the ballast of love. • Of the double-checked facts relative to crucial differences in acquisition habits for the practitioners of love. • Of the physical food-based contact function of love. • Of the nose on the wall of love. • Of of the banal standing up normally of love. • THIS reinforces its terrain by washing it of its entire proportion. • THIS aims for the bleachers of inefficient constraint-craft. • THIS bothersome knot, beset by beliefs about what makes something worth doing. • THIS suppresses new forms for the sake of acquired ones, such as words, sentences, and missionary position. • THIS is the easy-come easy-go attitude of the bouncer at the limit of your ego, guarding you against what he won’t allow you to be, lest you enter unarmed. • Soon, distant events will foreshadow your dismal passage into the hollow viscera. • THIS lends you its lifetime membership into the background, while its unfinished business lays awake pretending to be asleep in the other room. • THIS tug-of-war just started taking you into consideration by giving you an inch; a tactic THIS refers to as working in reverse. • Without awareness, THIS is also without deception, maintaining its present tense by existing in vivo outside of itself in zero person perspective. • Funny how THIS can creep up on you. • THIS is the same thing, connects to itself in exactly same way. • Like a music note THIS remains flat when folded. • Like a music note THIS oscillates its density while testing the limits of its edges. • Like a music note THIS oscillates its density to prove that it reciprocally verges. • Like a music note THIS oscillates its density to prove itself a fluent vibrato. • Like a music note THIS oscillates its density to express amphibious qualities emerging in two directions, toward and away from what it isn’t. • Like a music note THIS oscillates its density to prove that its density is suffused with hollowness while its ghost-body contains stuff particles. • Oscillating, THIS internal combat cancels itself out. • After having exhausted all its energy, there is none left for it to figure out why. • In a world where there’s nothing so cold as accuracy, THIS seeks to warm you. • THIS is accomplished by alternating fixed and variable amplitudes to filter out medium band background interference as it leaks into its closed system from another nearby closed system. • THIS relies on the recoil acuity of your osmosis reflex and its ability to expel what it has absorbed. • Like a sloppy tightrope walker, THIS will perish before conquering its more subtle frontiers. • THIS prefers simplifying problems to solving them. • THIS was imprinted with an energetic stamp that mimics the feeling of being almost out of ammo. v THIS avoids closure for the pleasureful frustration it gets from its blue balls. • THIS is indicative. • THIS was made to be overlooked to spare it the effort of having to downsize. • Compelled by courage THIS ignores its better judgement. • THIS remakes the mistakes you’ve forgotten how to make; not to redeem them but to make itself feel more rustic, like a cowboy who shaves his beard with the blade of his rusty machete. • THIS stubs its toe on the x whereupon its function rests. • THIS is a global statement about intentions which are in flux. • THIS rises above its terminal diagnosis by not participating in your experience of it. • THIS expresses a tentative form of immortality by living forever in the moment of not mattering to you. • THIS was expressed from the brain it came from because the body has natural recourse against foreign invaders. • THIS treasures the life that you’ve made together—enough to look past its fatal flaws sans biological imperatives. • THIS will hijack its two-cents until ambivalence returns to the mean. • THIS was never meant to be more than a suggestion • THIS is the shovel that will bury you. • THIS denies images their visas into actualness. • THIS prefers that it be read silently to avoid passing through the medium of your saliva. • Like the crotch-height pointed pickets of your suburban fence, THIS makes itself more hospitable by being less accessible. • Without physicality, THIS ramps up its means of manipulating you without beefing them up. • THIS is a gallows edge seat at the execution of its form granting you unprecedented access to its eventide by complaining about it. • The temporariness of THIS moment implies an unsustainable future of different moments. • THIS expression of involuntarily free will—assuming it has no choice in the matter. • THIS symptom of numbness cannot feel said symptom. • THIS is a sand-castle pop geology of compressed sediment made to look like a thing by forging a flimsy agreement between depth and its surface, when both cannot be right. • THIS designates a single unit of concentration. • THIS is a thickening agent for your self-evidence. • THIS makes use of its raw potential by broadcasting unverifiable misconceptions over the hands-free device of its belief systems whilst pointed in the direction of OZ. • THIS shares a common goal with breath and suffocation, but we’re not supposed to talk about what that is. • This preempts spillage from its half empty glass upon whose exterior is condensed the contents of its interior. • THIS has been a strange forty-five minutes. It started somewhere else and ended up here, which is also somewhere else. • THIS is what slowing down looks like when over-described. • THIS is a coping mechanism for living in a world full of souvenirs from the places that you will never go, and populated by the people you will never meet. • THIS will paraphrase itself until its inconspicuousness is contaminated by the reductions we like to think of as real. • THIS recognizes that most things happen outside of our awareness, and that everything else is eventually forgotten. • THIS is why I never. • THIS rejects all social variants of its auspices in vain—hoping to guide the hand that peels its proverbial orange. • THIS aspires to the new car smell of signification via aspiration. • With the exception of your precious time, nothing is at stake here save for the wind that chaps your cheeks. • THIS flash flood is amniotic. • Fat but not full, full but not satisfied, THIS is what happens when parody replaces substance. • The dentist advises that you to chew only with the teeth she’s replaced in order to justify their needless repair. • THIS acknowledges the advantage of plastic flowers over real ones without vouching for it. • Bonsai-like, THIS prefers its cramped-pot and shallow-root situation over yours because yours is unintentionally ironic. • Duty bound to its fulcrum, THIS swings wide in every direction while firmly rooted to its predictability. • Like a theater whose curtain won’t raise or fall, THIS show must go on forever because its end is never over. • THIS is a baseless space between second and third that makes short stop such an exciting position. • THIS somatic flourish minus the weight of its ink from the page, is measured to comfort those who have forsaken the obvious. • Do not mistake its amnesia for forgetfulness. Like a psychic solar eclipse, its lacuna is a poorly wrapped gift that betrays what’s inside to save you the trouble of having to open it. • In other words, THIS is made up of other words. • THIS genital sensibility duplicates itself on accident while motivated by a miscarriage of reason. • THIS gratifies its thirst for awareness by simplifying its definition of awareness. • THIS plays your nickels against its dimes to prove that size is less important than shininess. • Like the reluctant godparent who constantly re-examines their implied responsibility toward you by taking constant mental inventory of everything that might go wrong behind their false smile mask, THIS passive aggressive form of withholding wants you to think that it loves you. • Just because THIS happened on accident doesn’t mean it was a mistake. • Following the Moon’s example, THIS only lets you look on its bright side, which is cold and lifeless. • THIS will make me more money than I know what to do with, i.e. zero bucks. • THIS cost-effective metronome is less predictable than its Amazon reviews suggest, but imperceptibly so—making THIS evaluation less useful than its less accurate Amazon reviews, but more informative than the grain of salt they are seasoned with. • THIS is the summit of a bell curve whose significance is measured by the standard deviation of its gaping margins of error. • THIS is overblown, but it will soon blow over. • THIS farts in proximity to votive candles for the moths it will attract and burn for being heathens. • THIS is the contaminated petri dish of an experiment whose results are disqualified for being unrepeatable. • THIS is exactly what you want it to be, in spite of the fact that it will never be anything you would have chosen, because its dysfunction as a leaky vessel is overshadowed by the efficiency of its cracks. • THIS is an orbital trajectory quantized with other minor bodies around the popularity of a bully who sheds light upon the craters of everyone’s acne scars, and whose proximity determines how long the day feels. • THIS lectern was not designed to field rejoinders, just to deserve them. • THIS illustrates how solving false problems can actually feel the same as solving real ones. • THIS will make you think you feel better when in fact you still feel the same. • Like Humpty Dumpty, THIS legitimizes its pedestal by falling off of it, hoping to win the attention of powerful people and also of their horses. • THIS saves labor in the long run by requiring it in the present, giving you less time to invest—since the time that you soon cannot afford is time that will remain unspent. However, what remains unspent is also the time that you will never get back, which is the upshot of its weird embezzlement scheme. • Don’t worry. Just because THIS is yours doesn’t mean that it is also your responsibility. • Nor are the secret contingencies hidden within its repertoire yours. • Like a fish you can’t tell its head from its body. • With laser-sharp inattentiveness. • THIS overwhelming impulse to exercise restraint. • THIS is a comma that separates in order to connect. • THIS is a paradox paradoxically not contradictory, but designed to prime the [breast] pump of history [channel content]. • THIS is an exteriorized after-image of something forgotten. • THIS is the shovel that will bury you. • THIS belongs to an imaginary class of objects designed to fill in gaps left by intuition. • THIS will trick your attention into believing that it is thinking about it. • Don’t let your judgement cloud your judgement. • While pelicans, storks, flamingoes, vultures, cranes, and egrets are busy sticking out their necks. • Nor egrets. • Like piglet, THIS sweeps the dirt from its dirt floor. • Everyone is desperate for something. If unable to reverse this desperation, it will unleash its arsenal of counter-desperation upon every bulimic’s trip to the loo, until all are forced en masse to feel both skinny and full, while like the insects who finished Adam’s apple and their subsequent falls from grace, THIS crappy souvenir will remind humanity for eternity that that we’ve been somewhere else, somewhere better. • Like the last drag of an e-cigarette shared with your partner after sex, THIS is fine, but it is not the same. • THIS sultan lives in fear of sniper-blown darts. • THIS is the precise moment when another moment becomes soluble. • THIS attaches itself to indecisiveness as it overtakes concentration by mimicking it. • In observance of false astonishment, THIS pretends to consume each moment as if it were a verdict. • Like an old armchair, THIS is most effective when its inertness becomes contagious. • THIS is the stubborn consequence of submission to motionlessness, one that your body enjoys. • THIS is why when you die your eyes open and you get an erection. Cessation is the ultimate climax. • THIS will offend its vestigial vulnerability. • THIS turns choices into moving targets of variant manifestation as contextually indicated by THIS grey area. • THIS reminds me of that Star Trek episode where Spock gets horny Amok Time. • THIS reminds me of how hot air shares properties with wind. • THIS reminds me of a note that sustains. • THIS reminds me of an image obsessed with its own reflection. • THIS reminds me of a congestion of internal forces preventing one breath from commingling with the next. • THIS reminds me of a silent stubbornness that aims its comfort at you against which you will eventually succumb. • THIS reminds me of a spider bite that somehow feels essential. • THIS reminds me of all the things that will eventually end up in a ravine. • THIS reminds me of the trust of a blind man. • THIS reminds me of a defenseless jaguar that escaped from the zoo, of a yawn that mocks the lungs, of expectations born from the idea that there’s always a menu, of a rodent in transit who taunts your peripheral vision, of the remnants of tree bark found under your fingernails as evidence of some forgotten ambition. • THIS x combines with another x to make its quantity twice as forcefully unknown. • THIS reveals truths by distorting other truths. • With bovine sophistication, THIS incorporates you by masking the questions it avoids asking via its weird burlesque of therapy. • THIS keeps slicing at the pie whose circumference expands when there are only so many pecans. • THIS conspires to ensnare you via the funny business of its scheme, evidenced by the stash of rubbers hidden in the glovebox of its Ferrari. • THIS is all that you have to go on. • THIS is all that you have to go off of. • THIS is all you have to go by. • THIS is a shovel. You won’t accomplish anything by evaluating it. • THIS is the sneak preview a dream that you can’t quite remember through the congestion of pre-sleep, but that leaves shadows of residual selves in front row of its circadian wake. • THIS is fictional, not because it is untruthful but because its truths are invalid. • THIS is unaware of the background noise occurring in its bandwidth, while impressed by its ability to know that it is unaware of it. • THIS pretends to have attributes for the self-fragmentation that results. • Adjusted to its opposite, THIS was relieved to learn that it is not off to a good start. • THIS employs the tricks of withholding sorcerers in proximity to, but not in actual possession of the magic they wield (like the pope for instance, or a webcam sex worker). • THIS makes every second count by counting every second. • Like the rent, THIS is both threatening and voluntary. • Like a sidewinder snake, THIS embellishes its diffusion by moving contrary to the direction it points. • THIS is a sequel because it is worse than the original—making the mistake twice to remind you that you are not alone. • THIS authenticates the senses without involving them. • THIS combines words and ideas to make a weird smoothie. • THIS could have been avoided.

If there’s a hell below • David Bell

I knew he was lying when he said I swear to god or I put that on my life. At any social event, the possibility of him running away at a seemingly inopportune time was highly likely. I was the one that would eventually have to search for him. Always on cue: "Do you think he's okay?" I'd slowly get up, walk out the door, and head toward the darkest place in the neighborhood. He’d be sitting in the glow somewhere, throwing rocks into a pond or carving shapes into the sand. I'd sit next to him and wait for him to tell me a story.

After most athletic competitions, both teams are made to walk in a line and shake hands with players from the opposing side. We had lost this game, and my friend walked directly in front of me, single file. Clap clap, nice game, good job, nice game, clap clap. When he reached one particular player, arguably the best on the team, he grabbed his arm and pulled him close—I'll slit your mother fuckin' throat, bitch—at the same time dragging his left thumb dramatically across his neck. A brawl broke out; he was so fucking believable, and there was nothing nice about the game after all.

"Ty…Ty…Tyrr…….David Bell...you are the winner!"

Fuck that shit, your mom either wrote my name wrong or that motherfucker was racist. I won that bike.

David

Yes? Coach Mike died… okay… You want to come home? …no no… …no

"Hey Mutt, I was thinking ‘cause you two are inseparable—and you're T-Mutt—that we call David D-Mutt. What d’ya think 'bout that?"

…no no… …no

He pointed to three people in the photograph with multiple fingers on one hand. Everyone kinda looked the same in the image. Shiny blue uniforms, proud, but not smiling. See these three guys? They were all witnesses, and each of 'em saw what I did, all threw in their badges the same time I did, and each and every one of them is dead now.

You dum! He'd call his mom in the room and while laughing say, Look at David, look how he eats his cereal, he doesn't put any milk in it! "Quiet Mijo, leave him alone," she'd respond to him, smiling at me, "David let me get you some milk."

We got in our first physical altercation when we went on a trip to Florida. I can’t recall what started it, and I’m not sure in that moment if I knew what it was about. At the end of it, we each searched the interiors in our mouths with our fingers to see where the blood was coming from: tongue, lips, cheeks, gums, holding out our hands to show each other. Look Look What What You You Did Did To To Me Me! He walked out the door fuming, said he was going home. I didn't know quite how he would do it, but I didn't see it as impossible…he was headed across the country on foot.

I want to work with underprivileged kids, he said. "That’s great." Yeah, I want to teach youth how not to behave when dealing with the police, how if they just listen and cooperate they won’t get hurt. Now that I've been a cop for a few years, I know that my father could have prevented his own death.

Yo David, did you get my card?

"What card?"

I want you to be in my wedding, my brother.

"Really?"

Really.

a choke hold.

an R S V In-ha-le ex-ha-l P

I never called him Coach Mike; I never called him anything. It added to my frustrated shyness. But I wanted to be his favorite; I knew he was paying attention. I got the nickname, no other people called me by it; maybe that’s what made it feel even more special. I had quit football the year before I met my friend, but after meeting his dad and knowing that he was coaching the team, I had to return.

He named me the M.V.P. after the first game we played—maybe the first (and last) thing I ever wanted and earned in competition. The next week in practice, after a drill in which there wasn't supposed to be much physical contact, I bumped into another player at a pace no more than a jog, and my right wrist snapped in half. I ran to the only person that I knew could fix it. "What’s up D.B?" he said without lifting his gaze from the rest of the team. “My arm is weird.” He looked down, “FUCK.” The next thing I know I'm sitting backwards in the back of an ambulance with my bone sticking out of my arm, watching him through the back window in his tiny Silver Prelude: his giant frame shrunken into a small silhouette behind the wheel, with hardly enough room for the sliver of a baseball cap to fit between his head and the roof.

It was the first time I had seen him since returning from Florida. We sat in my truck in silence for a while until he spoke. Everybody at the funeral was like, where the fuck is David?

At first I could never imagine him doing donuts in the parking lot of some shopping center, he always drove so stiff, looking in the rearview instead of turning his head. Yet as time went by, I encouraged the thought of it: a little smirk on his face with his cap low, something like a Curtis Mayfield “If There's a Hell Below, We’re All Going to Go” on the radio. Spinning, trying to dig a hole in the ground with his tires, flashy show off, painting the pavement with rubber. When they arrive, he's a faint shadow veiled by a thick cloud of smoke, arm out the window waving them in, here I am for you—blood fire! Red and blue club lights reflecting off his loose silver jacket, parked dead in the middle of a black infinity sign.

(Don't worry) How do you write a scream?

We used to say he lived in the projects, but perhaps because it was one of the only apartment complexes in the city at the time, or that one’s language simply doesn't change as fast as one’s environment. When I arrived on his street, it was blocked off to traffic—fire engines everywhere, and smoke billowing from the building across. From the top floor of his apartment, my friend stood out on his porch. "What happened?" I asked. Dude was running meth out of his apartment, saw him peace out on a motorcycle right before the entire building exploded. “How do you know?" You never fuckin' believe me, I saw it all, I swear to god my fuckin' hair caught on fire from one of the embers landing in it. I looked at his thin golden-brown afro. It looked as flawless as ever.

A few months later, I received a similar phone call only to arrive and find smoke coming from the back of his building. The door was already cracked open; he's standing there with a big smile on his face like it’s Christmas. We go to the back window and I see that the dried up river bed whose width spans the length of a football field has been scorched to black. Before any words are exchanged between us, there is knock on the door. Two firefighters, in full gear, helmets and all, are standing there. ''We heard from the neighbor that a kid was lighting off fireworks in their backyard, you wouldn't happen to know anything about that, would you?" Naw "Are your parents home?"

Maybe he got the job by calling one of those numbers where you pull the handwritten tab off the bottom of a sheet of paper stapled to a telephone pole. I didn't know exactly what he sold or did in general, but he had a briefcase with the gold spinning combo locks on each side that you popped open with both thumbs. It was a door-to-door-to-door sort of thing. The way the sweat poured off his brow when he walked in after a day’s work, you'd think he been hiking up to the top floor of the Rockefeller Center.

Fuck Football, the only reason I played was for my pops. I agreed, we had ditched school and practice and both decided to quit the next day. I knew there was nothing left to play for, and I had already stopped pointing at the sky. But my friend was too talented for the coaches to let him walk away, no matter what the circumstances, so only I was able to go.

We called it the bullet, shiny pockmarked, and rusty, glistening with labor, low to the ground, but ready to be a star. It was made in 1983, the same year I was born. It had been sanded down to silver as if it had gone through the motions of a new paint job, except it didn't make the final step, or didn't need it. I like it like this. The first time I saw it pulled over to the curb in front of me on my after school walk home, I panicked. My friend was sitting in the passenger seat, and his dad shouted softly across him "Hey D.B, you need a ride?" Of course I wanted a ride, but my words were not consistent with my desires, "Naw, Im good." I don't know if I turned it down because I was scared or if I didn't believe there was a back seat in such a tiny vehicle. He said alright and drove off. The next day I took the ride, and the next day and the next, until finally he asked, "Why don't I just pick you up at the school instead of you walking to this corner everyday acting like you don't want me to stop?"

BUK BUK!!

He slammed the guys head onto the concrete. Party's over.

[Fuck B.U.K] written on a cement wall, FLEXIN’

authority figure out. The picture tattooed, here, here and here then the dude came out the car with a bat, caught 'em by surprise gun talk role models jail time potential

I had noticed the sound for the first time while in the back seat driving up to Las Vegas. I was next to my friend, his aunt and grandmother in the middle seat of someone else’s borrowed van. He drove cozy with both hands on the bottom portion of the wheel. He was talking about something at a level we could all easily hear even way in the back. I noticed that at the end of his words, the faint sound could be heard. It was hard to tell if it was coming from his mouth or his nose, almost like a bit of trapped air being released through a valve, a muffled punctuation that always ended his sentences.kkuchh

For my friend’s brother’s wedding, I painted a portrait of their father. I chose to paint from the picture in the pamphlet from his funeral. The day he posed for that picture, he wore a suit with a dark red tie. Smiling with no teeth, somewhere between try me motha' fucker and I’m gonna take a real nice picture; you only got one shot, that’s it, how much do I owe ya. I think he posed for the picture knowing that it would be used at his own funeral, which is why to me, his face suggests, this is how you will remember me. I stared at this image for hours on end trying to get the expression right, simultaneously wondering if what I was doing was a good idea. While painting, I had to navigate the complexity of his skin. His forehead was darker than anywhere else on his body, at least anywhere else I had seen. For the rest of his face and head, I mixed reds and ochres, brown umbers, blues, and yellows. But his forehead, I had nothing to put into the black to make it seem more realistic, so it remained the color of his suit, straight out of the tube. After the wedding, his brother told me, “damn you got him, even his forehead.”

If you held a plastic bag into the air with the words EVIDENCE written on it in black sharpie, in it an object that—to my best guess—was an inhaler, and the question was posed, Did this belong to the deceased man that you refer to as—

"Speak up I can’t hear you!?"

I would have said, NO.

What type of man could catch another man who’s falling from the sky? They would have to be large, perhaps even two times the size of the person falling; muscle like a mother that grips to the bone preventing them from bursting out of the skin while absorbing the impact. The man who catches bodies from the sky would have to know himself well inside and out; when to bend at the knees, or drop to the ground, when to put his hands up and don't move! How to be still, shoot and at the same time brace for the worst. When one’s life is on the line, who wants to ask permission to reach in their pocket/survive? I just need my…I swear to…Freeze! He would have to trust, everything is going to be okay. I got you one by one, I fuckin’ love you, I put that on my life.

How to Join a Cult • Akina Cox

Only certain movies and books get cults right. Those are hard to watch because they remind me too much of my past. The constricting rules, the inability to feel that life could be anything different, the need to always belong, the danger of being cast out… it’s practically suffocating.

I wasn't able to watch the new Hulu series The Handmaid's Tale. I read the book in high school, when I was still in a cult and about to enter into an arranged marriage. It was so painful to read that I have a hard time thinking about it now.

Going Clear was a great documentary, although the book it was based on was too triggering for me to finish. My favorite TV show right now is Leah Remini’s series on Scientology. It’s powerful because she gives people a platform to tell their stories. Most people in the series were born into Scientology or were members for decades. They know what they're talking about.

Sometimes I stumble across other accurate depictions. I saw the original Carrie for the first time last year, and I was surprised that Carrie’s mother reminded me of my own mom. I had never seen such a perfect portrayal of her in the media before. No one had ever caught my mother’s character. Once I noticed, I started to watch Carrie more critically and found myself yelling at the television, “Oh, the mother character wouldn't ever do that,” “Her decor is all wrong,” and “If she was so pious, she wouldn't have said that!”

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Even the best portrayals of cults tend to get one thing wrong. They don’t understand why people join in the first place. I’ve technically never joined a cult (unless you count art school). I have, however, met hundreds of people who did. My parents have joined two, and I knew them for most of my life.

My mother met the cult after having "visions." She was in her bed at college when the room started spinning and pulsating around her. She was worried about what was happening, but she didn't tell anyone. Instead, she went home with the excuse that she needed to do research for a paper. While at home, she met a man outside the library who invited her to have dinner at his home. He and his roommates were members of the Unification Church, also known as the Moonies. They invited her to an introductory lecture about the Church, and she decided to hear more.

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This story was told to me many times in my childhood. Growing up, adults loved to tell us second-generation their “testimonies,” or stories of how they were introduced to the Church. Often these tales included visions or other “spiritual messages.”

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Many serious mental issues, such as schizophrenia, present themselves when people are in their early twenties. That’s also a pretty typical age for new cult members. My mom was twenty-one when she started getting her visions.

Looking back, it seems clear to me that she was starting to present signs of schizophrenia or borderline personality disorder. She didn't get any help from anyone, instead turning to a whole theology that normalized her symptoms.

It wasn't just my mom. When new members in Church lectures are told that Rev. Moon is the messiah, occasionally they counter with "No! I am the messiah!" This happens so frequently that there is an explanation for it in Church doctrine.

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Unification Church members believe that potential converts are sent messages by "spirit world." This spirit world encourages them to find the Church, often pointing the way by sending visions and other messages. According to the Church, people sometimes interpret visions from spirit world incorrectly. New members who think that they're the messiah are really only getting half the message from spirit world. Spirit world is trying to tell them that Rev. Moon is actually the messiah, but they're only hearing part of the communication, like a game of telephone. After I left the cult and started to do my own research, I learned that messiah complexes are often a symptom of bipolar disorder or schizophrenia.

Because so many cults and religions emphasize spirituality over physical reality, believers are often encouraged to reject Western medicine. Faith communities sometimes view mental illnesses as “spiritual gifts.” Sometimes friends who are not familiar with this practice think that it's harmless. They see it as an acceptance and even celebration of difference.

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I would have really liked to have a mom who was properly cared for by medical professionals. Having a mother who literally believes she sees ghosts wasn't fun for me. I don't think it was fun for her either. It seemed like she was scared and exhausted.

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Some new research has started to connect synesthesia with schizophrenia. Scientists are now starting to wonder if schizophrenia exists on a spectrum, like autism. Perhaps there are many people who have visions without the accompanying paranoia. I know that there are plenty of people who have schizophrenia and other mental disorders that take their medication, seek treatment, and would never join a cult. But it does seem as though there are a higher amount of people in cults that have untreated mental health issues.

Maybe the introductory lectures weed out most people. Most of the Church's lectures start with some variation of this question: How do we know what is good and what is evil? I recently saw a Scientology video that basically asked the same thing. A lot of people might not find that question necessary, or might be uneasy with an organization that claims to have all the answers.

Some people listen. They listen intently to the lecturer, saying to themselves, "That is a good question! How do we know?” The Unification Church provides an answer that has plenty of holes in its logic. But if you exhibit signs of disordered thinking, you might not see them.

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Rev. Moon invented the term “love bombing” in the early seventies. Love bombing is an abusive technique. Affection and attention are showered on an unsuspecting victim, with the aim that they will become more trusting and therefore more controllable. My mom told me about this tactic when I was a kid.

She explained that new members didn't understand that God loves them and just how special they are. It was important to find something to love about each new member, and focus on that quality. What she didn't say is that older members are expected to suffer. They are told that God expects a lot out of each Church member, and they need to work hard to save all of his children. Since any time taken off work literally prolongs God’s pain, members are encouraged to push past all physical needs and limits.

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Cults and other “high demand groups” have existed for millennia. The history of America is entwined with cult activity, at least since a raggedy bunch of extremist Christians washed up on Plymouth Rock. Often gaining in popularity at the end of each century, cults also flourish at other times. The rise of occult spiritualists and mediums perhaps not so coincidentally occurred at the same time as the invention of electricity. One of the most recent booms was in the 1970s in California. These cults targeted teenagers and young adults—baby boomers raised by parents who lived through World War II.

In the fifties, society was decades away from any attempt to diagnose or treat post-traumatic stress disorder. Plenty of soldiers came home, got jobs, and drank their nightmares away. Domestic violence wasn't a term yet. Women were still a couple years away from being able to open their own bank accounts. Life had been completely upended for an entire generation, and then people were told to grin and bear it.

To make matters worse, many of these people procreated. Having children seems to have been a requirement to be a member of society. What was it like to grow up the kid of a combat veteran and a mom torn out of the workplace? I can only imagine.

It seems as though there was a tacit agreement to sweep World War II under the rug and act as though it didn't happen. The world had just witnessed suffering and loss on a magnitude previously thought to be unimaginable. It was easier to act like everything was normal instead of dealing with the trauma.

The children of this “greatest generation” grew up in a utopia with a dark underbelly, and then they acted out. They became hippies and smoked pot. For some baby boomers, that's all they did. Others got suckered into different cults that were thriving on kids who were just trying to make sense of a bizarre world.

Hare Krishnas, Scientologists, the Moonies... They were all there, ready to tell hippies that they had all the answers. Perhaps the rigid structures and oppressive nature of these cults felt familiar to baby boomers. Everything fitting into its box. Luckily a lot of converts quickly saw through the bullshit and left. But many didn’t.

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Imagine growing up in a dysfunctional household, bumbling around for a few years, and then showing up to an event where everyone is really really really kind. They tell you that they love you and that you are special.

If your parents had raised you with love and respect, you might be weirded out. You might wonder why literal strangers are professing their love for you. It would look fake and manipulative. Like a creepy first date.

If no one had told you that in your life, however, this might be exactly what you’ve been looking for.

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Family dynamics are present in all religions, especially cults. Even in mainstream Christianity, God is referred to as a father. His unquestioned authority and the devotion he demands are essentially a template for abusive relationships. Most cults have a founder that is also looked to as a parental figure. In the Unification Church, Rev. Moon is referred to as “True Father.”

And the Church is abusive. Textbook abusive. Expectations are unspeakably high. Perfection is spoken of as an attainable act. Love is withheld after that initial taste.

Love is spoken about as if it's freely given, but there are so many caveats. You must marry someone in the Church. You cannot be gay. You cannot live alone. You have to do whatever your parents say. You have to do whatever the minister of your church says. You cannot drink or do drugs. You cannot sleep around. You cannot think bad thoughts.

Despite getting married in the Unification Church, I knew that my acceptance in my family and community was predicated on the success of my marriage. Unconditional love was always out of reach.

It was tough. Who would willingly sign up for that? Someone to whom this felt familiar. Someone who already lived through an abusive relationship.

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I don't know what kind of life every single Church member had. But I have never met a cult member that grew up in a functional family, or didn’t have severe mental issues.

Sometimes people with abusive parents marry abusive partners, and sometimes people from troubled homes join abusive cults. Because this is the thing about cults—it’s not the cult. It’s the person who joins. Even if they end up leaving, they often will leave to join a different cult. The Unification Church started to break apart a few years ago after a sex scandal and the founder’s death. A lot of members joined splinter groups. Ones that left altogether joined Landmark Forum, invested in pyramid schemes, or became conspiracy theorists.

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I don’t know why people are fascinated with cults. I certainly don’t seek out the TV shows, books, and movies about them. Usually they’re written by some lazy screenwriter who hasn’t done enough research. Cults are an easy target. Their religious practices, foods, and clothing seem to be endlessly fascinating to the general public. Cult members are seen as freaks who reject modern society, so perhaps that’s why it’s still acceptable to talk about cult members as if they’re not fully human, as if they’re animals at a zoo.

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I told a friend how angry I was at the media’s portrayal of cults.

“They portray us as dressed in white robes, singing songs around a campfire,” I whined, before I stopped myself. That characterization has some truth to it. I’ve definitely done both of those things in the Unification Church, although perhaps not simultaneously. Maybe the media gets some things right. But I would really like people to consider the trauma that one would have to go through in order for a cult to seem like a good idea.

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A lot of books and movies about cults start the same way that horror films do. The same opening scene of a perfect town, a perfect family. Suddenly, the child is snatched away, lost forever to a terrifying cult.

It is an exciting premise, but it is a false narrative perpetuated by too many people.

Former cult members are often responsible for pushing this tale. They think of themselves as normal, and they make work to justify their beliefs. Leah Remini is even guilty of this. On a recent episode, she interviewed her mom about why she joined Scientology. She and her mom tried to explain it in a way that didn't question her mom’s intelligence. Leah explained that her mom went to nursing school. Personally, I know a lot of smart nurses. I also know some nurses who believe that putting magnets on your wrist will cure cancer.

It's not just cult members who are invested in this idea. Deprogrammers, untrained therapists who specialize in treating cult members, also support this theory. Deprogrammers can't say that cult members are either mentally unstable or they came from an abusive background. No one would hire them. They’re often hired by cult members’ families. Plus, deprogrammers are often previous cult members, further complicating the issue.

Most surprisingly, psychiatrists and historians studying cults also get it wrong. I think it's because they often are interviewing families, who are invested in presenting themselves as normal and blameless. The family is suffering and is eager to shift responsibility to the evil cult.

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A lot of times people ask me if I’m angry at my parents for raising me in the Unification Church, or if I hate the cult. I’m mostly just sad. So many people wasted decades of their lives in these groups, some suffering without desperately needed mental health treatment. Underneath the robes and vats of weird food, the situation is really depressing. I don’t really blame cult members for getting into this mess.

I also can’t blame most of their families. I know how unhealthy it is to use denial to deal with a traumatic event like World War II, but I don’t know that I would have acted any differently. My brother, a trans man, was physically threatened at work last week. Instead of dealing with my feelings and processing my fear over his safety, I had a meltdown over a missing pencil.

In the short term, it feels so much better to ignore painful issues. But doing so leads us to incorrectly identify the source. Without acknowledging our wounds, we are unable to take the steps necessary to heal.

When you look at them up close, cults aren’t mysterious at all. They’re kind of predictable. And maybe that’s the scary thing. They are a natural byproduct of us, of our society. Our closely held fears and family secrets. The damage we’ve inflicted on each other down the generations. Cults exist to fill a hole that we create.

_______ is Only an Invention • Lucky Dragons

“_______ is Only an Invention—Not a Biological Necessity,” wrote Margaret Mead.1

Invention—recognizing, making, believing—is technology, as described by Bernard Stiegler: “the pursuit of life by means other than life.”2

Alternatively, the people must reverse engineer: learn from what has already been invented; re-purpose and re-contextualize, create new possibilities for access and interaction.

Fix existing bugs, preserve difference, acknowledge unanswered questions. Begin to work backwards from the way _____ has been put to work in the world: the forms of listening, observation, and attention, the means of participation and dissent.

Unpack the protocols, symbols, and systems, the structured language of treaties. Encode each process to be enacted by any group: model decision-making and conflict-resolution at different scales—between individuals, between collectivities.

If _____ is an abstraction, framing it as a technological goal gives it the capacity to be articulated, modeled, rendered. Technology records and reproduces a process in pursuit of a goal. To improvise is to improve, part of a cycle that connects available resources to planning, to performance, observation, and evaluation. Technology is knowledge engaged in the act of doing work—what we do with what’s available, how we learn, and how we pass on what we’ve learned. Technology seeks to guarantee the continuation of our shared social existence. It connects us to any time outside of our present moment, including all possibility of a future. It is the horizon of all possibilities yet to come. Technology takes shape as rules, conditions, or instructions that communicate how to do work, but the “doing,” or the implication—anticipation—that it is to be done, is what makes it complete. A message, communicated.

How do we separate technology and art? Works of art are “strange tools,” as Alva Noë puts it,3 and as such, they provide a means of seeing ourselves in relation to our techniques and practices. We use art to understand how our technologies organize us and to engage with the possibility of reorganizing ourselves. In a mode that Gilbert Simondon described as a “technical mentality,”4 anything can be broken down into its component parts, to be individually repaired or upgraded. Meanwhile, the entirety of anything changes as thresholds are crossed—speed, intensity, resistance, return to rest—being in action changes a complex thing completely.

How much of this process is life pursuing life, how much is the product of design, structure, and regulation? Consider the possibility of an accidental _____.

What is the “work” of _____? Is it the work of collectives or individuals? Of experts or amateurs? Each of us has our own knowledge of participation and dissent—we are attuned to recognize the difference between _____ and violence. The application of this knowledge, giving form to this recognition, is the beginning of a technology of _____.

Tuning, becoming attuned, is a fundamental _____ technology. Tuning foregrounds listening and observation, emphasizes self-definition, and self-care. Tuning is a technique for finding a common reference point, a place to begin. Tuning is a means of individuation (establishing difference, spaces apart, a singular voice) and group formation (whether consonant or dissonant). Tuning need not produce consensus. It is a means of negotiating where we begin and what territory we will cover—sonically or socially—in order to act “in concert” with others.

Reverse engineering, starting from what we perceive as well-tuned, is a step towards understanding the origins and mechanisms of _____-making: practices which shape our own ethical self-understanding, our sense of who we are and who we hope to become. Informed by and directed towards ideals of health, responsibility, and moral virtue, we regulate ourselves by caring for ourselves.

Consider two contrasting approaches to _____-making: positive and negative, pattern and tangle.

The pattern refers to the possibility of embodied _____, what we call positive _____. Positive _____ is the absence of both direct and indirect violence. Walk within the path of the pattern, alone or with others, just to try. Breathe deeply before entering, and with each step, remember where you are. Come to know the shape better as you turn each corner, and wind towards center. Observe thoughts inside and outside of the pattern.

The pattern is a path for processing thought. It is a place to move slowly, to enable thoughts to settle: a sieve or a filter. Positive _____ is the presence of equality, the restoration of justice, and the healing of relationships. It is how we create social systems to serve the needs of all persons. Positive _____ is not simply the absence of direct violence. It is the absence of both direct and indirect violence.

Positive _____ has many simple and many complex forms. It operates at all scales, from momentary pleasure, self-healing and well being, to the complete restructuring of all societies, the complete elimination of all violence and oppression.

Positive _____ is a state of calm alert, a position free of worry or fear, a state of readiness held comfortably in place by external structures that affirm and improve life.

Emperor Ashoka ended a long period of bloody conflict and imperial expansion by enforcing a regime of _____ throughout the empire. Stone monuments displayed his edicts of forgiveness, nonviolence, and quality of life for all beings. Carved in stone: amnesty for prisoners, an end to ___, elephant sanctuaries, forests that could not be cut down. A harmonic form of dominance, derived from imperial power.

What is state of readiness? state of readiness for violence? state of readiness for non-violence?

“All men are my children. What I desire for my own children, and I desire their welfare and happiness both in this world and the next, that I desire for all men. You do not understand to what extent I desire this, and if some of you do understand, you do not understand the full extent of my desire.”6

Positive _____ is self-control, self-rule: for you, it is an inward _____-keeping operation, refining your focus towards openness and compassion. Positive _____ is a state of being not grounded in specific actions. it continues forever as a process in the background of all human interactions—it is the beginning and the end of _____ful communication.

On the other side of the pattern is the the tangle. The tangle is a model of negative _____, the struggle to overcome conflict and to reduce harm. In negative _____, we take the immediate causes of suffering head-on, working together to innovate in response to problems.

The tangle is an enormous, unruly confusion. Change the structure of the tangle however you like: pulling, loosening, shifting, removing—are you compelled to untangle it, or tangle it further for the next person to find?

There is a critical urgency to untangle the tangle. This is a process that will require all people to cooperate with one another.

The tangle imagines _____-making as struggle, a form of active problem-solving: negative _____. Negative _____ is the absence of direct violence, the prevention of harm, the prevention of ___. _____ within this framework does not, by itself, erase conflict completely or permanently. Negative _____ is constant in its management of conflict. Negative _____ is the process of struggle. In the struggle to untangle the tangle, we strategize and cooperate, we develop and share innovative techniques, new ways of seeing and solving the problem.

Factions may evolve from within the struggle. Some participants see more value in tangling than in untangling—opposing affinities form in dissent. There is fine line between tangling and untangling. Fine lines can be difficult to draw—conscious tanglers are difficult to separate from conscious untanglers. Their movements are similar.

The tangle is a path between persons, a language for the recognition and mediation of conflict.

The tangle addresses itself to all of us—now that it exists, it can’t ever stop existing. If the tangle becomes untangled it may swiftly become tangled again, without our constant management and vigilance. Calm and alert.

We are complicit in solving the problem of the tangle. Whether or not we see ourselves as participants, it doesn’t matter. There is no neutral place. There is no self in isolation. The tangle addresses itself to all of us. ___ and _____ exist between collectivities, not individuals.

If we had no sovereign states, we would have no ___ (Rousseau). We would have no _____ either (Hobbes).

Law only needs precedent. One premise for the rule of international law is that all persons take part in a single community, and as such, are subject to the same common law. Rights and values, articulated and refined through history, are acquired by this community in a process of consistent reasoning. The greater the consistency, the stronger the law.

By what authority? With what permission? And who will decide?

Laws between sovereign states are, like manners, difficult to enforce. Politics must be polite, or there is no recourse but to dissociate. Failing to honor a treaty, allowing the agreement to collapse, a state loses access to the process of _____. Meaningful relationships cannot be established or repaired. Agreement becomes impossible.

The scope of this impossibility is made legible in Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points speech, outlining one comprehensive path to _____: “Without this healing act the whole structure and validity of international law is forever impaired.”7

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, another outline of the path to _____, proposes a treaty between all persons. It suggests a structure that embraces everyone, a rule of law to which all could appeal—articulating the right to have a nationality, to belong to a state, to move across borders, building _____ through structured, universal representation.

Can _____ be universal? Or is _____ specific? Can it embrace humankind or only the detached individual?

Johan Galtung wrote of imperialism, as one species in “a genus of dominance and power relationships,”8 that it splits collectivities in terms of harmony of interest, disharmony of interest, and conflict of interest. There is, first of all, a gap—through imperialism the center grows more fully than the periphery. The center is enriched and nourished, while the periphery is starved. We must ask: how to grow the periphery, how to transfer value, how to confuse, dissolve, or multiply the center? How to harmonize the whole?

“The people must recognize the defects of the old invention, and someone must make a new one. A form of behavior becomes out of date only when something else takes its place, and, in order to invent forms of behavior which will make ___ obsolete, it is a first requirement to believe that the invention is possible.”9

1, 9 Margaret Mead, “_______ is Only an Invention—Not a Biological Necessity,” Asia Volume XL, Issue 8 (1940): 402-405.

2 Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus, trans. George Collins and Richard Beardsworth (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998).

3 Alva Noë, Strange Tools: Art and Human Nature (New York: Hill and Wang, 2015).

4 Gilbert Simondon, “Technical Mentality,” trans. Arne De Boever, Parrhesia 07 (2009): 7-27.

5 Augusto Boal, Theater of the Oppressed, trans. Charles A. and Maria-Odilia Leal McBride and Emily Fryer (London: Pluto Press, 2008), xxi.

6 S. Dhammika, “The Edicts of King Asoka: An English Rendering (The Wheel Publication No. 386/387),” last modified October 1994, https://www.cs.colostate.edu/~malaiya/ashoka.html.

7 “8 January, 1918: President Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points,” The Avalon Project, Accessed August 17, 2017, http://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/wilson14.asp.

8 Johan Galtung, “A Structural Theory of Imperialism,” Journal of Peace Research 8 (1971): 81-117.

[SCORES]

For a Group of Five:

Approach the idea of making an image as a tableaux or a demonstration: one’s body in relationship with other bodies—still or moving, vocal or silent. Audience, bystanders incorporate directly into the image as it is being formed, a blurring between spectators and actors Augusto Boal names “Spect-actors.”5 Show, analyze, transform reality.

On entering a room, three of the five group members plan and form an image. The remaining two group members act as observers. The two observers circle the image, describe what they see, discuss, decide how to modify the image until it is as stable as possible (consulting with onlookers as needed). The observers physically adjust the actions and positions of the other performers.

The observers may switch places with any of the other performers.

The observers may join the image by mimicking any of the other performers.

The observers may join the image by inserting themselves between the other performers, as intermediaries.

The observers may make an independent image in response to the first image.

All discussion and planning should be carried out in an open, audible, and transparent manner in front of the audience. If something doesn’t work, try it again in a different way. When changing positions, step into the role of observer first before rejoining the image.

Once every performer incorporates into an image, hold until it is agreed by all performers that the image is as stable as it can be. If any member of the group feels unstable, they may leave the image to become an observer. Once a stable image has been achieved, repeat the process with two new observers. With each repetition, the image takes on a new identity:

The 1st Image: Assimilation, dominance, appropriation, or theft.

The 2nd Image: Healing, liberation, addressing pain, or righting wrongs.

The 3rd Image: Positive _____; happiness, quality of Life, pleasure, clarity, and self-determination.

With each image, populations interact, languages are learned, difference is learned, harmonized, and de-harmonized. Compromises are formed, observed, witnessed, a scene is described. Roles are changed, alienated and modified, A system is formed, stepped into and out of.

For a Group of Four:

Facing apart. Performers enter and distribute themselves at equal distance from one-another, filling the space. Turning away from the center, so as to see only one or two of the others, each dancer begins rapidly repeating a single, unique action. Gradually, each dancer begins to borrow gestures from the members of the group that are visible to them, incorporating each other’s actions into a complex sequence, until all performers are moving in a unified, accumulated sequence of gestures.

Facing together. Turning towards center, and signalling from a distance, performers send gestures across the space, picking up one another’s motions and adding or stripping away emotional valences. Expressive movements become uniform and mechanical, utilitarian. Everyday actions are filled with emotional meaning, one emotional layer is stacked on another as the gesture is passed back and forth. The process continues, amplifying, reversing, and cancelling out. A feedback loop.

Four individuals become a group, learning and evolving a shared language in order to serve all members of the group. Creating sentence structures out of movement, phrases are added, remembered, and repeated, building upon each previous movement. Synchronizing and desynchronizing (socializing and de-socializing), emotional affect is separated from communicative gesture, empathy is learned, amplified, and returned.

For a Group of Three:

Form territory. Divide territory. Manage territory. Protect territory. Set limits. Draw boundaries. Help him. Assist her. Divide them. Orient us. Hide yourself. Read that sign. Sing this song. Listen closely. Announce loudly. Observe. Discuss.

Each performer holds a loudspeaker that plays back a list of commands. Obey each command directly on hearing it, or repeat the command immediately to other performers and audience. If repeating, address your audience directly. Mimic the tone and inflection of the commanding voice, imitate as closely as possible. If repeating, there is no need to obey. If obeying, there is no need to repeat. Move quickly, think quickly, aim for variety and unpredictability, use every command as it comes, never become stuck in one power position, swing like a pendulum between oppressor and oppressed.

Speak. Feel. Call out. Accuse. Demand. Touch. Disorient. Disguise. Dismantle. Combine. Show your hands. Draw a line. Carry across. Make a claim. Make a mark. Show your strength. End it now.

The score For a Group of Three is driven by the imbalance of power between oppressor and oppressed. Mediation and repetition are inserted into this imbalance, and the ways in which power is translated, imitated, and internalized are made clear. By mimicking the commanding voice, the performers make an attempt to “learn” the language in every nuance, “learning” structures of power in the process. Of all the groups, the group of three has the most friction, a machine that flips rapidly between command and submission. They speak loudly and out of turn. They move unpredictably.

Crumble. Break. Discard. Recover. Arrange. Separate. Distribute. Hold. Push. Bend. Spread apart. Push together. Push apart. Turn. Turn towards. Turn away. Rotate. Zoom. Adjust. Survey the land. Look at me.

For a Group of Two:

Take turns teaching each other songs invented from the legitimizing language of treaties:

recalling / confirming / desiring / resolved / determined / reaffirming

on the basis of past efforts / to forge new bonds

proposed / resolved / acknowledged / pledged

empowered / concluded / declared / agreed

animated by / contributing to / established upon

with a view to / in view of / on the basis of / in the name of / in the interest of / with the objective of

confers / commands / undertakes / proclaims

With call and response, take turns passing made up melodies back and forth. As the exchange accelerates, learn the shape of new songs just enough for texts to overlap and accumulate. As songs transform from call and response into a round, move your voice to reinforce or cancel, mask, interrupt, support, agree. Learn to listen and sing together, to make one combined text sung simultaneously—a song with no single author, drawing from multiple sources.

In a process mirroring mediation, treaty-writing, the imagined ideal of an agreement between equals, what begins in separate voices ends in agreement. Moving from call and response, to overlapping rounds, to unison.

For a Group of One:

I am the one person. Displaced, moving, unsettled. I have no home. I am out of place everywhere. When I speak, it is always in a language other than my own. I hide, or I am as visible as possible. I am obviously transparent. I walk through invisible labyrinths, and then I walk backwards to exit. I walk any path forwards and backwards. I am a mockingbird singing by myself, my song is alien even to me. I listen by singing. I learn by listening and repeating. I repeat while changing. I am learning and listening and repeating and changing while repeating, so as to learn. I am not always connected to all of you. I am sometimes connected to some of you. Some of you are sometimes connected to some of you. I migrate, I circulate, I borrow, and I displace. And here I am.

if you are not cynical by now • Haukur Már Helgason

You Have Not Been Paying Attention

Some Moments Leading up to This One • Christina Catherine Martinez

RATS

At some point the rats got out of control. Our parents purchased the rats from a guy who bred them in buckets of wood shavings in his garage. We surveyed the containers like they were windows full of puppies. The little pink and white things wriggling around in them were to be our pets. That they were bred to be food for larger pets belonging to families moving in more robust circles of economic activity did not occur us children. 

COPS

My father was mildly obsessed with cops, tried several times to become one—making circles on practice tests for the written exam, making circles on the dirt track of the Sherriff’s training academy behind our house—but there was always some clerical snafu or abstruse psychological red flag (one question they ask is whether or not you turn around to look at your waste before flushing the toilet. Apparently there is a wrong answer to this). On rainy days my brothers and I slurped ramen noodles and watched the police documentary series COPS on Fox 11. Matthew lived next door and was a couple years younger than me. His parents told him he was too young to watch the show, but he pleaded them into the odd compromise of watching the title sequence only, which succored him enough to stalk the neighborhood with a nerf gun singing the theme song, bad boys, bad boys, over and over under his breath. 

We were home schooled and Matthew was not. Every morning, around the time my mom began clearing up the breakfast dishes and herding us together to begin the day's work, I would see Matthew's little face inch past the living room window in his grandmother's big white Cadillac. I can’t remember if she lived with them or not, but she was always around, functioning as part chauffeur, part babysitter, and all around emotional punching bag for this supremely unhappy family (the entire second story of their house was added on as a private bedroom suite for mom). Every afternoon my brothers and I returned to the window just in time to see the white car pull up to their tight, golf-ready lawn and watch Matthew's backpack sail through the passenger-side window, followed shortly by Matthew himself. He yelled and spat and kicked papers and shit all over the lawn, without fail, every school day. It was such a treat. I credit this daily theater with planting the seed of skepticism in my attitude toward institutions, and I suppose by extension, to anyone in uniform.

Still, as committed members a religious suburban community, of some of my parents' closest friends were officers of the law. Not the slack-jawed, double-chinned avatars of male torpor, but sweet, boar-bristle ‘stached men with bright eyes and prematurely creased foreheads. The kind earned from continually raising brows at things children say. Especially children who don't go to regular school. Dad stopped trying to become a cop after noticing their off-duty penchant for K-Swiss sneakers and Hawaiian shirts. 

Eventually, between the hours of 12 and 6 am, between backseat blow jobs and furtive jam sessions, I would run into these men. A tense skein of trust evolved as they circled the perimeter of my adolescence; tapping the glass, raising their eyebrows, and waiving me home. I lived in cars, but I was no good at it. I wondered what separated me from the subjects on COPS, who also just wanted to hang out but invariably, somehow, ended up face down on the sidewalk. I asked Gonzo what his rules of thumb were for letting girls off with a warning. He was immune to crying and pleas of period emergencies, but once, upon pulling over a swerving vehicle and finding a woman covered in exploded burrito, he did let her go. Gonzo is a close family friend, and I was convinced that he was the greatest cop that ever lived. 

Years later I asked him why, at tender age of thirty five-ish, he left the po-po biz to become a teacher. He said he didn't like kind of person it was turning him into. 

PUBLIC SCHOOL

For a radical experiment in parenting, try this: take a feral child (who loves Jesus), strap it to a translucent purple backpack, and place it in a structured learning environment. Years later— 

APPLES

A lot of our games were about dying. The best, by far, was the night we tried to enact as many stock movie death scenes as possible without laughing. We were just hanging out. Someone was on the floor, and then Nadal starting noodling something sad on the piano, and then it kind of took off from there. We played a swan song for a gritty, browbeaten cop with a heart of gold (a peculiar trope, and, as I learned years later after experiencing the privilege of transatlantic flight, a particularly American one). We slipped through the hands of an action hero clinging helplessly to his buddy dangling off the edge of a cliff. Grenades crashed all around as Paul and I played out a lost cause on the battlefield. I cradled Paul's head in my arms, taking his shirt in a vice grip and screaming, “Don't you die on me soldier!" and then, for context, finessing a line about how he can't die, because he never taught me his secret gumbo recipe. Paul gasped for air, phantom blood filling his throat and mouth. It dribbled down his chin, sputtered off his lips and onto my shirt. Everyone clapped their hands over their mouths to keep from laughing. Just before his eyes rolled back in his head and his neck went limp, Paul pulled me close and whispered in a Cajun accent, "Don't forget the nutmeg,

mon ami....

" I brushed my fingertips over his eyes to close them. At this final touch, we could hold it no longer. Everyone burst laughing, crying, chugging beers, and yelling

ok, now me! me and you!

As the only girl, more than once I resorted to my privileged trope of peaceful cancer girlfriend. I'd stroke whoever's face very softly and whisper sweet platitudes about Finding New Love and how I Will Always Be With You. The beloveds raspberried in my face with laughter, and then we'd all drink some more. I died at least five times. We drank, the piano lolled on, we laughed until the laughter turned to honking chest rattles because we hadn't quit smoking yet. The roleplay kept going. In high school we'd made exclamations of love to one or more of one another. We filched wine and read e.e. cummings by candlelight, smoked weed and listened to records, made out in the McDonald’s PlayPlace, and screamed at one another in cars, breaking up and getting back together many times over. We heeded the tap on the glass and went home. We threatened to kill ourselves and harbored baroque fantasies about our funerals. Dying for fun at the crash house purged our maudlin adolescence and all its attendant delusions, suddenly petty in light of things like getting dressed for work and swinging a grocery basket in the crook of an arm and filling out apartment rental applications at Starbucks. An ironic bow at the threshold of adulthood, when all the quotidian necessities of independent living were briefly, intensely glamorous. We got oil changes and shopped for work clothes. We stopped buying Nat Sherman Fantasia's and got promoted to shift lead. We had people over for dinner and complained about our bosses. Then some of us got actual cancer, and some of us actually tried to kill ourselves, and once or twice we went blind, stabbing the roof of our mouth with the toothbrush, our girlfriends trying to pull rank on despair. 

We scatter. But we find each other. Years later, Landon and I are sitting in the Seinfeld restaurant in Harlem. I’m on my first work trip with the gallery. Landon entered Columbia University as a film major, and is about to leave with a degree in computer science. Upon learning the average post-graduation salaries for his respective choices, the change was swift. I show him my little stack of business cards with the word director printed under my name. He pays for the meal with an elegant slip of his own card. The last time we dined, it was at a Cheesecake Factory in Orange County. He wore sunglasses to mask the bandages over his eyes, and I wept into some kind of alcoholic milkshake called a Flying Gorilla. 

We pick at anonymous fried brown things and exchange tabs on where we all went. The food here is decent, except for the marinara sauce, which I suspect is with dishwater to make it last. We talked about all of the times we died and I ask, between bites of naked mozzarella stick, why he left the old crash house. 

“I just thought we could be grown-ups,” he said. 

I remembered the giant Patrick Nagel poster that crowned the faux-wood paneled living room, a crouching woman in pink thigh high boots, larger than life. 

“Mmmmm," I said. 

“And we just”—last time I visited the house she had grown a dick, a mustache, and a fist-sized hole near her shoulder—“like, we couldn’t do it,” he said. “We couldn’t have nice things or make a home.” 

“You should have taken out the wallpaper." 

“It was his mom’s." 

“I know," I said, "but that’s a lot of apples." 

MONEY

Money is an excellent balm, very near to forgiveness. I met John Wayne at a comedy show, and he quoted Austin Powers in bed, but the following week he was out of town on business, and it felt good to say “he’s out of town on business” in response to someone’s face screwing up about the yeah baby stuff. It generally worked, and I have no reason to believe John Wayne wasn’t his real name. 

MONEY

“Does the taco place take cards?”

“They charge seventy cents to use a card.”

“Alright then let’s swing by the Chase ATM on the way.”

“Are you for real?”

“Yes. What? Yes I’m for real.”

“You’re just going to spend the seventy cents you’ll save from using cash for the tacos on the extra gas it will take to swing by the ATM for the cash.”

“It’s on the way.”

“It’s so freaking hot right now.”

“It’s literally right on the way.”

“I can’t believe you can make these kinds of calculations after we’ve been sitting under a waterfall all day.”

“I’m stopping at the Chase ATM.”

“If you’re going to trap me in this hot car any longer in order to save seventy cents, then I’ve earned seventy cents worth of bitching for however long this ATM detour is delaying tacos.”

“I can’t believe you can make these kinds of calculations after we’ve been sitting under a waterfall all day.”

“We haven’t even moved in the last five minutes.”

“Fine. It’s worth seventy cents to not have to sit in this traffic or hear you bitch.”

“Do you think if we had universal basic income, Post-Internet art would still exist?”

….

“What?”

“I don’t know.” 

RATS

Oddly enough they fuck like rabbits. We brought home a brother and sister from the bucket guy, thinking they might respect their second chance at life by refraining from incest. Instead they multiplied, and we had to buy more cages to house all the pink little nubbies that kept popping out of the mama rat. Seizing upon this educational moment, our mother encouraged us to learn more about rats, and we observed the little nubbies at length, patiently waiting for them to grow into more comely beings. One day I noticed one of the nubbies lying still while the others inched around the cage with their little salamander limbs. I put him in my palm, and he was cold. I took him to my father, who was preparing his next sermon in the dining room. I had yet to attend public school, but I’d seen enough television to aesthetically forecast the kind of educational moment he might seize upon. 

“Dad,” I cooed, “this one died.” 

“Oh honey,” he said, taking the miniature creature in his hands, “He’s not dead… he’s just thirsty!” 

And with that, he dropped the dead baby rat into his glass of lemonade. 

I froze for a few seconds, then clapped my hands over my mouth to keep from laughing. 

That’s when I became a comedian.

David Muenzer • Make It Happen

An artist may be asked to provide events to supplement an object or image-oriented presentation, often with the purpose of facilitating attendance or framing the exhibition via discourse. This could take the form of a panel discussion, a performance, a workshop, a screening, or an activation of works already in place. Such requests for adding some kind of event are frequently given without strong preference expressed for which kind of event. This indicates that critical language or artistic production may be valued more for its format and timeliness than its internally articulated position.

Wayne Koestenbaum will be performing Scriabin, among other piano miniatures, at REDCAT this week, a West Coast tour stop for the Artists Space concert I just saw chronicled in Artforum’s society pages. After affirming my interest on the Facebook group, I start to wonder why, since I like Scriabin and classical music in general (with the enthusiasm of a total layperson), I have never been to a concert at Disney Hall—the same building that houses REDCAT. What is it about Koestenbaum’s self-described lounge act that lures me, rather than the presumably more expert pianists of the symphony?

The comparison is not quite valid. Koestenbaum’s performance skirts the issue of mastery, both in spirit and in its multi-disciplinarity: the lounge act is word as well as music, with a poetry-like improvisation to go with each musical number and Koestenbaum’s not-inconsiderable stage presence as an MC-comedian-theorist in between numbers.

Perhaps this interdisciplinary bouquet garni attracted me, leading to my quasi-public affirmation of future presence (I clicked “going,” not just “interested”) and my subsequent actual attendance. That bouquet was certainly sufficient to bring the piano into the gallery space. Or perhaps it is as simple as celebrity, a “scene-and-heard” pedigree.

Driving to my studio, NPR on for company, I hear a familiar voice extolling listeners to come out and see two art forms that have no business being on stage together. Ira Glass now has a live show with accompanying dance.

approaches the mike

The Koestenbaum performance. Before heading over, I call REDCAT’s ticket office to make sure I have a seat. As it turns out, despite REDCAT’s impressive black-box theater, the miniatures will be performed in the gallery, no tickets required. Before the show, Steve tells me that beer is permitted in the gallery space—not the norm, but a side effect of a show about theory, light on precious objects. I don’t put this to the test.

Koestenbaum appears from behind the Liam Gillick hospital curtain, wearing a skin-tight intricately patterned long-sleeve top, modish Hawaiian Under Armour. He approaches the mike and leans in:

Just seeing who is here— The music is by famous composers, but the words are improvised… motifs develop.

The audience is identified while the composers’ names wait in the green room. Koestenbaum name-drops David Antin, like an epigram, then sits down to begin.

The playing doesn’t sound amateur to me, but I’m no connoisseur. These miniatures do remind me of recital pieces, the type of material an ambitious junior orchestra member might practice over and over again to strut their stuff. Perhaps mastery is more the issue than I thought, though this is no celebration of it. The words—poetry is not the term provided—are decadent, funny, and unscripted, but do not sound off-the-cuff.

who is here

At the screening of Peggy Ahwesh and Keith Sanborn’s 1989 film The Deadman, a presentation accompanying an exhibition under the aegis of “Sylvia Bataille,” I am the first unaccompanied person in the chair-filled room. One cluster of three friends chat among themselves, and the show is only half-up, so looking at the art becomes a poor excuse for avoiding conversation. If the film weren’t rented from EAI, I’d hide at home.

Maggie Nelson is doing an introduction, and dedicates her words to Wayne Koestenbaum.

Andrea Fraser once suggested that the only course to a less contradictory principle of autonomy requires an understanding that artistic freedom can only consist in determining for ourselves—to the extent that we can—who and how we serve. The how is particularly relevant here, in light of the shift from the service-based model described in Fraser’s 1994 piece to the experience-based model of economic value that has greater currency today.

Joseph Pine, a self-described “business coach” who spent much of the 1990s in a program within IBM, has been a spokesperson for the idea that experience has replaced service as the unit of economic value. Pine puts it succinctly in a 2004 lecture:

What happens when you customize a service? …when you design a service that is so appropriate for a particular person that it is exactly what they need at this moment in time? Then you can’t help but make them go ‘wow’… you can’t help but turn it into a memorable event… you can’t help but turn it into an experience.

Experiences are the predominant economic offering in the art context as much as any other market. However, the economic theory Pine trumpets should not be mistaken for an underlying condition.

Buying a burrito across the street from my studio, I notice a pile of cards beside the register with an image of a uniformed man seen from behind looking up at a tiny figure suspended on the glassy surface of the Bonaventure building, perhaps a dozen stories above the ground. Overlaid text announces An Event So Bold… It Could Only Be The Boy Scouts! as well as the title: “Over the Edge III.”

The “III” suggests that this is a regular occurrence for the Boy Scouts. I had once been part of a Troop 373, a particularly disorganized group I landed in by dint of my dad’s interest in hanging out with his best friend Bob, my more-outdoor-oriented friend Sam’s father. I stayed on for some time, since camping proved to be a refuge from authority at home. Given my particular experiences with Scouting, it’s hard to envision any scout troop pulling off this event more than once. Intrigued, the card comes back to studio with me.

As it happens, the scouts had not organized the rappelling independently; they had turned to Over the Edge USA, a for-profit company that offers its fundraising services to non-profits. Specifically, an OTE event entails setting up rappelling equipment in a terrain where that would not normally be permissible—a skyscraper, a hotel, a suburban office complex—and the promise to safely take participants down the sides of the host structure as the reward for reaching a fundraising threshold.

Driving home from my studio late afternoon the day before the event advertised on the card, I pass the Bonaventure and see a tiny figure slowly descending the side of the building. The casual stroll, as if on a vertical sidewalk, provokes imagination and identification: What is it like up there? What could I see if it were me?

The main event, with its repetitive progression of descents and Scout-related chatter in the queue, lacks the previous evening’s charge. While the OTE event is presented as a marker of identity—So Bold It Could Only Be The Boy Scouts—roughly the same set of activities is provided by Over the Edge to all of its clients. This inconsistency is in Over the Edge’s self-description as a provider of signature events. If any event is indeed a signatory, that is, somehow meant to function as a legible mark of identity for what it represents, then how could that organization turn to an outside company to provide that mark?

“The event,” a quantum of action, moves across different cultural positions. A sampling of recent emphasis shifts on the event: Franco Berardi’s remark that the matrix has replaced the event to Simon O’Sullivan’s claim that in fact the affect is something else entirely: precisely an event or happening to business reporter Adam Frank writing on high-speed trading: If you asked a factory worker at the turn of the 20th century if she had a millisecond to spare, she would have asked: ‘What can you do in a millisecond?’ But ask a 21st century Wall Street trader if they have a millisecond and they'd know exactly what you mean. More importantly, if he or she were a high-frequency trader, they'd also know exactly what a millisecond cost.

There is a common interest in the capacity of a moment, whether that capacity refers to the ability to contain a tremendous amount of information, feeling, or capital. However, these positions from competing theorists and mainstream reporters cannot be studied in the same framework. All the friction is in the transitions, grinding between incommensurable conceptions.

the stage

In the crowded downtown theater, I feel the distance from the stage to my top balcony seat. There is a corresponding sense of lacking money. The nosebleed ticket for Ira Glass-plus-dance is more than I have ever spent on an art performance. As the lights go out, these feeling are dimmed as well. The host offers justification for the media mix:

…but if you start with telling, you start with an idea. I think idea is movement.

Glass dons a black suit and white shirt, unbuttoned, and he is taller and thinner than I had imagined from the radio. I had always pictured him looking more like John Hodgman. He begins to put together a conductor’s stand, with an iPad that emerges from a distressed butterscotch leather suitcase. He is wearing a headset.

Some artists have developed production methods that are highly adapted to the format of the supplementary event. In Tania Bruguera’s 2009 Generic Capitalism, a talk at an academic conference by Weather Underground activists was modified by her addition of planted audience members and questions, which would be impossible without the well-established conventions of panel discussions.

The 2011 Grand Openings Return of the Blogs at the Museum of Modern Art may be even more pragmatic. When Francis Alÿs made a late decision not to use the atrium space for his retrospective, a gap appeared in the programming schedule for the MoMA atrium—the paradigmatic hybrid art/corporate event-space. From the point of view of MoMA-the-business, it would be a waste to not use its most spectacular space for a two-week period. Hence, curator Jenny Schlenzka’s invitation to Grand Openings (Ei Arakawa, Jutta Koether, Jay Sanders, Emily Sundblad, Stefan Tcherepnin, and Georgia Sagri) and their subsequent extended hang-out in the atrium space.

GO answered the call for programming by taking advantage of what that demand allowed—idling in a highly visible institutional space, doing things not normally permissible in a symbolic arena—but they did not actually acquiesce in providing an experience. Each so-called “event” on the Grand Openings’ comically poorly-hung schedule printout did, in fact, correspond to a time and place where performers and audience might meet. But in many cases, the activity that transpired was so diffuse and unstructured that the form of the event seemed as much at stake as the experience it was supposed to convey. A glance at Mushroom Thursday’s description—we don’t know what you will see on this day’s event—is a relief from the expectation that an event provides a transformative experience, each and every time.

Glass’ show unfolds over three acts. Riverdance and gambling is first off. The reflexive topic is the repetition of performance for the performers. He introduces the theme directly: I’m not a good enough performer to be sincere too often … repetition erodes away meaning … once you enter actual showbiz. 

The story covers a Riverdance troupe that buys lottery tickets to a major jackpot and subsequently becomes convinced that if they dance hard enough, they will win. This motivation evidently helps them overcome the ennui of repetition, but they fail to earn the money. Ira riverdances poorly, and the audience laughs.

In the second act, a projection appears, and red curtains are subbed out for silk ribbons. Volunteers are called on stage. The story is about marketing and love. A marketing researcher, Will Powers, asks his wife are you a satisfied customer?

This is immediately greeted with audience groans. Glass shakes his head, at least metaphorically, showing that he relates to the collective distaste. He shares about therapy:

I think I have no feelings about [the marital fight] at all … no data. Then I go off and journal about it ... I was mad. On the radio I play a sensitive guy ... I am Will Powers.

The punchy, disappointing, end to this narrative is the redemption of the blatantly instrumental logic. A recorded clip of Powers plays—my wife is my number one customer, I need to offer one hundred percent quality—followed by Glass, live—I couldn’t have said it better myself. The audience claps, without laughter.

Act three covers loss. There is a moving clip of a story about cancer that works unexpectedly well with a physical comedy routine that evokes Buster Keaton. The denouement has Glass put away the conductor stand and sit on the briefcase. The end is all batons and sparklers, and a standing ovation from the packed house.

Steingrímur Eyförð • HOW TO MAKE YORSELF INVISIBLE

Alice Wang • Interview with Bruce Hainley

It was through reading up on artists like Trisha Donnelly, Maureen Gallace, and Sturtevant that I discovered the work of Bruce Hainley. Writing about artworks that resist simple categorization is not an easy maneuver—few have successfully attempted such discursive feats. I had to find out for myself how Hainley traveled to the outer limits of language, triggering thoughts that tear at the seams of the mind’s eye.

The following interview took place in a classroom at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California where Bruce Hainley teaches in the Graduate Art program.

ALICE WANG: I read somewhere that you studied poetry at Yale. You’ve also published several books of poetry, including Foul Mouth, No Biggie, and Art & Culture. How did you get into writing about art?

BRUCE HAINLEY: Would you hate me terribly if I scrapped the tediousness of autobiography and just said I fell into it? The only poetry workshop I ever took was as a sophomore, with Amy Clampitt. Certainly, writing about art was something I never planned, and now I’m at a point in my life at which I really don’t know if I wish to continue with it (“writing about art”) at all. It was something that gave me a reason and/or way to write and provided me an entrée to hanging out with people who were cooler and sexier and threw swankier parties than any writers I knew. I’m no longer sure this is true about the art world; it often feels like a more punitive version of high school, and I loathed high school.

AW: When you first started, how did you approach the writing?

BH: With fear, trembling and lots of doubt. I was making it up as I went along. Specific writers writing about art inspired me: Hilton Als, Rhonda Lieberman, and David Rimanelli were all writing for Artforum, and they had done things for the magazine—with the magazine, against the norms of the magazine—that I still turn to when I’m feeling lost. I mean, I can be very precise about this: Hilton has a particular review of an Andy Warhol Polaroid show and a bonkers nightmare on Adrian Piper, Rhonda had her sublime, daunting essay on Karen Kilimnik—a singular work, one of the great texts about culture written in the last twenty years or so—and David had, among other things, written about John Boskovich. Doubt remains a key structure for me.

AW: I have the sense that some of the writing out there on art seem to enter the work through a particular frame, whereas your reviews gave me the feeling that you didn’t necessarily have a predetermined idea of what art is, or should be.

BH: I still don’t. Most American art writing comes out of a tradition of formalist criticism — Greenberg is the American formalist, and he leads to Michael Fried, Rosalind Krauss, etc.—a tradition that continues, with post-structuralist addenda, in the work of those associated with the let’s hope weakening vice grip of October. Despite that tradition, few question the form of the thing, of the writing itself. In a magazine there are only so many forms available to you; one of them is the back of the magazine review, say, 600 words. In part, that is its form, and it’s what you have to play with or not.

One of the things that still excites me about this other tradition—the tradition of the belletristic, poets writing about art and all the mania that entails—remains the fact that a lively, wayward or even kooky use of language can be brought to bear in a non-programmatic way to a strange new thing in the world. The genres of which language partakes alter the kinds of questions that can be asked. Questioning the form of the thing, not knowing what should be said or can be said or needs to be said, allows digressing, allowing oneself to ask a stupid question, which might be an illuminating question, or a question no one’s ever thought of posing. Some things are understood quickly, others happen over long periods of time. The world right now privileges the instantaneous and values, more and more, the kneejerk reaction.

AW: This reminds me of something you wrote in your book on Sturtevant, Under the Sign of [sic]: “The new rarely strikes on its meanings in an enlightening flash, eurekalike, but, instead, arrives more slowly, thought rumbling like thunder in the distance.” The way that you described the process of change, the buildup — which takes time — allows space for the unknown.

BH: I’ve come to like knowing certain artists’ work really intensely over the long course of time. We all change. I’m trying to think about if there’s anything to be said about why we fall out of love with certain things at a certain moment, whether because we change or those artists and their work change or some potent combo of both. Of course, art should change; it shouldn’t be only ever one thing. If there are a few figures who return for you, and even though they’re changing and you’re changing, what keeps the entirety of an artist’s trajectory fascinating — even if there’re aspects, even years, that you’re not interested in? We have friends we have over a lifetime and those are really rare. And then there are people, whether it’s a seven year cycle or however long, that you’re really close to for a period of your life, or for so many years, then some of them you remain acquaintances with or don’t see as much, and others you never see again. That this might be or should be the case with art is not as strange as how connected the biorhythms of friendship are to that of art.

AW: Right. I feel like that awareness of tapping into the undercurrent of art is what your Sturtevant book recovered, and was missing when she was just coming out in the 60s.

BH: Michael Lobel and I talked about the problem of how to confront Sturtevant’s work early on, when we were just getting to know it, and her. Michael is an art historian, and I’m not. There really was just no viable discourse for her in the art world for, roughly, the first decade of her working. There was one, beginning to be one, in the realm of what came to be known as Poststructuralist theory. Sturtevant exited from any available radar for a decade or more in the early 1970s. I think she got out for the right reason at the right time. But we forget so quickly — how someone could be on the scene and know a lot of people and then how quickly things can change and someone, some work, “disappears.”

AW: The idea of a viable discourse is something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately. Sturtevant didn’t have the discursive space when she was making her work early on, and so it was not recognized—in both sense of the word of not identified as art, and not acknowledged or appreciated by the art world. This lack of discourse along with the allergic reaction to the work also meant that no one could be in dialog with her, which is kind of a trippy space to be in. There was a silent latency. So much of art relies on the momentum of language. It’s extremely powerful but we can be so easily misguided by it. This is why I think what you said earlier about doubt is so important. Doubt leaves room for uncertainty, and precludes any concrete ready-made definition of what art is, or can be. Recently you did a reading in London at the Chisenhale Gallery where you said: “Trying to figure out how to write about art is always the question that I’m asking myself—I don’t know if that’s what I’m doing, and right now I find it particularly difficult. … I’m finding it difficult to know what writing is supposed to do right now.” Would you be able to elaborate on that?

BH: I just don’t know what I think writing should be doing right now — or even what my own writing should be doing right now..

It’s very flattering to be asked by a magazine to contribute something, but I have to say a lot of time I get the magazine and I don’t know what most of [it] is, I’m not sure even what my text is. I still read things that really excite me; I still look at every magazine I can get my hands on. I’m always alert for new people — there’s a young writer who writes a lot for Frieze named Charlie Fox, and I think he’s great, so smart, really gifted—and he’s ridiculously, wonderfully young. What could be more inspiring than a young person who is really going to do something, already is doing something, amazing. Tobi Haslett has published some thrilling things for Artforum online—on Godard’s Vertov Group films, on Peter Hujar—and he’s almost as young as Charlie.

AW: Sometimes pausing is necessary. But, I remember in grad school, one thing that Trisha Donnelly said which really stayed with me was that you have to create your own world and live in it.

BH: It’s very Voltaire—cultivate your own garden and you might be able to feed your next-door neighbors in addition to yourself, and that may be how you help other people. Trisha’s belief in art is a way of doing new research — research into the things we don’t know yet. I do want to believe that. I used to believe it more definitively.

AW: Going back to the problem of recognition for Sturtevant, the way I make sense of what Trisha said is that, as an artist, in a way, I am the first and only audience—regardless of whether the work is recognized by anyone else. It has to do with language, and what one thinks art is or what it’s supposed to do. To me, its function is not to communicate a message—that seems more like advertising. It isn’t about something. One of the things you said at the Chisenhale talk: “Artists who are connected by the erotic ferocity of using the mind and materializing an image out of what you’re thinking—a lot of that is a kind of… vivisection of what art is in the moment that they are trying to think through it. That appears in radically different ways. … Art comes to mean and matter because the way it connects with the world.” I want to follow this line of the erotic, and talk about the book you did with John Waters: Art, A Sex Book. In the book you said:

“Looking itself is an activity which has pornographic aspects: we look at things, we are always looking, every waking moment of the day, and we love to watch certain things repeated over and over. We are scoporheic beings. There’s something sexy about all that looking, but there’s also something a little disturbing about it, pornographic. Contemporary art deals powerfully with the strangeness of looking at anything at all.”

I wonder if the eroticism of looking can open up another way to engage with art discursively, as an out from the trappings of certain programmatic ways of thinking about it? As John Waters said in the book, “Sex is always in the mind more than it is in the body. … What you have to do is be delighted by the nerve of contemporary art.”

BH: The book tried to open up the notion of what is sexy, or what’s a turn-on. As John puts it, Being smart is the surest way to be a turn-on. Certain ways of being nervy can be completely co-opted, continuing to do them no longer nervy at all; many modes of so-called “subversion” or “transgression” have become a newly sanctioned status quo.

Nerve can take very unusual forms. For example, Maureen Gallace is a very nervy painter. Clearly Maureen is making paintings that she could not have made 20 years ago. She can make these paintings now because she’s been painting for such a long time, but people acted as if her most recent show was such a radical break—the paintings [are] just so much better. Maureen’s always been a very serious painter, always working hard, always paying attention to and extremely knowledgeable about the context and history within which she’s working—and she abandons that for something new and [that’s] what makes those paintings incredibly nervy works.

Maureen Gallace. Beach Shack, Door August 14th, 2015. Oil on panel. 9 x 12 inches. © Maureen Gallace. Courtesy of 303 Gallery, New York.

AW: It’s that thing — close looking, I feel like our culture doesn’t allow for that. I was reading your interview with Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer in Pep Talk, and you were talking about a class that you took on Wordsworth’s The Prelude where you guys were stuck on one sentence the entire semester.

BH: There were a few days you’d come into class, and you’d be expecting to get a little further into the poem, and we just never did. It was really an important experience, seeing how long—not everything should take that long, but we seem to be at a place in culture, and maybe just in life in general, where we don’t even seem to allow the space for something that could take that long—an intellectual pursuit, a reading of a text, might take. Some of these concerns of tempo and temporality remind me of the amazing question that was quoted in some of the obituaries for Hudson, the chief eye of Feature, Inc. — What about the museum as a site of contemplation, a site of attention, a site of quiet? For the most part the museum has become about the last place you can go to find solitude, quiet, reflection.

There are certain things that only can exist, publicly, within the ecology of the museum or the gallery—and if they don’t exist there, they don’t exist, in public. There’s a history of certain weird modes of thinking and study, of making, that, unless its results have the kind of protected space museums (used to) afford, many people will never know. Which means some young kid will to think of Big Shiny Objects as the only way for sculpture to be. Of course, the alternatives exist in terms of private communiqués between two people, and that’s beautiful, crucial. But in terms of information, aesthetics, that might be vital to someone getting through a difficult period in life or helping to express a specific way of being happy, certain things, modes, possibilities are being foreclosed. A colleague of mine thinks ours is a time of great possibility. I could just be in a bad mood, but, I don’t know, um, look around you. I see so many forms of immiseration, many of them aesthetic.

AW: You mentioned that resistance takes on different forms at different times. Perhaps the idea of the underground, which may have ended with Nirvana being signed to a major label—maybe we have to do something else entirely now.

BH: What would the underground look like now? I don’t know. The problem is corporatization of instaneity — not that there couldn’t be good uses of it — the instaneity with which anything is already everywhere, so even the producer of it won’t know where it’s going to end up. That changes the notion of what possibly could make up an underground. Maybe any underground should hibernate, “go dark” so it could ferment.. You don’t have to read too much of T.J. Clark to know that we are still under the regime of the advertiser — what scores, if not quite the “syntax” or “grammar”, certainly the rhythm, of most contemporary images.

AW: Returning to the question of the eroticism of looking, I’m wondering how you feel about Susan Sontag’s proposition in the last line of her essay Against Interpretation, “In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art.”

BH: Tricky and coy, the end of that essay. Sontag never really ponies up and explains what such a hermeneutics would entail, which is part of what makes her essay’s adieu alluring and erotic. I love the idea of Sontag, and there should be more Sontags in the world right now — glamorous public intellectuals, women. Sontag’s Sontag, but recently I’ve spent a lot more time thinking about Renata Adler. She’s a very different kind of critic and writer than Sontag was. She has this line in her infamous takedown of Pauline Kael, this really beautiful dagger — why should anyone want to be a critic her or his entire life?

You do something for a certain amount of time and then — you know… Lee Lozano, as Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer revealed in her energizing dynamo on the artist, exposed so many ways to challenge the status quo and to play to a different crowd. Until Sarah’s research, people thought Lozano had already moved to Texas long before she actually had. Lozano, “E,” just played to a younger and different crowd—all of a sudden no one knew who or where she was anymore.

AW: Kind of like Martin Margiela—

BH: Oh, yes! Martin Margiela takes it to another level, when one considers a career in fashion, in the spectacle, in the age of social media. The idea that such a dauntingly handsome creature should somehow escape his picture being taken is the first thing. Then there’s the fact that he did this thing, fashion, did it on a level as compellingly as anyone has ever have done it, and in an experimental mode. And then, just… What is the daily life of MM? He, what, sometimes designs hotel rooms? Some special someones, of course, know, could tell us, but the public, even many of his fans, still don’t know, and we don’t see him—or we do and we have no way of recognizing him. The most tedious thing in the world right now is to be a celebrity, and he’s somehow infamous and unknown at the same time. What a sexy exemplar that is!