Spratt's Medium

Dionysian Song Fed the Catch-All Rumor Mill … [Reblogging the TLASILA (To Live and Shave in L.A.) Blog: Post Title & Subheading Shavings, 12.31.08 – 1.1.08]

2012-01-12T17:49:00.000+13:00

Meine Lieblingsplatten von 2008. Lisboa > Pix Dia 5. Day Six Is Upon Us. Lisboa > Pix Dia 4. Lisboa > Pix Dia 3: The Aftermath. Lisboa > Pix Dia 3. Lisboa > Pix Dia 2. New Pix: Berlin > Lisbon (Day One). Words Fail. When Bloodshot Orbs Are Groaning. Merry (Hic!) Chrrahsssmusss. Und Frohe Weihnachten von Tom und Claudia! I Suppose This Was Before "Are We There Yet?" Before "Also kochte Cook der Crew". Fuck Frampton Forever. Karl Schmidt Verlag. KSV 001 TLASILA Konstriktion und Narzissmus (CDR). Post-Gut Wrench Analysis. Heaving & Moldering. Balazs Pándi Recommends. Mark Morgan Recommends. Torrent Deformations: TDTESS. "The Mirthful Garb of Farce..." Brian Turner Recommends. Mutter vs. Mutter. And Starring Michael Dudikoff as Arto Lindsay. Nor Simulate a Throe. Substance vs. Bohren & der Club of Gore. Beccafumi Wants His Chiaroscuro Back. New Vid from Helsinki. Death Metal Wall-Bleed Trumps Actual Death Metal. Zia-ul-Haque as a Woman: Anesthesia Options for an Honor Clitorectomy. Su Tissue vs. Antony & the Johnsons. Where the color of mourning is as dirty snow. RIP Jørn Utzon. Sleep Conquered (For the Nonce). Star Photographs of Magda. Emerson, Lake & Palmer vs. Marianne Faithfull. Confab re: Cortege v3.0. There's a Tooth Inside That Old Slow Roil. Version Three Update. The Planks of the Bridge. Analog Suicide and Hull Curve, Live at Pit's Salon, Hannover. Wading Mainstream Through Last Century's Art Pond. It Ain't Ketamine. Quantity X bei Dreharbeiten zu "Das alte Gewehr 2". To Live and Shave in L.A. Vixens of the Mortal Ring. Cafe Glocksee / ...und der böse Wolf / C'maxX. This Is Not a Human League Song. Pläsir ab Vier. A Warble Exceeding 13 Jupiter Masses. As Adorno Penned His Definitive Leyton Buzzards Bio. Oblivion – Always Such a Handful. "Vaudeville-Theater im Spielparadies..." Cool, Cool, Cool. Abscess and Infection at the Point of Intersection. RIP MM. The Jimi Hendrix Experience vs. Jack Bruce & Friends vs. Ramatam. Lobsters Have Blue Blood. To Live and Shave in L.A. Marty Balin (Lady Granny), Spring '67. Back at HQ. Berlin: Tag Vier. Berlin, 9. November, 14:20 Uhr. "Im Internett Raum bitte nicht Rauchen..." Berlin: Tag Eins. Doddering Within Predicative Bounds. Vive la révolution! Frenzy in the Bowery. Ja, Wir haben! Today Is the Day. RIP JCB. Frankie Say Please Don't Make This Into a Goddamned T-Shirt. As the Jet-Lag Fades. Democracy in Action (Or...). The Obamercial. The Man Reading Eco Didn't Have a Hat. Hercules' Crude Bum-Rush of Odysseus. RIP Jerry G. The Tedium Is Medium. No Word for Pumpkin in Finnish? Bacchanalia Database: Earmark Liver to Mirror. Between White und Wrong. The Rovian Paradigm Flatlines. At Betley Hall, a now-demolished country house. To Live and Shave in L.A. "Her-Her," the So "Her," the Put-Mouth. The Genealogy of Orestes (According to Trace-Horse). We're Number... er, 36!! Upping the Ante on the Supergod Stakes. Fuck No Wave – Let's Get Nasty! I Dreamed I Detoured Around Hillbilly Heaven. A High Quotient of Emotional Intelligence. "What Do We Do in Wasilla?" Honor. An Elbow to the Ear... Damn! Well Said, Sir! Kitten in Agitated Repose. Most Pitiable Talking Point in Human History. Tears Unlikely to Dry. First Dipshit of the Day. The Battle of Dan-no-ura as a Nanotube Aggregate. We Work the Kultur Beat So You Don't Have To. Anxiety. My Eyes! My Eyes! My Eyes! My Eyes!! Doomsday for Stupids? (At Last?). Why Life Is Effing Wonderful. A Pox on Politics (for Now). Those Must Be ACORNs in McCancer's Cheeks. Yet Another GOP Canard Debunked. Utterly Debunked, Once and for All. Denmark Über Alles. Just Desserts? You Betcha! Miss High Heel reviewed in Blogstitude. Obama Knew All Along. No. This Is Why They Hate Us. New Miss High Heel Review: 9 Out of 10 in German Vice. Hiiii-fucking-larious. Fly Me to the 99th Floor. From HuffPo: "Lies Refuted About Ayers and Obama." TLASILA vs. Wordle #5. TLASILA vs. Wordle #4. Congratulations Cherie and Andrew! The Assassination of Trotsky (As Performed by the Cast of The Hills). TLASILA vs. Wordle #3. TLASILA vs. Wordle #2. TLASILA vs. Wordle #1. New! TLASILA/Harshcore Split CD3! Some Monster in Thy Thought. Woozlebug Dewclaw. Don't Laugh. I've Yet to Netflix "The Challenge," However. Inside the Fetid Spud-Brain of an Uncongenial Drama Whore. The Dark Heart of Banality. And on a Related Note. As Values Crumble. Costes Katai Udon (Hard Noodle). Back-Lit Cibachrome Again? VA Highlights of Vortex. Harwood on the McCain Fumble. Ferguson on McCain's Suspension (Of Principles). Introduced Pubic Hair to the Loft Scene. Sunny Murray's Untouchable Factor Apple Cores. Oedipus Knew a Thing or Two About When to Gouge. Bright Flashing Strobe Effect! The Squibs Din Pinwheels with Report. My First Food Riot. Imp Rape Express Imp Rape Express. Neurasthenics Trump Calisthenics. Frown Live at PKN Stock 3. I Voted Today. From Kos: "Three Times is Enemy Action." The Deepest Decent Yet into the Archive. "Truthiness Stages a Comeback." I Prayed to Jesus Christ for a Movie I Could Show My Kids. Bummer. If You've Been Nodding Off in the Kino. Torrent Artifact Tests Vol. 5. Kos on the Palin Yahoo Hack. Unicorns and Rivers of Flan and Fuck Motherfucking McCain. New and Limited So Act Now Now Now Now! To Live and Shave in L.A. & Totally Ripped S/T Split. Taking the Lying Cunts to Task. RIP Rick Wright. Torrent Artifact Tests Vol. 4. "Wait a Second." Blending a Closed, Fortress-Like Exterior. Leslie Q The Casual Plane. The House Is Faithful. Leslie Q Presque Vu! Lipstick on a Sad Old Sack of Shit. "The 'American Idol' Candidate." Waiting for Jimmy Durante to Let Fly with "Stimmung." Joan La Barbara Tapesongs. "McCain's Integrity." MSM: Castration Impossible, As There Are No Nads. Rope Cosmetology: The Other Dead Meat. Lampreys' Gills 'n' Acid. Peach of Immortality Live, WCVT-FM, Towson State University, Towson, Maryland (25 May 87). The Box Swells Inordinately. Late Night with Jimmy Boy L. Asteroid Steins ESA/OSIRIS Fly-By: Way Cool. York, Pennsylvania, September 4, 2008. OOPS!! Earloss vs. Einparken. Peach of Immortality The Best MUX! Grindhouse Torrent Artifacts. The Water-Carriers Abandon the Bucket Brigade. If You're Not Scared Shitless, You Should Be. Minitrue vs. Miniluv ina Blackwhite Ingsoc Style. "Why I Will Not Vote for John McCain." The (Un-)Holy Shit Deepens. Sick of Being Sicker. Degradable Ring in Fourfold Catamaran. Peach of Immortality ... need "Thee." Sledding Under X-Rays into Troughs of Radon. Woozlebug Mullicana (Songs Sprung from Spongs). Vagina-Americans Unite! (In Abortion Prison!). A Reminder. Lest Any American Forget. Jon Stewart on America's Greatest Themepark Attraction! A Cad Deferred, Hurling Mom. Chaos Reigns No More. TSSR Warning! Straight in at Number One. Deeper Still. Refusal: In-Progress. Lee "Scratch" Perry: Repentance Auto-Promo Gush. Olympix Hoopz Replai. Hot Flashes for Hot Flushes. 3:07 and not a minute too soon. 20 Years of Night Sweats Later. VA Head Full of Acid. Wringing Out the Sieves. VA Lowlife #14 Free Tape. Towering Shards. Broderick Crawford vs. Starbucks. To Live and Shave in L.A. Angel Cash (36 DD) and Carol Miller (44 DD), Who Are Lactating. Yet Another Reason to Delay Today's Suicide. Po' Po' Pee Poo-Core Reanimated! Duotron Duotron vs. Tom Smith (new edit). They Fucking Out-Booed the Boo Birds! Peach of Immortality Live, Destroy All Music 4*, Nexus Center for Contemporary Arts, Atlanta, March 31, 1989. Greatness. New Release: TLASILA / Demonologists Slow Dance and Dry Hump. R.I.P. Jerry Wexler. The Two Most Recent Releases. I Approve This Disapproval. Do It for Jules. Now It Can Be Told. Velvet Monkeys vs. Issac Hayes, 1986. Courtesy of Balazs: "Messiah Remix Goes Off!!!" Despite Scientology, Sobs. "Merely Resurrected": Foxy Digitalis Review. 100 Years, Either Way. Peach of Immortality "Jehovah" My Black Ass - R.E.M. Is Air Supply! Held Over at the Tartarus Marriott! Moaning with Ess-tasy. John C. Holmes - A Day in the Life. Persona Non Grata: New Bundled Reviews. Three Hundred, Then Full Stop. TLASILA Mashup Finale: Electric Eels vs. Maggi Payne vs. Sir Victor Uwaifo vs. Passenger of Shit vs. Thou vs. Musiques Matisses vs. Z'ev. Torrent Artifact Tests Vol. 2. Re: "Merely Resurrected." Oh, What a Soldered Web We Tweetup. Tom Smith & Flying Luttenbachers - Live, Fireside Bowl, Chicago (22 Dec 95). Torrent Artifact Tests Vol. 1. John McCain, Sleazy Cocksucker Pt. 666. Baptism or Descent. William Schimmel Accordion Revisited. Not the War of Preference. Diamanda Galás Faust. Eros. Tod. Your Children and My Children. Diamanda Galás Diamanda Galas. Even the Gravestones Were Used. Syphilitc Vaginas vs. Jerry Murad's Harmonicats. Wet Sheets Over the Doors and Windows. Pussy Galore Oven Bait. Charles Kimmel, for Selling "The Sex Addict". Mandrill vs. La Düsseldorf. Oliver Stone's "W" Trailer. Subsume the Small-Scale. Ravi Shankar vs. E/S/M. Presumptive Consumptive Cretin-in-Chief. Palming the Four-Foot Box. Assück vs. Othar Turner & the Rising Star Fife & Drum Band. Balazs Pandi: The Awe and Mystery. One Last Aubade for the Knuckle. Recyclopedia C vs. Cocoon. "So much as a fur, as a watch..." Deadbeat vs. (Rock Duo) Magma. Two Parts Aqua Net to One Part Nutrament. Pussy Galore Oven Bait (original version). Developed Ulcers, Mid-Sabotage. Eric Lunde vs. Ivo Papasov & His Orchestra. We Had the News Not Long Before You Came. Tapper Zukie vs. Am-Boy. Cypress with Rapid Workshops. Totalitär vs. Hot Women. Ein weiteres unmögliches Genie aus Deutschland. You Shall Not Lessen My Death by That Liquefaction. Johnny Mathis vs. Genocide Organ. Haruspex Kix. Not in Fact a Glass Eye. The Deadly Ones vs. Wire. Startles the Arbors Without Clothes or Shoes. T.I. vs. Tapes 'n Tapes. She Spoke, Nailing Our Hearts to Bits of Ribbon. 11bit vs. Peter Wyngarde. No Room for Asphyxiating Impulses. Otto Muehl vs. NV Groep 65. TLASILA: Interview with the Mitchell Brothers (repost). To Live and Shave in L.A. An Interview with the Mitchell Brothers. An Intervention... (repost). Original Doll vs. Art Ensemble of Chicago & Tarkus. Wild Berries for Sugar (and Major Injuries). Lotti Golden vs. Grouper. From the Nation That Gave Us Stockhausen. 89% Pure Coke to Save the Republic. Fantastic Four vs. Akira Rabelais. The Knotted Tangle of Crayonist Oeuvres. Jonathan Winters vs. Lady Sovereign. A Stubborn Resurgence, Dripped with Clippings. Jilted John vs. Louise Huebner. Elopes, Steadily Weeping. Dry Ice vs. Mephistopheles. Female Stars of the Stagnation. Michael Nesmith vs. Chapman-Whitney. Down in the Light (Ketamine Mix). Also Revealed: Blue-Collar Groundhogs Released by the Cong. Schola Musica vs. Booker T & the MGs. Black Square on a White Ground (Cee-Ce's Acapella Mix). Kevin Federline vs. Mayo Thompson. The dynamism of endless succession. On Faith and Its Antipode, Italian Techno. A Gloss on Doctrine. Grey Wolves vs. Phil Ochs. Summer Savings at Just Noise! Jocelyn's Mesh Blouses, Nandor's Skrewdriver Tee, Weasel's Jodhpurs, Rat's Chucks, and Misty's Blonde Fall, 75% Off! Nettles in Yachts You'd Mentioned. 4" Be 2" vs. Pole. Half Enclave, Half Typological Barque. Willie Nelson vs. Alice Coltrane. Τρεις παραστάσεις του συμβιβασμού από Ξενάκης. My Mega-Raucous Fourth. About 20 of Us Gathered in the Lower Chamber. Isifi Lokole vs. Burzum. I Felt Sleepy and Enchanted as I Quickly Trickled Down. The Ventures vs. Vanilla Fudge. Colossal Buzzkill. TLASILA Euro 2008 Fliers, Pt. 2. Envy Would Rather Bite Out Its Own Tongue. Bangles Dubs vs. PiL Ritz Riot. Devouring the Green World of Moths and Gasoline. John Wayne vs. Magik Markers. Aspects of Speech We Might Admire. Half Church vs. Smegma. Sound as a Sponge of Freedom-or-Something. Billy Mackenzie vs. Psycodrama. Old-School Badasses at the Height of Their Powers. The Cortege: Super-Secret Kraut-Peek. Framed and Fruitful as the Obedient Wretch. The Fates vs. In Flames. Bound Up with Ambivalance: A Moral Dramatization. DJ Donna Summer vs. The Jess Roden Band. Almost Unique to South America: Towers, Moats and Gates. Lithops vs. Directing Hand. "Merely Resurrected" Carved and Cubed. Orange-Cranberry Molds Dissolve. D. Nyoukis & F. Apism vs. Luca Formentini. Clothed in Primal Tombs. Tradition vs. Bran(...)Pos (2008). I'll See Your Aesopian Metaphor, and Raise You a Lifeless Ideology. Chic vs. Mystic Moods Orchestra. R.I.P. George. TLASILA Euro 2008 Fliers, Pt. 1. Achtmonatige Ziegen-Creme. To Live and Shave in L.A. - 30-minuten männercreme. Painter-Monk, Waterlogged Road. Birds of Delay vs. Phil Parnell. A Minor Hiccup in September 1787. Basil Kirchin vs. Pussy Galore. Erosion's Inoperative Intent. Sickboy vs. Aosoth. Liz Armstrong's Vice Mag Piece on Rat Bastard. Prolapsed Distinctions. The Move vs. Greg Kelley. He Was Told to Slit the Boots. Ben Frost vs. Pink Skull. Obediance, Nod, Bend, Bow. Classics IV vs. Mark Stewart. Between Thumb and Forefinger, Volition. Gas Shepherds vs. The Stranglers. Resist the Urge to Build Environments to House Your Works. Anton Bruhin vs. Bokrug. "I'm Voting Republican." MMJ > POI > OMG. Laid Out and Rotting? "Sure, Tremendous..." Marcus Schmickler vs. Bent Fabric. Photo Credits: Hysterical Blackout, Prometheus East. Anstam vs. France Gall. The Near-Great Cannot Droop Morosely. Cdatakill vs. Ian North. Swollen, Tense, Pierced by Spokes. Woody Herman vs. Ladytron. In All Three Periods I Was Inarticulate. Oswald Wiener & Gerald Reuhm vs. Black Dice. "Work on One Thing at a Time Until Finished..." Nigger Kojak & Liza vs. Merrilee Rush. Sickness Abounds Blog: TLASILA Links. A Detour of Devotion. Twinkle vs. The Advisory Circle. Abeyances Cum, Morrows(s) Limn. Hell Yes. What Happened to Graffiti and the Dripped Swirls and Skeins? Winners vs. David Watson. One or the Other of My Lives Is Public. Keith Hudson vs. Scooter. "Let There Be No Sense of Time..." Steve Lacy vs. Charlie Daniels. Our 1,000th Post! Los Norte Americanos vs. Skyhooks. Of the Petty Sniping and the Holy Struggle. Josef Beuys vs. John Fred & His Playboy Band. When the Vogue Began to Ebb. Missy Elliott vs. Sunny Murray. Four Great Things About Germany. The Dark Figure in the Illegal Bar Eschewed. Frank Sinatra vs. David Soul. I Suggest an Accident on the Rig. Ryoji Ikeda vs. Agon Ensemble. Regression at Variance. The Count & Siden vs. Blood Stereo. "The Guys Said You Would Be Monogrammed!" 16 Bitch Pileup vs. Newcleus. One Final Tour Date: The Laundry Room. E28: Prefiguration. Auf Wiedersehen Deutschland. L*ve Goes to an Altes Gebäude (On F*re). Revivified at Maschsee. Glazed and Infused. Another Perfect Day. A Blogger's Take on the Paris Performance. Snug. Paris Pix. Il est fini (et nous avons régné). Merge and Fall Astride: May 19 Pix. A Trio of Hamburg Pix by Claudia Franke. Hamburg Pix. The Long Slog: Geneva to Hamburg. Woe Is Us Re Leipzig. Lausanne to Geneva > Cave 12: Pix. Fassbind's Non-Bavarian Breakfast Klatch. dp Denounces the Vegan Reich as Asparagus Comes to Town. Dave Phillips' Lausanne Pix. Lyon to Lausanne > Cinéma Oblò: Pix. Astride the Articulated Grind. Oblòng Appurtenance. Just Trying to Keep My Head Together, Man. Toulouse to Lyon > Sonic: Pics. Objets Trouvés. Toulouse Arrival: Pix. Getaria / San Sebastian: Farewell Pix. Getaria Gaztetxe Pix. Madrid to Getaria: Pix. R.I.P. Robert Rauschenberg. Madrid Pix. Rob Lowe Deserved the Disconnect. Valencia Pix. The Rain in Spain Falls Mainly on Our Asses. Restauración en el Zapato Rojo. Barcelona to Valencia: Pix. Tension on the Gran Via. falling into the arms of TLASILA. Donde está Gaybomb? Torino to Marseille: Pix. Torino Pix: Harshcore e Nana. beau-fils à cheveux rouge dans le nouvel enfer. Arrivederci Italia! Roma, Mattina (Compreso un viaggio al Colosseo). Head Finally Flattened. Roma Pix. In the Vise of the Grip in Roma. Morning at a Farmhouse Outside Bologna. Bologna Pix. XS at the XM. Trieste e Venezia Pix. From Ruin to Rack in 140 Kilometres. TLASILA 1, Metelkova Anomie 0. From Split to Ljubljana: Pix. Escape from the Bunker (Through Hail). Zagreb to Split: Pix from Murder Road. Kudos to Igor and Team Kocka. Soul Is a Hamhock in Your Cornflakes. But by definition, soul is absolutely not a Nazi skin, defrocked, semi-rehabilitated, or otherwise, drunkenly sieg heil-ing on your stage (post-concert), or slumping, insensate, in the doorway of your dressing room. The Depths Must Not Be Illumined. Splitting in Five. Zagreb and Associated Convolutions. Budapest to Zagreg: Pix. Death Metal Always Takes a Backseat to the Quiet Storm. Österreich Is Alright for Alighting. Bratislava to Győr (By Way of Vienna): Pix. Wien to Győr and All I Have to Show for It Is This Goddamned Black Sabbath (Dio-Era) T-Shirt. Bratislava Pix. Post-Apocalypse. Praha Pix. Last Moments in Praha. Poznań to the Czech Border and Into Praha. Poznań Pix. Sitting at the Magical Sill. Warszawa Pix. Escher Jump Style vs. Microwavable Ass Banditry. From the Wrocław Deep-Freeze. Polish Cruise Down Bloglane, Berlin Refused Us Its Mysteries But Went Overboard on the Epigrams. København Pix. Kicking Against the Canned and Pre-Ordained. Århus Pix (Including Morning in Hannover). We Are Jump Style (Through Apostolic Filters). Hannover Pix. Basking at Baukasten. Besieged by Typical Immortal References. The Sloth Before the Storm. Rotterdam > WORM Recording Session Pix. Tilburg > 013 Pix (Including Joke, Antwerpen AM). Selected Photos from Tilberg and Rotterdam. Aandacht! Achtung! Bonzenspeck und Prollgehabe. Antwerpen > Scheld'apen Pix. Bruxelles > Domino Festival Pix. Aujourd'hui Est Mon Anniversaire! Lille Pix. Jerkin' in Antwerpen. En Route to Jacksonville Airport, April 8. While We're Away. Barely Recognizable Figures, Pigeon-Liver'd. J.J. Burnel vs. The Breeders. He'll Not Stop Him, Mother-Mass Congealed. Wishbone Ash vs. The Headboys. Best Photo from My L.A. Trip. There Will Be No Other End. Prostitute Disfigurement vs. Herbie Hancock. Second Best Photo from My L.A. Trip. I Laughed with Her an Eternity Later. The Hollywood Stars vs. The Rembrandts. Eyes Up Close As Treacherous Oak. New Trolls vs. Howard Jones. Effortlessly Repeated Masterly. Erm Ace Rectale. Foxes' Heads Upon It. Link Wray vs. Robert Fripp. A Pity. We Were Spelling Disaster, Gone at Dusk. Jack Scott vs. Grind Inc. Graceful Junctions Skid with Blasts of Verse. Commander Cody & His Lost Planet Airmen vs. Natural Snow Buildings. Woman Donkeys for a Bride-Piece. Alexandre Desplat & Aaron Zigman vs. Big Black. Felled at the Kodak. He Does More Than Loathe Simple Faith. Archimedes Badkar & Afro 70 vs. Michal Ho. Le Bon Mal. Threatens to Crush Recent Years. The Joystrings vs. Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds. A Less Important Expressive Realist's Black Monk Free-Play. Akira S. & As Garotas que Erraram vs. Elton Motello. All Hail Random Chance! A Throat Distinctively Scarred. Chicken Shack vs. Koen Daigaku. "Your Work Is You, Nothing More." Rick Astley vs. _ (Undrskor). Say, Does the Cinder Kiss the Wrinkled Cur? Subway Sect vs. The Quick. On the Scales of a Tin Fish. Dyan Diamond vs. Portishead. Slash with a Knife, for I Shall Not See Open Arms. Chris Watson vs. Doctors of Madness. There Was a Girl Who Lived in My Burnt-Out Stars. Metalux & John Wiese vs. Droppin' Science: Greatest Samples from the Blue Note Lab. Reposted by Request: Phauss Audiodrome. Garlands Ground Down to Gloom. Mathias Schaffhäuser vs. Bone Thugs-n-Harmony. Phrases That Have Come Unmoored. AG Geige vs. Radiators from Space. Wiki No More. On the Brink of Dreadful Speech. Kit Ream vs. The Goslings. The Antipodes Await the Drift. Henri-Michel Raschle vs. Erykah Badu. To Live and Shave in L.A. Vedder Vedder Bedwetter (Contiguous Mix). In Re: The Mortified Smash-Heap Backcomb. U-Roy vs. Raoul Sinier. Pleasure and Desire Left in the Sink. Astrid Gilberto vs. Belong. To Live and Shave in L.A. "Helen Butte" vs. Masonna Pussy Badsmell. His Hunting Coat Nailed the Bulls-Eye. Dolly Parton vs. Roger Ruskin Spear. Spreads Out Shapelessly (Lake from the Kidnap). The Dave Clark Five vs. Nils Petter Molvær (et al.). Meanwhile, the prime movers liked the look of the spectre. Moth Electret vs. The Andrews Sisters. Reappraisal of the Reach of the Pitch. Stephane Grappelli vs. Lair of the Minotaur. You Could Eat the Whites Evenly. The Sidewinders vs. David Tagg. Flashes of Memory, Crowning. Cecil Taylor vs. Chris Stamey. Ready to Send Gifts of Soft Cheeses to Azerbaijan on Day One. WFMU vs. WFMU. The British Board of Censors and a Magnifying Glass. Desperate Bicycles vs. Walter Smetak. Shouting defiance from the hinge on the cabin floor. William Loose vs. Howard Shore. Of Course, Not All Laughing Is Laughing at People. Scaffold vs. Silicon Teens. Contracting from a Star of the First Magnitude. Barbara Lynn vs. Au Pairs. Assez pour une séance 2: Recourse to Form. Asmus Tietchens vs. Steve Miller Band. The Numbers Don't Lie. Catching Up. Janet Jackson vs. Negativland. Billy Joe Royal vs. Vampire Weekend. Nervus Rex vs. Conjunto de Juan Reynoso. Brenda Lee vs. Debauchery. Toumani Diabaté vs. +++++++++. Isia Moriendo Renascor. Very Sad News. On the Floating Corpse Question. Kris Kristofferson vs. Johnny Ringo & Asher Senator. Big Toes, Mere Matter. Ákos Rózmann vs. Alexis Korner. Not Surprising Considering the Singles-y Feel. Battle of the Shitstackers: Day Three. Oxford Shirts, Boat Shoes, Columbia University. Battle of the Shitstackers: Day Two. Constitution v. Cowardice. Three Extraordinary Lives. A Refined Shoegaze Aesthetic. Battle of the Shitstackers: Day One. The Four Elders and the Four Storytellers. The Kingsmen vs. Goldfrapp. McScandal '08. She Went Platinum at 16... And Us? A Toy Tractor Slathered in Lead Paint, and Two Copper Kettles. The Lady Tigra vs. Heitor Villa-Lobos. Reaching Out to Cut It to the Quick. Ministry & Co-Conspirators vs. Xiu Xiu. Stiff Winds Dangling from Her Wrists. Six Teens vs. Tokio Hotel. Indistinct, Hidden Behind Other Noises. Zatox & Activator vs. Jimmy Gilmer & the Fireballs. "About a half quarten of whiskey..." Scarface vs. Glow Kids. The Earlier Books Are the Grumbling Big Dog. Henry Cow (BBC Sessions bootleg) vs. Natasha Bedingfield (Pocketful of Sunshine). Decent Young Fellow, Trying to Remember. Sandy Nelson vs. Shirley Collins. Tour Update: 17 Feb 07. Orgasmatron Under Attack! Motörhead vs. ABBA. Swamp Lions Rip Divorcee Lust Strip! Meco vs. Rafael Toral. The Folly of Attacking Iran. Many of the Fathers Assigned Tenuous Bodies to the Angels. Roberta Flack vs. Nath Family. A 45-hertz Tone Strokes the Public's Heart and Soul. Beaver & Krause vs. The 5.6.7.8's. Registers Evoked in Their Fullest. Wynona Carr vs. Metamorfosi. Fuck McCain. Bartender! Three Unadorned Abshire Homes! Dizzie Gillespie vs. Body Vehicle. Shot in Documentary Style (Alluded to without Name). Levande Livet vs. Ken Nordine. Godlike Is As Godlike Does. I Want to Paint Something Untitled, the Tower Itself, Marks and Signs. Wouter Van Veldhoven vs. The Moody Blues. When Housewives Get Bored, They Turn to Rolls of White Seamless Paper. Aidan Baker vs. Enya. Uncorrected Proof for Unsettled Distribution. Jana Hunter vs. Billie Holiday. Still Not Too Late to Attend. But What Caused the Shock That Caused an Infection? C.W. McCall vs. Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. As a Matter of Fact, Red Curtains. Ghedalia Tazartes vs. Hateform. Making Conversation for the Sake of a Telltale Recess. Sha-Na-Na vs. Pulse Emitter. Earle Brown was provoked by Grundy as well. Kool G Rap vs. Krill.minima. Loosens Pious Care by Degrees. Glen Campbell vs. Sala-Arhimo. I First Discovered These Presets at My Uncle's House. Rascal Flatts vs. Hecker. Buttercups, Daisies, Owls Not What They Seem. The White Lodge's Twilight Vision vs. Roxy Music's Stranded. Succinct. A Fever Late, and in the Fit. Library Tapes vs. Swing Out Sister. Peter Hook: Amplification and Effects. Josh Groban vs. Howard Stelzer. There Are Worse Things Than Trepanation Advocacy. Shooter Jennings vs. Autechre. Scaling Another Stack of Acceptance Letters. Soil Sing Through Me vs. Leo Kottke. I Walk on Gilded Eye Stalks. Borknagar vs. Hisato Higuchi. Boundless, Infinite Loathing. Boston vs. Talvekoidik. Re-Sanding Booglitch Totems. Status Quo vs. Opitope. Thank Satan for Paleo-Evangelicals. FCC Seeks To Fine ABC $1.4M For Indecent "NYPD Blue" Episode. Recursive Tendrils Squeak. The Buckinghams vs. Janek Schaefer. Overrun by Light. The African Dawn vs. Nicola Ratti. Croaking a Guess at the Edge. Amy Winehouse vs. Carsickness. Valencia Promo Mix. Cortege Previews Posted! TLASILA The Cortege. Hostile Faces Disowned by the Bureau. Tiger B. Smith vs. Zaimph. Expelled from the Professions. Disrupt vs. Fr. Pat Berkery. When It Came to Fetishes, Her Curves Contained Tags and a Five-Metre Glaze. Ella Fitzgerald vs. Blurt. Until Ellen Throws Her Cigarette in the Sink. Yui Onodera vs. Juno OST. Just a Pissworth of Green. Fat Boys vs. Magma. Thomas Paine, Son of a Quaker Corsetmaker. Close Our Fists Over Streaked Silence. Pilot vs. Hosono & Yokoo. Adamantly Eat Ant 0/2/5. Manquette for the Set of the Ballet "Unartificial Insemination." Ron 'Pate's Debonairs vs. Kraken. In a Word, Mathematical Symbols. Chris Watson vs. Blood, Sweat & Tears. Atlanta: Afternoon, Day Seven. Without a Tie, Hardly Decent. The Banana Splits vs. Aan. I Am Sitting in the Smallest Room. KTL vs. Akira Ifukube. Body Surfers Slid Along the Torch. ''Sneaky Pete'' Kleinow vs. Lamella. Though Lewdness Court. Gene Pitney vs. Eyvind Kang. Atlanta, Dawn of Day Three. AFOS Part III: The Daily Beauty That Makes Me Ugly. A Flock of Seagulls vs. Jazz Finger. RIP Michael Griffen. AFOS Part II: Slowly Disappearing Summer Beaches. A Flock of Seagulls vs. Miscarriage. AFOS Part I: The Complex Illusion of Age. A Flock of Seagulls vs. The Haunting. "Queen-Anne's-Lace" (Seventh-Gen Xerox). Benny Goodman vs. Slow Dancing Society. Fast Fading Violets Make Your Old Pecker Curl. Jean Claudric vs. Jackie-O Motherfucker. Fate Raises Up, Fate Casts Down. Michael Flower vs. Kitaro. Huggabroomstik Are So Not Antifolk! Burial vs. Yellow Swans & Ashtray Navigations. From Al Giordano's Blog, "The Field." At the New Roxy, Only Teen Field Recordists Making Field Recordings of Northern Field Recordists. No Thanks vs. Touch 66. The Droner You Plod, the Blisser You Ought Not. Non-Horse vs. James Gang. RIP Henry Chopin. Re: "Nothing Happening There..." Don't It Make My Bloodshots Fog? Quosp vs. Crystal Gayle. 1) Holocaust 2) Rwandan Genocide 3) 2004 Tsunami 4) New Wave. Spectre Folk vs. Billy Joel.

Another Harry Partch Bootleg Flushed [Reblogging the TLASILA (To Live and Shave L.A.) Blog: Post Title & Subheading Shavings, 12.25.05 – 1.7.05]

2012-01-03T22:35:00.022+13:00

Favorite Music, 2005. CG Fete Aktionen! Last "Noon" Post for Twenty-Four Hours, Promise! A Dredged Odium I Limn Not. Swag Report. Mashup Proposal #56: George Grosz vs. Fred Barnes (8" Tabebuia serratifolia plate, semi-concentric lathe, 1682). Erdbeer-Rhabarber & Gurgelstock: Eye Chart Fixation. Lou Harrison Bitch-Slapped Again by Jayne County Lathe Cut. Get Off Your Ass and Record the Sounds of Sacred Places. Und Szene in der Therapie (1989 Remix). Herr Roth (Tho Error Ho'): AWK in Transit: I Want Kant, Sir. Majordomography: Rap Jog Rod Ma Homy! As I Was Taking the Consecrated Host from One Catacomb to Another. Snot Bar Aside vs. Bastard Noise. Dishonest, Reprehensible, Corrupt. Parsing the Lard from the Larder, Pt. 1. I'd Much Prefer Shooting the Shooters, But That's Just Me. Oh Dear. Why Bother Reading That Thing? Don't Miss. "Noon" Nine Million Light Years Distant. More KiKi-D. In 2001, Kim Ki-Duk Most Certainly Was God. Jukebox Jury Deadlocked. On Returning from Marathon. Scales Not Being Flung from (Punctured) Eyes. Another Vacation. Still Here. Report from Disgruntled HQ. A Memo from the Majordomo. Book Notes: Wednesday, October 5. My Sloth? Faith-Based! Note to Our Regulars and the Odd Ascetic. Texts of Antiquity XIII: Brooklyn Beat review (Ugly American, February 1992). The Brooklyn Beat Live at CBGB's: Soon to Be a Major Motion Picture. Tech Itch: "The Rukus" bw "Replicator"... Holy F*ck! Texts of Antiquity XII: On Ron Jeremy's To Live and Shave in L.A. (Ugly American, 1994). Haruspex of Perfunctory Tick: Ron Jeremy's To Live and Shave in L.A. Texts of Antiquity XI: "Delectation of the Über-Muse" (Creative Loafing, Atlanta, 1998). Delectation of the Über-Muse: Blast Off's skewed, long-running reign as Atlanta's premiere video salon continues. Texts of Antiquity X: Quiz #1 (TS's "Cinema Depreciation" course, MDCC, 1991). Texts of Antiquity IX: Waste Management (Antenna #39, Miami Beach, 1991). Waste Management: You Asked for It! South Florida's Number One Exclusive Lesbian Connection! Urgh: An Ethics War. Texts of Antiquity VIII: Waste Management (Antenna #37, Miami Beach, 1990). Waste Management: Shhh... Don't Wake Her! Texts of Antiquity VII: Waste Management (Antenna #36, Miami Beach, 1990). Waste Management: A Pecan Log's Guide to Smoked Beef Brisket. Texts of Antiquity VI: Waste Management (Antenna #35, Miami Beach, 1990). Waste Management: A Slum-Hopper's Guide to Tele-Squalor. Texts of Antiquity V: Waste Management (Antenna #34, Miami Beach, 1990). Waste Management: A Slum-Hopper's Guide to Tele-Squalor. Texts of Antiquity IV: Waste Management (Antenna #33, Miami Beach, 1990). Waste Management: A Slum-Hopper's Guide to Tele-Squalor. Texts of Antiquity III: "Incredibly Terrible Music 2" (Bananafish, 2001). Incredibly Terrible Music 2. Ahhh, Purity. Hog Heaven (Is a Place Where David Byrne Never Happened). To Live and Shave in L.A.: Quasar-Mottled Update. Turkish Massage (with a Brandy Chaser). Mainstreaming. Paula and Luc, Editing Quarter-Inch Reels of Tape in a Tree, G-L-I-T-C-H-I-N-G! Moog Bites the Envelope, Soul Tweaked with "Tarkus" Filter. DVD Only Seven Short Prosthetic Skips from WOW. 0. WOW 1. XPX 2. YQY 3. ZRZ 4. ASA 5. BTB 6. CUC 7. DVD. The Dreaded Thousand Centimeter Stare. The Lesser, More Annoying Variety of Jet Lag. Грахданский Кодекс в Москве. Not Quite Bourke-White #10. Not Quite Bourke-White #9. Not Quite Bourke-White #8. Not Quite Bourke-White #7. Not Quite Bourke-White #6. Not Quite Bourke-White #5. Not Quite Bourke-White #4. Not Quite Bourke-White #3. Not Quite Bourke-White #2. Not Quite Bourke-White #1. Hauling Ass on the Sniardwy. I Deleted My Christian Marclay Rarities, and I Dare You to Do the Same. The Groan Heard 'Round the Cupboard. As I Lay Glomming. Christoph Gächter (1957-2005). Bunraku as Coptic Flare. "Noon" Preview: Live Stream Alert. Too Bad Weenie, That's Your Hot Dog Hand. Pausing for an Uncommercial Message. Postcards on the Lam. Writing About Flying Is So Much More Exciting Than Fucking. Soundtrack to Plamegate. Coney Island Mongoloid. Another Perfect Day in New York. As the Garotte Sidles Up to the Noose. Staring Down Morrissey's Hatchet Man. London on No One's Lips. No Wickedness for the Rested. No Longer Gargling with H2SO4. Johnny Comes to Koreatown. Worst Live 8 Image, Pt. 1. Two Large Vessels Were Found. Our Rousing Battle Cry: "Want Some Juice?" Nothing from Nothing Leaves Everything, Pt. 665. "When It's Time to Party We Will Part Ways..." Spleen Removed by Wolves: GSA Edition. Fan and/or AC. Countdown to Run-of-the-Mill Cable Car Soundscape. Nach Tod. Albums Pilfered (Okay, Taped) from Rudolf Eb.er's Collection, Aarau, 2002 (Pt. 1). Dave Philips (who was safeguarding M. Eb.er's archive at the time) had no means to rip vinyl to mp3, und zo I was forced to copy the following onto cassette. Primitive, of course, but in this instance (necessitating a month-long orgy of consumption), I had no choice. Not all are super-ultra-mega rare, but that wasn't the point. (Neither are all wholly arresting or compelling. Some are mere bald-faced curiosities.) I simply liked 'em, and wanted to take 'em home with me. I don't think about collecting. There's never an end, and I abhor parameters. Just wanna hear the stuff. I may only listen once, maybe twice. Done. Curiosity satisfied. In no particular order: VA Lower Caste Religious Music from India: Monks, Transvestites, Midwives and Folksingers (Lyrichord LLST 7324, 1977). Zbyněk Vostřák, Miloslav Ištvan, and Václav Kučera From Czech Electronic Music Studios (Supraphon 1423, 1974). VA Experimentelle Musik und Szene in der Therapie [Direction: Manfred Richter] (Jecklin & Co., Jecklin 225, 1983). Günter Brus Günter Brus zum 50. Geburtstag Überreicht vom 1. Deutschen Trivialeum: Panisches Leiderbuch (Dichtung und Musik) (Das Hohe Gebrechen, Die Taubueosel 1, 1988) (Ja, the above title is just a tad unwieldy...). VA Raudelunas Pataphysical Revue Starring Ron 'Pate's Debonairs Featuring Rev. Fred Lane (Say Day-Bew Records NR 6155, 1975) (Yup, pre-CD reissue, orig. vinyl). The Blue Denim Deals Without the Arms Armed Forces Day (Say Day-Bew Records SUB-2, 1978) (Ditto). Jacques Lejeune Symphonie au Bord d'un Paysage (INA GRM 9 111 LE, 1983). Mario Bertoncini Cifre/Brown/Cage (Edition RZ Ed. RZ 1002, 1989). William S. Burroughs Break Through in Grey Room (Sub Rosa SUB 33005, 1986) (I'd not previously located this compilation... A sweet one, actually). VA Dada for Now: A Collection of Futurist and Dada Sound Works (Ark Records DOVE 4, 1985). (Not the same as Sub Rosa's 1989 Futurism & Dada Reviewed comp.). Anna Lockwood The Glass World of Anna Lockwood (Tangent Records TGS 104, 1970). (Great alb, beautifully realized). The Glass Orchestra The Glass Orchestra (Music Gallery Editions WRCI 1551, 1978). (Sensing a theme?). Henning Christiansen Fluxyl (Burgen Records HC 04, 1984). Marion & Michael Folge 1 (Rena 6422, no date listed on sleeve). Harry Partch U.S. Highball (RIP 003 bootleg, no date of release; pieces date from 1943, 1955, and 1954, respectively). bog Art Sounds of a Sculpture I & II (bog Art BOG 103, 1989). Evil Moisture Tribute to the Hiss on a 3rd Generation Copy of "Blood Feast" (BMR 004 7", no date listed). (Didn't have this one; never even saw it when I was hanging out at Andy's old King's Cross flat in London... Obviously, a must!). Mathias Spahlinger Morendo / ΑΡΟ ΔΩ / Vier Stücke / Entlöschend / Störung / Sotto Voce (Edition RZ Ed. RZ 1005, 1990) (Kinda Joss Stone-esque...). Josef Anton Riedl Josef Anton Riedl (Wergo WER 60066, 1972). Steve Miro, Steve Solamar, et al Collaborations: Indiscreet Music (Object Music OBJ 002, 1979). (At one time I had the entire Object catalogue in my collection, but most everything vanished in the early 80s. It was cool to have this again. Of course, I've not listened to it since I taped it in June 2002...). Le Chant des Baleines [Recorded by Roger and Kitty Payne] (Capitol Records France 28 068-85349, 1970). Xylex Gluing Goes Electronic with Xylex (Doomation AH 29575 7", no date on sleeve). (Another hyper-obscure Evil Moisture epic... Dave's copy, not Rudolf's...). Mascara-Sue Battle Sweet EP (Low Class Dandy 007 7", 2000). (Not Rudolf's, but Dave had it and I'd really enjoyed their other EP, so...). Nurse with Wound Chance Meeting on a Dissecting Table of a Sewing Machine and an Umbrella (United Diaries UD01, 1979). (Widely available, but R&D had pristine, first edition vinyl copies. (My UD stash was stolen eons ago.) Call me a sentimentalist, I don't fucking care!). Moniek Darge Sounds of Sacred Places (Igloo IGL 056-LP, 1987). (Yeah, some of you know how good this one is...). When Drowning but Learning (Witchwood Records WIT 001, 1987). Christian Marclay More Encores (No Man's Land nml 8816, 1989). Trevor Wishart Red Bird: A Political Prisoner's Dream (Yes 7 LP, 1978). (Wishart was a big influence on the way I imagined voice/vocals; this album is as good as it tends to get, although the forthcoming Bo Bice collection reportedly comes a close second... Bought Red Bird on release; it was stolen a few years later. Most of my recs from the mid-70s were grabbed in a robbery. Now I just laugh at the thought of thieves lugging a shitload of avant-wha? albs across the courtyard of my former building, but then...). VA Music in the World of Islam – 1: The Human Voice (Tangent Records TGS 131-LP, 1976). G*Park Seismogramm (Schimpfluch SH19, 1990). Schimpfluch-Gruppe / Runzelstirn & Gurgelstøck Mama (Des Fest) (Schimpfluch KSK03/SH26, 1991). (Awesome...). Audio Arts Accent for a Start (N Media W NMW 004 AA 006, 1987). Culturcide Tacky Souvenirs of Pre-Revolutionary America (no label, matrix #LH 24789-90, 1986). (Simultaneously idiotic and brilliant, and too retarded to resist taping. Dave and Rudolf must have had three copies of it between them). VA Zerstückelte Dekkurbeld (Schimpfluch 02, 1988). (Exhaustive early Schimpfluch comp., Eb.er's second release. Well worth your weekend). Runzelstirn & Gurgelstøck Stuhlgangblockade (Schimpfluch 59, 1990). (An insane Eb.er remix compilation... Edition of 100). Runzelstirn & Gurgelstøck Je Rumpelsturz Desto Burzelblock (RRR R+G, 1992?). (RRR have always struck me as the K-Tel of experimental labels, but within their compromised scope they've released more than a handful of interesting releases. Unfortunately, most "Due Process RRRadio" projects have been dreadful. This one beat the odds; it's all in the source material...). VA Wash Your Brains (Schimpfluch Produktion SH01, 1988). (The very first Eb.er release under the warped Schimpfluch imprint. Great great great!). Mlehst / Runzelstirn & Gurgelstøck Untitled Split LP (Bandaged Hand Produce 68, no date on sleeve). Hanatarash / Runzelstirn & Gurgelstøck / Eb.ersonna This Is Tiefpunk EP (Tochnit Aleph 033, 1999 12''). (An excellent document, released by Daniel Lowenbrucke on his (currently) embattled Tochnit imprint. This was probably Dave's copy. Of course, now I have one... Cheers, DL!). Meredith Monk Our Lady of Late (Wergo SM 1058, 1986). Alvin Lucier Music for Solo Performer (Lovely Music VR 1014, 1982). (I've had this since its release, but I couldn't resist taping it anyway). Alvin Lucier Sferics (Lovely Music VR 1017, 1988). Oswald Wiener & Dieter Roth Tote Rennen: Lieder (Edition Hans Jörg Mayer F666-08, 1977). Roth / Rainer Autonomdialogische Thematik (Misch-U.Tremkunst) (Verlag Leber-Hossmann / Dieter Roth's Verlag DR 1180, 1978). Dieter Roth & Björn Roth Autofahrt No. 1 (15-16h., 17 Apr 79) / Biefert Nr. 1 (Kl. 14-15, 17 Apr 79) (Dieter Roth's Verlag BRDR 579, 1979). (The Roth albums are utterly berserk, essentially unreleasable and now, hopelessly unobtainable). Daniel Stephen Crafts Soap Opera Suite / Snake Oil Symphony (Lutra Recordings 1001, 1982). (I finally found this again in 1996, but I took an opportunity in Aarau to make a safety copy. A beautiful album). RLW/Aube Organized EP (Meeuw Muzak 006 10", no date on sleeve). (This was Dave's. DP's always been more of a noise classisist than Herr Eb.er). (I'll wrap this up at a later date. The list goes on for a while). "Grisbi," continué. On "Touchez Pas au Grisbi." Nondor vs. Nandor: To Live and Shave in L.A. Cubed. TLASILA on the Brink of an Ellipsis. More Grumbling About Year-Old Rubbish. "Waltz of the Water Puppets." After "La Commare Secca," 5:33 AM. Avoid Contact with Skin and Eyes. "Antique the Cranford Rhythm..." (As grain spills, rats feed). Fluxyl'd Again! Another Harry Partch Bootleg Flushed. The Russian word for sunset, закат (za-Kat), translates roughly to "decline." Beautiful. Axiomatic permutations notwithstanding, and ignoring for the moment certain relevant Bry Ferry Stranded couplets, today's spurning is killing me. The neighborhood's grim tool sheds are bathed in florescence; no birds do sing. They repudiate, too, and this zestless plot is transformed. On a gilded note, I return to the combine. More to follow. Sprink Breag. This Fucking Spine Is Giving Me the Eye. I Turned 49 Today and I Don't Care. (Or, I Am an Ancient, Cur!) On the Pyre, 6 April 05. Noon-ish, after class, a romp through Ellen O'Gorman's New Lit. History essay "Decadence and Historical Understanding in Flaubert's Salammbô." Fave (or, most resonant) lines (at least in terms of my own research), re the sacking of Carthage in 146 BCE: Indeed, kindling the French torch on the altar of the Capitol initially appears to have the vaguest of temporal references, but the flames of Corinth can be carbon-dated. Even at the moment of her destruction, a moment which apparently guarantees the future of civilization, shows us perhaps that Carthage as absolute irredeemable decadence is as difficult to assimilate fully into the narrative of progress as it is to utterly exclude it. That, and a rotten apple, will buy you a date with a Dutch donkey. A Proud Pop Beams. Warning! Panisches Liederbuch (NFF Traum der Langeweile). Alright, Fuckers. Chocolate Superimposition. My copy of John Stuart Mill's On Liberty unacountably became tattooed with a brown stain. There's a sort of sideview 3-D thumbtack shape dripping on the "b" in "edited by," as in "edited by Elizabeth Rapaport." A thumbtack sheathed in a spit bubble. More (or an outright expurgation) soon. Where Shall We Toil? Where Shall We Be Foiled? I'm Loathe to Respond, but Too Vain to Resist. Just Tryin' to Tell a Fucking Kid About Brand Recognition. 1000 MG of L-Lysine Against Fascism. Damned If You Don't. No Xmas for John Rhys-Davies: TLASILA Tour Reminiscence Vol. 2. A Genuine Bad-Ass. Bleary Still, But Stirring. At Home, Dawdling, at Last. Everything Reversed, Always.

O. Ruddock d. 'H.S. Mauberley' [Reblogging the TLASILA (To Live and Shave L.A.) Blog: Post Title & Subheading Shavings, 12.31.07 – 1.2.07]

2011-12-30T15:21:00.005+13:00

Favorite Music of 2007. Everything Must Go!!! (Pt. 3). Post-Christmas Depression vs. King Crimson's Red. Everything Must Go!!! (Pt. 2). Xmas Scrum vs. Plateau. Everything Must Go!!! (Pt. 1). Electro Punk: Viva La Revolution vs. Smoky Mountain Christmas. The Twelve Feasts of Praamzius (La Grande Bouffe Edition). The Twelve Feasts of Praamzius, Pt. 12: Conway Twitty's A Twistmas Story vs. Hilary Duff's Santa Claus Lane. The Twelve Feasts of Praamzius, Pt. 11: Collin Raye's Christmas: The Gift vs. Jim Reeves' Christmas Songbook. The Twelve Feasts of Praamzius, Pt. 10: Clint Black's Looking for Christmas vs. Kenny Rogers' Christmas in America. The Twelve Feasts of Praamzius, Pt. 9: Burl Ives' 20th Century Masters: The Christmas Collection vs. Larry the Cable Guy's Christmas in Larryland. Merry Christmas und C Новым Годом! RIP Oscar Peterson. The Twelve Feasts of Praamzius, Pt. 8: Buddy Emmons' Christmas Sounds of the Steel Guitar vs. Loretta Lynn's 20th Century Masters: The Christmas Collection. The Twelve Feasts of Praamzius, Pt. 7: Buck Owens' A Merry ''Hee Haw'' Christmas vs. Marie Osmond's Magic of Christmas. The Twelve Feasts of Praamzius, Pt. 6: Brenda Lee's Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree vs. Merle Haggard's A Country Christmas. The Twelve Feasts of Praamzius, Pt. 5: Bill Anderson's Christmas vs. Nashville Superpickers' Pickin' on Christmas. Next: Hop Sing and U Roy in Rail Steel Clash 1868! Christmas on the Ponderosa vs. Studio 1. The Twelve Feasts of Praamzius, Pt. 4: Bellamy Brothers' Tropical Christmas vs. Sammy Kershaw's Christmas Time's A Comin'. The Twelve Feasts of Praamzius, Pt. 3: Amy Grant's A Christmas Album vs. Ray Stevens' Christmas Through a Different Window. Tardy Again. The Twelve Feasts of Praamzius, Pt. 2: Alan Jackson's Honky Tonk Christmas vs. Toby Keith's Classic Christmas. The Twelve Feasts of Praamzius, Part 1: Adam Brand & Friends' Christmas in Australia vs. Vince Gill & Olivia Newton-John's 'Tis the Season. Kringle's Mirrored Stovepipe Sliced by Errant Guywire. Pulse Emitter vs. Slade. Horus Likes His Muselix After All. An Evening with John Denver vs. Led Zeppelin, O2 Arena, London, December 10, 2007. Sidekick Marries Splitnik in Gemütlich Sond-Flick. Dennis Day vs. Watersports & Changeling. Charybdis Blows Off Odysseus for a Quick Clop with Pliny. The Most Awesome Line Dancing Album vs. Yellow Swans. R.I.P. Ike. Post-Stockhausen: The Lull. Athena Was Goddess of Shortwave, Non? Nana Mouskouri vs. Medroxy Progesterone Acetate. Your Overstolz Traces a Larder. Sarin Smoke vs. Slim Pickens. Santa's A-Pickin', and Blixen's A-Convulsin'. Buck Owens & Susan Raye vs. Musica Elettronica Viva. Under Heavy Manierismus. Prince Jazzbo vs. Mount Fuji Doomjazz Corporation. In (Serrated) Memoriam. Karlheinz Stockhausen vs. Feist. Abschied. Ticking Beneath the Tarmac of Orly-Paris Runway 4. Stinky Toys (le disque jaune) vs. Goem. The Rite Craves the Ceaseless as the Brain Feigns Death. Crazy Frog vs. The Soft Boys. Skin Isn't All It's Hacked Up to Be. Ed Kuepper vs. Aril Brikha. The Leveller. Pulsing in the Wake of the Purge. Lily Allen B-Sides vs. Sonic Youth B-Sides. A Slender-billed Curlew Walks Into the Lump Cabin Beverage Room ... and asks "Have you heard the one about the NO I WON'T WRITE THE WORD 'SNOWBIRD'!" Anne Murray vs. Ophydian. Wolfgang Flür / Fotheringay Split Shock! Steeleye Span vs. Silver Apples. Ye Olde TLASILA Vid: Unearthed! Beelzebub prefers Mark's Texas Hots to the Wiener's Circle (or Mel's, for that matter). Pengo vs. Deicide. No Mention of "Yankee Reaper" Scheduled in the Short Term. Hell Rell vs. Van Dyke Parks. The Gizzard-Flavored Halvah's Gonna Rise in Wein. Pomassl vs. Charlie Daniels. Goose, Gander, Etc. Peter Criss vs. Peter Christopherson vs. Chronic Town. Cross-Kultur'l Courtesy Calls. Klimek vs. Archie Campbell. Repost: Ohne 1. Reminds Slightly of Community Action: Noise Canned Goods Drive! Josh Lay vs. Dischord 1981. Vocalists Are Hanafi School; Neo-Proggers Are ITT Tech. Perry Como vs. Battles. Nothing Revs Up a Pajama Party Like Gin and Anti-Colonialist Polemic. Tweeners, Take Your Marks! Orchestra Baobab vs. Julie London. "Sugar Lips" Scored for Cryptobiosis. Al Hirt vs. Lichens. What's Powhatan for "More Piety in the Monitors"? Wild Turkey vs. Pocahaunted (2007). Vers un mal de mer. Carlos Giffoni vs. Loggins & Messina. Worst Recommendation Ever. If You Could Read My Depeche Mode Playbook. Sylvian Chauveau vs. Gordon Lightfoot. Mashup EP #100! Bonnie Tyler vs. Drone Nation. More Exquisitely Fucked Pistols Vids. Nam June's Synaptic Collapse, (Garbled). An AK slug fired into the flank of the "surge" success myth. Jethro Hiccuped All Over My Hate-Loop. Roddy Jackson vs. Antikillah & Sitter. Our First Noisebloid Smear... Awww! Rat Bastard Quits TLASILA because Tom Smith Smells Like Pee. Colour My World with a Hobnail Imprint on Seraphine's Mug. Young Marble Giants vs. Chicago. Upon the Morrow We Perambulate the Slurry. To Live and Shave in L.A. The Cortege. If Leee Black Childers Had Managed Rudolf Schwarzkogler, But Backwards. Abel Bocoum vs. Dagmar Krause. I Became Addicted to Vinyl Siding a Second Time Under the Following Circumstances. Black Artists Group vs. The Tubes. Doc Watson Is David Gest, and Terry Riley? Terry Kath. Michael Flower vs. Limahl. Norman Mailer. Detonations Rattle Crystal Dolphin Displays. Dan Fogelberg vs. Akira. "All You Need Is Heroin." Try As I May, I Can't Quite Fit the Bösendorfer in Condy's Bunghole. Neil Campbell vs. Kelly Wells. '08 Tsunami Foretold. Take the Delorean Around the Neo-Zone Perimeter, Then Slowly Smash It to Bits with a Hunger-Supression Chip. Deadstyle Is Hard vs. Trans. Blathering on About Beauty and Your Bloody Serenity. Sigur Rós vs. Nicholas Parsons. New Mixes Arriving Later Today. WOW's Husqvarna + Ney's Greasepaint = Anti-Emo (or at least Times New Viking, sort of...). Secos e Mulhados vs. The Plasmatics. If Only Pelé Had Studied Under Clara Rockmore. Ror Wolf Der Ball Ist Rund. In the Other Georgia, Hastening a Different Sort of Rain. Thigh-Highs for DecoMetal® Oblivion. The Hullabaloo Singers and Orchestra vs. Merzbow & Nordvargr. If, as Jacques Derrida suggested in Glas, "every thesis is a prothesis," then this infernal collision sports 665 pairs of white vinyl Courrèges grappling tongs. If You Don't Love Paris You're Inviting Osama to Your Prostate Exam. Mr. Doherty, You're No Carl Crack. Phallus Über Alles vs. Babyshambles. Slogging Up the Multi-Infarct on the Down. Barbara Streisand & Barry Gibb vs. Grachan Moncur III. Personally, I'd rather Evil Moisture had been booked for Stern. Columbia-Princeton EMC vs. ICP. Linda Stein. Waterboarding, Up Close and Impersonal. I'll Have the Seething Rust Urchin with an Enamel Crust on the Side. VxPxCx vs. Shaun Cassidy. Gaza Oxygen Bar Small Talk. Keith Jarrett (via Marian McPartland) vs. Steaming Coils. One Hundred Trillion Times Cooler Than the Coolest of the Cool. Baby Come Back to Jikken Kōbō. Player vs. Tōru Takemitsu. Don't Gouge Out Your Peepers Just Yet. DDF Graminoid ISO DTE Bezoar 4 LTR. Venetian Snares vs. 1910 Fruitgum Company. Scotty Moore, Ladies and Gentlemen, on VLF Transmitter! Dub Dickerson vs. Jefre Cantu-Ledesma. Putting an End to ________. Kashif vs. The Bark Haze. Thank Christ for Sunday (Pt. 666.7). Five T-34 Tanks Surrounded the Cabaña. Jimmy Buffett vs. Inhume. So, Why Exactly Did Cianciusi Ditch JFA? Harry Pussy: Microgroove, Atlanta (3 May 97). I Only Suit Up for Bechtel. Threnody to the Victims of a Lout Named "Kill Yseult." Airto vs. Sham 69. "An Earnest Orb Trained on an ICP for Damp Pseuds." Or so read the headline from 1631. Sammy Davis Jr. vs. Radiohead. Attacked by Beige Polo Beach Togs. TLASILA: Live, The Edge, Ft. Lauderdale, Florida (XS Music Fest), December 1, 1995. Cobra Venom Mixed with the Old Blah-Blah. Vicekopf Principia Schizophonica EP. Not at Issue: Why They Still Love Jacko on the Aegean Side. Phauss Audiodrome. Her Feral Self Again in Shadow. Singcircle Mouth Music. Schwitters' Stutter. Verschärfte Vernehmung Requests the Pleasure of Your Blindfold Test. TLASILA 20 Post Op Wrongss. Haydevils Spiral. Morita Doji vs. Pearls Before Swine. From the Times: "A Prize for Mr. Gore and Science." Peeling Off Another Spool of Plangent Static. Kites vs. Langley Schools Music Project. An '82 J Would Concur. Pablo Cruise vs. Byla & Jarboe. This Mix Is Such an A-Hole. TLASILA Present Copa Without a Cover: Barry Manilow vs. CM. Three drifters, lost in the fog. Comfort Kills. Months Pass. P'ansori vs. PJ Harvey. No, Hauling a Basket of Dirty Laundry in the Back of Your Tour Van Isn't Comparable. – ∆ t (Minus Delta T) The Project. Seceding Between the Lines. Karl ein Karl Gramelot. Got to Scrape the Soundscape Off Your Shoes. Christian Marclay Footsteps. From Crooks and Liars, in Case You Missed It. Pseudodoxia Epidemica, and Other Body Rushes. TLASILA Present BXCABC in Mes Soudeurs Stupides '07-'07. Majin Stand-In Strapped to Milk Roast Pretz; Rubber Nagra Records Tar Pool. Akira Ifukube vs. Mouthus. Portsmouth Sinfonia: Toxic Clouds of Sound, and Not a Hosanna Too Soon. The Portsmouth Sinfonia Hallelujah: The Portsmouth Sinfonia at the Royal Albert Hall. The Smack Shire Ghost Site Haunts the 'Net. Diamanda Galás: The Metalanguage Album. Redoubled #3. A Slo-Mo Collision of Foam Slugs Traveling at Minimal Velocity. Jocy de Oliveira vs. Matt Munro. I Smell You at the Ox Bow Pool. Blowfly vs. David Toop (et al). Redoubled #2. Tracking the Ellipticals of the Brown Dwarves. Derek and the Dominos vs. Harry Pussy. Refused by the O-Mind. Undeterred Beatle(s) Loops: Lphe. Bockris Secretly Preferred Carmen. VU vs. Rechenzentrum. Redoubled #1. Droning on About Cristus and the Old Testament Rag(a). Scott Stapp vs. Burning Star Core. Bel Canto Negro Girl Gets Even. Maria Callas vs. Drunks with Guns. Linked from HuffPo: Shock Doctrine Confab. Gedächtnis der Listen. Elton John vs. Thurston Moore. I'll Call Your Homecoming, and Raise You a Cancellation. Grech, Ass-Drunk Again on Braun's Müller-Thurgau. Blind Faith vs. Marion Brown. Sitting on the Floor at James Chance's Request. The Schism Gave Birth to Excision. Brave New World vs. Miss High Heel. Evelyn Marble Sheds Her CaCO3. This one's for the Donald. Velvet Monkeys vs. Velvert Turner Group. Miss High Heel Update! Swallowed on the Morning of a Busy Day. In Flight Entertainment vs. Black Wing Over the Sand. For Poppa Fleming on His (Almost) Birthday. Einstürzende Neubauten vs. The Four Seasons. Moving to the Music of the Pit Boss's Letter. Bay City Rollers vs. Tieum & Dr. Macabre. A Tape of a White, Habit-Like Shirt Is Switched On. The Fix and D-Struct & SKC vs. Rockabilly Xmas. "At Once Horribly Unjust and Perfectly Well Deserved..." Leslie Singer vs. the White Stripes. The Bloody Dictaphone of Inevitability. Hermann Nitsch vs. Polyphonic Spree. Take a Xerox of a Car Bomb to Bass Cabs and Bassoons. Luc Ferrari vs. Scorpions. Setenta y Cinco Sondeos También Muchos. Alfredo Zitarrosa vs. Boredoms (77Boadrums). Wallowing in Transcendence. Lou Reed's Berlin vs. Mahavishnu Orchestra Live at Shibuyakokaido, Tokyo. An Intervention. (Amended September 11, 2007. The original archive was deleted after I discovered coding irregularities; the eight tracks – remixed again late on the 10th – were uploaded early this morning. Thus, this is version two of the Original Doll/Art Ensemble/Tarkus post.) Earlier today I intercepted eight tracks from the forthcoming (and as-yet-untitled) Britney Spears album. (The new album – at least according to the information encoded into the mp3s I downloaded – appears to be titled Original Doll. For the purposes of this intervention, I have used that designation). Original Doll vs. Art Ensemble of Chicago & Tarkus. RIP Janis Martin. 1988 Occultation Inna 1671 Shrina Style. N.W.A. vs. The Royal Guardsmen. Squeeze My Lemon ('Til the 2,3-Diethylpentanes Run Down My White Vinyl Peg Leg...). Tony Joe White vs. Les Rallizes Dénudés. Post-Cortege Collisions? Too Mauldin to Resist. John Zorn vs. Montana Slim. Shave Docu-Anomaly #667. TLASILA: Deletion Sub-Series (Segments I-L). TLASILA: GBM Pix, 28 Aug 07. TLASILA: Think Tank Video #1 (25 Aug 07). TLASILA: WFMU Session, 27 Aug 07. TLASILA: Think Tank, Day Two, 5PM-11:50PM. TLASILA: Think Tank, Day Two, 12 PM-5PM. TLASILA: Think Tank, Day One, 7PM-11PM. TLASILA: Think Tank, Day One, 2PM-7PM. From the Maude Sessions. Groggy but Unperforated. RIP Hilly. We're at Goodbye Blue Monday. Communique from the Deep. Demo Derby Victory Lap: Checkered Flag Shoved Up the Pitted Arse of Propriety. Discothèque 70: Guinée vs. Pierre Boulez. Für Elise (ORLAAM / Québécois edition). Céline Dion vs. Voivod. Lucifer Prefers Mr. Mister. Huey Lewis & the News vs. Karlheinz Stockhausen. Kleinere Schätze vom Haus von Eb.er (Vol. 2). K2 with Runzelstirn & Gurgelstøck Noise Tournament Vol. 4. Roach Lake Filled Instead with Gummy Dreads. Meredith Monk vs. Emerson, Lake and Palmer. Beaver Bear Fox Box Blue Slip Squelch Squawk. Bobby Bare vs. The Music Machine. Mitternacht am... Krug-Störschub! Maria Muldaur vs. Apparat. Henri in a Mortgage Pickle, and Don't Spare the Shabu Shabu. Incapacitants vs. Jack Nitzsche. Why Zidane Lost It. Materazzi reveals words of World Cup slur. Kleinere Schätze vom Haus von Eb.er (Volumen 1). Crawl Unit / R.H.M. (Randy) Yau Japan Tour 08:98. Even My Creeps Have the Heebie-Jeebies. Normal Brain vs. High School Musical (with special guest Marcel Duchamp). Toward the Finite, with Haste. Lava House & Lil Boosie vs. Tom Verlaine. RIP Max Roach. Nicolai or Noto-Polyfoto or Nicoulai or Noto oder Was? What the Hell is this? It was recorded / transcribed from Rudolf Eb.er's original copy, and I'm just a gnat hair shy of 1,000% positive that it isn't Carsten's 1998 flexi release (with accompanying 16-page booklet) Endless. I was scrupulous about copying pertinent information from the various treasures I ripped from Odin's archive, but perhaps I erred... Differences: Nicolai was spelled N-I-C-O-U-L-A-I (its Slavic variant) on the sleeve; where the Endless flexi runs approximately 3:30, this untitled piece bores into your doublewide at an efficient 2:30. Endless dates from 1998, whereas this recording is given a 1995 point of origin... I admit the light in Dave Philips' studio space may have been too dim for me to properly resolve an "8," but at this five-year remove I can no longer be certain. CN's early (pre Raster-Noton) label was yclept Noton Archiv für Ton und Nichtton, but I ascribed the flexi (as per printed credit info) to "Nichtron," its title as Archiv für Ton. (The "EV" matrix was common to Evatone discs of the day.) I'm either correct or totally fucking astigmatic. Anyone know this long-gone lil' pup? Carsten Nico(u)lai (aka Noto-Polyfoto) Archiv für Ton. Ye Olde Cantilevered Virtue. Judy Garland vs. Wolf Eyes. Prerequisites for Necrosis. Rush vs. Joanna Newsom. RIP Elizabeth Murray. Paul Simon/Sonore Collab Forthcoming. Edie Brickell vs. Tim Daisy & Ken Vandermark. Prima di ultime cadute di goccia della rottura, Querida. Freddie Fender vs. Super Italia Vol. 26. Les Tricoteuses: Examimed. Seth and Katie Sitting in a Tree, R-E-I-T-E-R-A-T-I-N-G. Kate Voegele vs. Anal Cunt. Frederick Karl Pruetzel as the Venusian Rift Valley Crust Vault in... Chico Magnetic Band vs. Document 02: Sine. I Strand Corrected. TLASILA Emblazoned at B2B. That Old Magische Klanggestalt Rag. York Höller vs. W. C. Handy. TLASILA: Goodbye Blue Monday. Alma de Resurrection. Tim Maia vs. Oliver Lake. Du Hast vs. Everything Aguilera vs. Spider-Pig vs. Blueberry Compote. Sawtooth'd Sighs Over Praha. VA From Czech Electronic Music Studios (1974). You Know the Name (Look Up the Stress Fracture). M. Behrens vs. Wayne Newton. Hasn't the Bastard Already Fucked Us Enough? Meta-Equivalencies. Jandek vs. Smash Mouth. Flash-Fused from the (Pop) Kultur Forge. MIA vs. Fe-Mail. Death, Death and More Death. Natalie Merchant vs. Johnny Rebel. Another Demure Evisceration. Rab Noakes vs. Hair Police. Antonioni. Vila i ro, Mästare. Ingmar Bergman, Famed Swedish Film Director, Dies at 89. Disgrace Among the Censors. Boris Policeband vs. Bright Eyes. Opposites Infect. Kan Mikami vs. Al Jarreau. Hippie-Noise Amanuenses Distort "Oud" in Triplicate. C.C.C.C. vs. Incredible String Band. Cod Austere contra Aus-Haddock. Uriah Heep vs. Low. Immoderately Aquiline Slips Relatively Heavy a Mickey. Skafish vs. Sunn O))). Two Coins, Same Side. Clay Aiken vs. Jim O'Rourke. Konserthus Sackbutt Subsumed. Hugh Le Caine vs. Deep Purple. Gourmandizer Alert! Chet Baker vs. Goblin. Genre Whore Hookup Pt. 662: Blind Date with Feedback and Bandolier. Sutcliffe Jügend vs. Blues Traveler. Rüdiger Carl and Jane Child Were Otherwise Engaged. Milli Vanilli vs. Vinko Globokar. A Proper Fucking Frankenstein. Mike Jones vs. Jerry Reed. Bette Midler Tipped to Topline SONAR '09. Pita vs. Manhattan Transfer. The Night They Drove Carsten Nicolai to Pick Up Smokes and Another Pony Keg. The Band vs. Alva Noto. I Did Have Sexual Relations With That Woman. Abuse by Request. Prurient vs. The Lovin' Spoonful. After an Hour of Hammering, the Blood Begins to Slow. Nitro vs. John Cage (via Takahashi). IM Excerpt: Live from Baghdad. More Importantly, Do They Ask for Encores of "Simon the Bullet Freak"? Narcocorrido Wraiths Converge. Judee vs. GG. No-Core Mixtape #8. Forcing Another Redundancy Into a Choke Hold. Alec Empire vs. Country USA 1955. Forty-Six-Year Ballad Collision: An Exploded View. Odetta vs. Derek Bailey. Reducing the Transparent. Chipmunks vs. Whitehouse (expanded edition). Back from the Long Weekend. Asheville: Out of the Frying Pan, Into the Gallon Jug of Sweet Tea. Asheville: The Milanese Hot Patootie Stares Down the French Broad. Asheville: Gag Reflex Doubled. Asheville: The Littlest Triggers. Asheville: The Tights Were Noose-Like. Asheville: Psychic Strap vs. Farsi Rhyming Slang. TLASILA: Catarrh Contra Duckbill. Björk vs. Cactus. Why They Hate Us, Pt. 99,999,999,999. Upgraded Spahlinger Link. TLASILA: Clarifying the Reductive. Chipmunks vs. Whitehouse. TLASILA > New York City > Club Midway > 14 May 07 > Vidcaps (Pt. 2). It's Nothing a 15-Year Run of Good Luck Couldn't Salvage. TLASILA > New York City > Club Midway > 14 May 07 > Vidcaps (Pt. 1). A Pallid Finger on the Trigger of a Damp Squib. Polka Tulk Blues Company's Peg City Detour. Snares Sabbath Dubs. Gusts and Great Harangues. Cyrus From the Shadows. Beyond Noise, Beyond Aesthetic Dislocation: A Perennial Toxin. Discharge Grave New World. Two Views of the Same Bloody Knuckle. Runzelstirn & Gurgelstock Feld. More Cultural Woe. Late Breaking Stiffening. Morgan Packard Airships Fill the Sky. Heavy Crescendos of Kontrabaß und Klavier. Mathias Spahlinger Morendo / AΠO ΔΩ (Von Hier) / Vier Stücke / Entlöschend / Störung / Sottovoce. Beyond "Rakt: Tsatzrakt". Josef Anton Riedl Polygonum / Nr. 3 / Paper Music / Nr. 4/1 / Studien für Elektronische Klänge II, I, IV / Vielleicht-Duo. I'll Lower Neither Myself Nor This Blog by Writing "Go Flux Yourself!" (Post-dated for your acute pancreatitis). Henning Christiansen Fluxyl (Musik Essayistik). Die Kinder des Samstags Sind. (Post-dated for your delectation). Marion und Michael Teil 1. All Silica, All the Time. (Post-dated for maximum freshness). The Glass Orchestra The Glass Orchestra. More Supreme Insanity. TLASILA > Washington, DC > Rock and Roll Hotel > 13 May 07 > Vidcaps. A Moment's Equilization... (Balto Bank After-Party). TLASILA > Baltimore > The Bank > 12 May 07 > After Party. "Three Bad Rulings." TLASILA > Philadelphia > Avant Gentleman's Lounge > 11 May 07 > Vidcaps. TLASILA > Evanston / Northwestern University > WNUR > 9 May 07 > Vidcaps. On Sicko. We Knew Andrew Barranca Was a Formidable Baller, But Goddamn! A Serge We Can Support. The Hissing's Most Likely Misting. Keiji Haino / Loren MazzaCane Connors Vol. 2. A Soundtrack to a Pastry. VA Inside the Fantastical Cave. The Usual Swirl. Taking the Weekend Off. Po' Po' Pee Poo-Core, Revisited. Duotron Duotron vs. Tom Smith. In Celebration of Largesse. A Book of Days for the Literary Year reminds us that on this day in 1374, the apparently very wise and equally thoughtful John of Gaunt awarded Geoffrey Chaucer an annual pension of £10 (or something on the order of 2,700 of today's dollars). I'm certain old Geoff shat a word salad, or at least dashed off a note to his nervous system to commence spasming. Funky Terrorist 5! 5! 5! TLASILA > St. Paul > Turf Club > 7 May 07 > Vidcaps. 9 for 502: Sweet Spot Hybrids. 9 for 502: Sweet Spot Hybrids. Before I Forget. RIP Richard Rorty. This Ain't Exactly Debbie Harry's Heart ... (Closer to Herzog, Actually). Anna Lockwood The Glass World of Anna Lockwood. Equivalencies. As Promised. TLASILA > Los Angeles > Pehrspace > 6 May 07 > Vidcaps. Now We're Talkin'. Audience pix from TLASILA > NYC > Club Midway > 14 May 07. Video Flood, Unabated. TLASILA > Los Angeles, CA > The Smell > 5 May 07 > Vidcaps. TLASILA > San Francisco, CA > The Hemlock > 4 May 07 > Vidcaps. TLASILA > Oakland, CA > 21 Grand > The Victory Lap. TLASILA > Oakland, CA > 21 Grand > 3 May 07 > Vidcaps. TLASILA > Portland, OR > Rotture > 2 May 07 > Vidcaps. TLASILA > Seattle, WA > Rendezvous > 1 May 07 > Vidcaps. TLASILA > Denver, CO > Rhinoceropolis > 29 Apr 07 > Vidcaps. TLASILA vs. Kansas, Continued. Three Things to Love About Death Proof. TLASILA > Lawrence, KS > Replay Lounge > 28 Apr 07 > Vidcaps. NY Times: Frank Rich Reviews Don DeLillo's "Falling Man." TLASILA > Nashville, TN > Stillwater > 27 Apr 07 > Vidcaps. When Life Hands You Lemons, Make Hand Grenades. Cracking the (Unresolved) Black Egg. To Live and Shave in LRS: Jacksonville (20 Dec 06) Pix. Grab 'em before they're gone. New Snaps from the Rotture Rout. TLASILA: Live Session, KFJC-FM, Los Altos Hills, CA (4 May 07). Bill Pisarri: Updated Information. William Pisarri: RIP. New Tour Photos Will Be Uploaded Throughout the Weekend. Ray Brassier: "Genre Is Obsolete" (from Multitiudes No. 28, Spring 2007). The fitting analogue is the bracing formalism of Pierre Guyotat or Iannis Xenakis, rather than the agreeable pastiche of John Barth or Alfred Schnittke. Sighs, gasps, burps, groans, retchings, barks, growls, dogs, roosters, accordions, yodels, strings, pianos, brass, shouts, roars, thuds, shrieks, and sawings are punctuated by precisely defined intervals of silence. Tears Begin to Flail. TLASILA in Flouts of the Midway. DC: Lite Jazz Motel Condemned / One More to Go. Now and Forever, the Balto Freak Scene Fucking Rules. Philly: Avant Post-Can-Toss Mosh-Core / Fitting Digs. 9 Mile Kennel Club / Alleghenies / The King. WNUR (Evanston) Stealth Session / MoCAD (Detroit) Creep. St. Paul Conclusion / Nihilist Constriction. St. Paul: Fucking Fire and Rain (James Taylor Marked for Death Yet Again). Escape from Escape from L.A. / Ogallala. The Acrid Taste of The Smell. The Hemlock: Yeah, We Drank of It, and We're Well Fucking Dead. Oakland / KFJC: It's the Impurities That Cause the Laughter. 21 Grand: Muncie-Delaware County Scene Bleed-Down! Mind-Rotture: A Paige-Turner. The First of the Tour Photos Have Been Uploaded: Scores More to Follow. Seattle: Still Sleepy After All Those Lattes. Post-Seattle Portland Interlude. Towlie Snores in Boise. Denver Dove Right In. Larewnce Welked, and Jesus' Son Smells of Old Crow. Nashville's Burning; Lawrence Beckons. All Set for the Long Drop. TLASILA Pre-Tour Deluge #5: The Underground, Hamilton, Ontario, 3 Sept 06. TLASILA Pre-Tour Deluge #4: WFMU, Jersey City, NJ, 5 Sept 06. TLASILA Pre-Tour Deluge #3: Friendship Cove, Montréal, 31 Aug 06. TLASILA Pre-Tour Deluge #2: La Sala Rossa, Montréal, 1 Sept 06. TLASILA Pre-Tour Deluge #1: Tonic, NYC, 18 Sept 04. A Respite. Naked in Montréal. Augmented Distress Screech Update. TLASILA Flood: Live, Safari Lounge, Providence, RI, September 17, 2004. Sproiiiinngg! The Old Switcheroo Goes Bionic. Our Madness Trumps (and Pretty Much Seems to Engender) Your Madness. Boozetown Chastity Vow: Upskirt Gallery. Re Tour: We Haven't a Clue. Two Weeks 'Til DESTRUCT! Theodor Kotulla. This Looks Like Fun. Calvin Lockhart, Roscoe Lee Browne, Kurt Vonnegut. Taking the Day Off. TLASILA Album Flood: Where a Horse Has Been Standing and Where You Belong (1998). As Badass Goes, You Can't Do Better Than Shostakovich’s Nose. 18 Days to Lift-Off! RIP Johnny Hart. RIP Sol LeWitt. Blessed Semi-Sweet Saviour. In Love. You Can Never Huff Enough Gold Bond. TLASILA Flood: Live, Southgate House, Newport, KY (12 Sept 04). TLASILA Flood: Live, Churchill's, Miami (15 Sept 94). TLASILA > WFMU 2004 > 10 Unpublished / Forgotten Photos. Seyaced Sratiug Net (1 Apr 07). TLASILA Flood: Live, WFMU, Jersey City, NJ, September 19, 2004. Birthy Half-Day Deadly Spawn! TLASILA Flood: "Free Agency of Electron," Radio Belarus, April 18, 2002. Test Card 10. Test Card 09. Test Card 08. Test Card 07. Test Card 06. Test Card 05. Test Card 04. Test Card 03. Test Card 02. Test Card 01. Someone Demanded a Fitting Room ... (aria). RLW / Aube Organized Split EP (1996). DSC: Buy Pet Meds Direct! Daniel Steven Crafts Soap Opera Suite / Snake Oil Symphony. Someone Demanded a Fitting Room ... (prelude). KM/LS: Comsumer Alert! TLASILA Flood: The Complete 1999 American Tour. RIP Mme Aubrac. Les Tricoteuses: il est arrivé! (Sort of...). Witold Lutoslawski Trois Poèmes D'Henri Michaux (1966). Peach of Immortality "Jehovah" My Black Ass – R.E.M. Is Air Supply! (1986). We wanted it to sound like multiple, continuously crossed pirate station broadcast signals. Peach of Immortality Talking Heads '77 (1985). Terry Fox Berlino / Rallentando (1988). Christian Marclay Record Without a Cover. Don Letts, Stratetime Keith, Steel Leg & Jah Wobble Steel Leg v Electric Dread. TLASILA Album Flood: Amour Fou on the Edge of Misogyny (1998, released 2001). TLASILA Flood: Rehearsal (25 Aug 94) + Performance (27 Aug 94). TLASILA Flood: Live, The Cave, Williamsburg, October 25, 1996. Where Was the Love? RIP (Sigh...). Günter Brus Günter Brus zum 50. Geburtstag Überreicht vom 1. Deutschen Trivialeum: Panisches Liederbuch (Dichtung und Musik). More Soothing Sonorities: Experimentelle Musik und Szene in der Therapie. OHNE Ohne 1 (2002). TLASILA Album Flood: Peter Criss vs. Peter Christopherson (1996-8, released 2000). Derek Bailey Concert in Milwaukee (1983). Nothing really needs to be said about Derek Bailey, but to reiterate... He got his start at the Brill Building combine, scoring a hit as a composer with the Orioles' "Gas-Filled Recoil" in late '62. He helmed Q65's unlikely gospel foray One Needs Grains and scored a belated European smash two years later with its "An Intermediate Goal," pulled initially as background music for a Belgian "bottomless" jeans advert. Bailey's stormy, May-December relationship with '40s Swedish ingénue Signe Hasso was widely reported at the time. His early 1970s work with Silverhead still strikes agreeably dissonant chords, but it was his dedication to and perseverance on behalf of Heart (most importantly, his shepherding of their contract from Mushroom to CBS/Portrait) that provided him with financial security and long-elusive professional accolades. (Heart's "Magic Man" famously details Bailey's tumultuous love affair with Ann Wilson). He capped his career with induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1999. Recent collaborations with Gavin Rosdale and Art Brut have proven successful. He resided in St. David's, Wales, with his wife Sasha Vinni, the former Penthouse Pet and current Welsh Labour MP. Bailey expired in 2009 after a prolonged bout with a Slint gatefold. TLASILA Flood: Live, Pez-Ner, Lyon, France, 28 Feb 98. Masstishaddhu Shekinah (1988). Brus, Nitsch, Roth, et al. Münchner Konzert Mai 1974. Günter Brus, Hermann Nitsch, Dieter Roth, Gerhard Rühm & Oswald Wiener Münchner Konzert Mai 1974. Attersee, Brus, Nitsch, et al. Das Berliner Konzert (November 1974). We're just doing this for the sake of accretion – the more blood-flecked one's phlegm, the fucking merrier. Christian Attersee, Günter Brus, Hermann Nitsch, Arnulf Rainer, Dieter Roth, Gerhard Rühm, Dominik Steiger & Oswald Wiener Das Berliner Konzert (November 1974). Neurons Firing, Yes, But Painted Silver, Salivating. Diamanda Galás Faust. Eros. Tod (1982/1988). Distance: My Demons. TLASILA on YouTube > Newly Posted Video. Crucial Critical Clarity. Where Were You That Summer of 2001? Fucking Stress. TLASILA Flood: Vedder Vedder Bedwetter Live Rehearsal, Churchill's, Miami, January 31, 1995. TLASILA Album Flood: New Songs with Drug and Pornographic Themes. TLASILA Album Flood: Tonal Harmony (Plus). A sluice of sinew and spittle. INC / Rapidshare Gripes. TLASILA Album Flood: An Interview with the Mitchell Brothers. Oh my, another moldy chestnut from our first decade. Chuck your crap-ass share rips, devour these fetid morsels, and cough up a blood-flecked essay on this topic: "Why Doesn't Trevor Wishart Ever Have Anything Good to Say About Winger?" Say, 2,000 words? TLASILA Album Flood: Vedder Vedder Bedwetter. TLASILA Album Flood: "Helen Butte" vs. Masonna Pussy Badsmell. TLASILA Album Flood: 30-minuten männercreme. SPK Who? An actual member prepares for transformation. TLASILA Tour: Adjustments to Itinerary. Dying on the Vine. From the BBC: No sleep means no new brain cells. Sick to Death. April/May Tour Schedule. Nashville – The Springwater. Sideslipping 07. Maureen Dowd: "Daffy Does Doom". Sideslipping 06. Sideslipping 05. Sideslipping 04. Sideslipping 03. Sideslipping 02. Sideslipping 01. Minutiae Unveiled. RIP Robert Anton Wilson. Under the Wire, 12/06: Two More Reasons to Postpone Your Suicide. Disco Cunt Funky + Disco. "Noon": Dusted (9 Jan 07). We're (Temporarily) Number One!!! (In Evanston...). No Winter, But Flurries Just the Same. Fuck... Does This Mean I'm Gonna Live to Be 1,000? Wha-? Huh... Where am I?

DRAFT: Sobject Performance Schema (via listening-through Deleuze's “He [sic] Stuttered”)

2011-08-30T15:10:00.023+12:00

said

murmured

stammered

sobbed

giggled

cried

stuttered

voice

intonations

stutter

speak

patois

say

murmuring

voice

audible

murmur

voice

murmur

stutter

squeaks

speaks

saying

stuttering

words

stutter

stutters

speech

stutterer

stutter

speaks

stuttered

words

quiver

murmur

stutter

tremolo

vibrato

reverberate

words

hum

silence

murmurings

intonations

squeaking

trembling

stammering

hum

vibrations

words

say

stuttering

say

stuttering

speak

stammer

listening

swelling

noise

stutter

speech

intonation

vibrate

stutter

speech

modulation

stuttering

vibration

trembles

listened

stammerers

speech

phonetic

speech

music

modulation

speech

mute

scream

stutter

stammer

murmur

music

screechings

inarticulate

sounds

music

speech

word

stutterings

speech

stuttering

speech

sound

breath

cry

speak

speaking

speech

stuttering

breath

stuttering

said

spoken

stutter

words

stuttering

words

stuttering

stutterer

stuttering

scream

stuttering

inarticulate

words

breath

breath-words

breaths

words

tonalities

modulation

music

words

silence

words

sound

words

sing

words

silence

squeaking

murmur

melody

singing

stuttering

stutter

murmur

stammer

silence

silent

speak

stutter

silence

talk

words

sounds

word

stuttering

stutterer

Source: Gilles Deleuze “He Stuttered.” Essays Critical and Clinical. Trans. by Michael A. Greco and Daniel W. Smith. Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1997. 107-114.

Craig Dworkin Interview

2011-08-16T12:35:00.007+12:00

Craig Dworkin (b.1969) is a poet, literary theorist and art critic. His work over the past decade has involved some of the most strenuous examples of ‘conceptual writing’ as well as some of the most giddy sound-scapes to come out of the practice of phonetic translations. Dworkin takes seriously Wittgenstein’s axiom that “there are no gaps in grammar, that everything is already there if we will only see the connections.”

He is the author of Reading the Illegible (Northwestern UP, 2003) and four books of poetry: Signature-Effects (Ghos-Ti, 1997); Dure (Cuneiform, 2004); Strand (Roof, 2004); Parse (Atelos, 2008); and The Perverse Library (Information as Material, 2010). He has edited Architectures of Poetry (Rodopi, 2004); Language to Cover a Page: The Early Writing of Vito Acconci (MIT, 2006); The Consequence of Innovation: 21st Century Poetics (Roof, 2008); The Sound of Poetry / The Poetry of Sound (with Marjorie Perloff, Chicago UP, 2009); and Against Expression: An Anthology of Conceptual Writing (with Kenneth Goldsmith, Northwestern UP, 2010).

He curates two on-line archives: Eclipse and The UbuWeb Anthology of Conceptual Writing, and is Professor of English at the University of Utah.

Jared Wells: To begin at a particular deep end, I’m interested in your thoughts on the connection between the oral performance of certain conceptual poems and the radical, abstract music of sound poetry. I’m thinking here of such sustained exercises in repetition and variation as Kenneth Goldsmith’s Traffic and The Weather, José Luis Castillejo’s “TLALAATALA”, and Caroline Bergvall’s “Via: 48 Dante Variations”, as well as your own high-speed readings from Parse and Vito Acconci’s "REMOVAL, MOVE [LINE OF EVIDENCE]: the grid location of streets, alphabetized, Hagstrom's maps of the boroughs: 3. Manhattan". Could you speculate on what vocal performance brings to these kinds of procedural, ostensibly sterile conceptual works?

Craig Dworkin: Well, one thing performance can underscore is how poetic these works are, even in the most traditional sense: they often involve measure – a counting of some kind – and a rhythm and an assonance. What Pound would have called melopoeia. Not to mention a clear formal logic. Actually reading Conceptual works rather than just glancing at their descriptions reveals the extent to which they often make everyday language strange, redeploying communicative language towards other ends (the very definition of poetry for the Slavic Structuralists). Or, in Wittgenstein's terms: although they are composed in the language of information, they are not used in the language-game of giving information.

On the other hand, for many people, "poetry" has come to mean simply a genre of writing that includes a small epiphany – a "deep" thought or "profound" insight or a bit of self-realization by an especially sensitive person. And it's broken into irregular lines. But without any sense of the line as a foregrounded device, or any evident interest in the qualities of the language itself (much less the word-as-such). These are poems that should have heeded Pound's admonition: "do not retell in mediocre verse what has already been done in good prose."

So we're in a paradoxical situation where much Conceptual writing is actually more poetic than the soi-disant "poetry" of people who react to Conceptual writing by saying "that's not poetry!"

JW: I think you're right in suggesting that performance helps to underscore the poetic and formal aspects of Conceptual works, in particular the defamiliarization of idiomatic and colloquial language. In "The Stutter of Form" you quote Michael Davidson’s observation that a poetics of disability “defamiliarizes not only language, but the body normalized within language" (183). Does something similar occur in Conceptual writing? I'm thinking here, for example, of the evocations of physical violence and exhaustion scattered throughout Parse, the glottal stuttering of Bergvall's "About Face," and the atomized, machinic-body of Goldsmith's Fidget. What is the role of the body in Conceptual writing?

CD: Well, the real answer is that the role is as diverse as the various pieces. But I think you're right to focus on the corporeal as a locus of interest. Steve Zultanski's PAD and Dana Teen Lomax's Disclosure would be other key works to consider – along with JG Ballard's "surgical fictions," Nada Gordon's "Abnormal Discharge," work in the anthology by Trisha Low, Ariana Reines, Deborah Richards, Kim Rosenfield.... the list could go on and on. And I'm reminded of Donald Burgy's "Checkup," as one of the many precedents from the world of conceptual art.

One other place to look would be where techniques of transcription are used. Friedrich Kittler points out that one of the collateral effects of modern media – film, phonograph, etc. – was to register and record some of the unintended, involuntary and generally unnoticed noises of the body: wavers of the voice, stammers, blinks, twitches, and so on. When the filters are set sufficiently low in Conceptual projects, you can register the same bodily activity: the um's and ah's in Kenny's Soliloquy or Traffic, say, or the distracted subject in much of Tan Lin's recent work.

The flip side of those biological registrations is the recognition that language is always a material body as well, even with all the seemingly effortless and disembodied flickering of its digitization – language is in fact something to be clicked and cut and pasted and transferred.

JW: To circle back a bit, I'm currently toying with the idea that in the oral performance of Conceptual works – particularly catalogues, lists, and dense, data-heavy texts that are not easily read aloud – the body comes to be grafted onto the work as a kind of originary supplement, one that emerges sporadically in and through the repetitions, stutters, misfires, and elisions that tend to mark embodied performance. (This process of [re-]embodiment perhaps mirrors the self-eclipsing dynamics of what Vanessa Place and Robert Fitterman call the “sobject”, where effects of the subject are registered within the work in the form of textual illegibility, noise and interference – Kenny's inebriation in the final section of Fidget, for example).

CD: Yes – and in terms of the politics of vocal readings, I think again of Caroline Bergvall, and her amazing work 'Say: “Parsley.”' But there is also the example of something like Brian Joseph Davis' “Voice Over” – one of those catalogues of dense, data-heave accumulation: thousands of movie advert tags (e.g. "They are society’s most notorious criminals; they are our only hope."). But in this case, Davis hired a professional voice-over actor – Scott Taylor – to perform the text (or about ten pages, which was as much as he could afford). There, the smoothy disembodied voice of professionalism prevails, and is an essential part of the work from the beginning.

JW: Changing tack: while context is everything, I was wondering if you could speculate on the significance of the proper name in Conceptual writing?

CD: Well, that topic could go in any number of directions – I'm interested to hear what you think. But two routes come immediately to mind. One is the prevalence of brand and corporate names. I'm thinking of poems like Rob Fitterman's "Metropolis 16" or Alexandra Nemerov's "First my Motorola" or even Michael Gottlieb's "The Dust," where the personal proper name runs up against the commercial name to devastating psychological effect. What all those brand names say about the corporatization of language would be worth thinking through more widely and carefully. One purely poetic effect, however, is a Poundian specificity and concretism: the "direct treatment of the thing." In contrast to poems driven by narrative, for which adequate words are found to fit a preconceived story, here the words come first – filtered by a certain procedure – and the narrative follows from their specifics.

The other route would be to trace the power of the authorial name. Those effects are implicit in Mónica de la Torre's masterpiece "Doubles," for instance. Or more crudely in Ted Berrigan's infamous interview with John Cage (which didn't involve Cage at all – Berrigan ventriloquized for him, copying answers from Warhol interviews and other sources and putting the words in Cage's mouth). More recently, Stephen McLaughlin and Jim Carpenter's Issue 1 demonstrated the extent to which poets who are happy to appropriate the words of others are not yet ready to have their own names appropriated. This, I suspect, will be the next frontier for Conceptualism's challenge to literary identity: greater kinds of anonymity and impersonation. Vanessa Place's Factory Series – books written anonymously by others but published under her name – is taking pioneering strides in that direction.

JW: I'm glad you brought up Fitterman's “Metropolis 16”, as I'm very interested in the way in which schematic diagrams of proper names may function cartographically, in particular as a means of mapping social and commercial spaces; I'm thinking also of Fitterman's “Directory” and, again, Acconci's "REMOVAL, MOVE [LINE OF EVIDENCE]" (although there Manhattan street names are translated into numerical locators). Could you say something about the politics of these indexical reductions of social space?

CD: “REMOVAL” would be a perfect example of what I had in mind just now – the facts are just presented without elaboration (the grid coordinates to alphabetized street names), but narratives emerge from those seemingly meaningless series of letters and numbers: whole histories of urban development and social politics that are legible in the grid of Manhattan and its deviations.

But more than any particular social narrative, I think what's most politically powerful about those indices is their 'pataphysics: they way in which they proceed AS IF ('as if' the list of grid coordinates were meaningful, when that's not the way we usually think of maps). On the one hand, that's a utopian gesture – maybe the most fundamental revolutionary impulse: to imagine that things might be otherwise.

Or to put that slightly differently; such works treat data as if they were information – but not the information the sources imagine they have presented, already packaged for consumption. Again, one could think through the political implications of particular works (the narrative space of the shopping mall, for instance), but the more fundamental lesson is that we are given certain facts, and certain parameters – unavoidable situations – but we can always do something else with that given material. We have more freedom to thwart the implied telos of a situation than we usually remember. As Guy Debord wrote: "dans cet espace mouvant du jeu, et des variations librement choisies des règles du jeu, l'autonomie du lieu peut se retrouver [the autonomy of place can be rediscovered in the shifting space of play and in the freely chosen variations in the rules of the game].

JW: Your reference to the 'pataphysics of Acconci's piece is interesting – can you comment further on the relevance of this ludic science to conceptual writing?

CD: I've written a little about that relevance elsewhere, with special attention to the politics of conceptual writing, but some of the connections are clearer to me now. First, the way in which 'pataphysics takes a pre-established system, makes a minimal intervention – the slight unexpected swerve of the clinamen – and then lets the results play out is one precedent for the kind of work that exemplifies conceptual writing: minimal but meaningful authorial intervention in a found text or database. There is also a loosening, in 'pataphysics, of the identification between author and text, since 'pataphysics so often involves a ventriloquized or appropriated style (Jarry writing in the mode of popular science journalism, for instance). That loosening continues in the OuLiPo, which we sometimes forget was a direct offshoot of the Collège de Pataphysique. The OuLiPo model, in which the emphasis falls on conceptual forms rather than particular results – forms that are to be held in common and tried by whoever wants to take them on – was another important precedent for conceptual writing. Although we know who invented the S+7 technique (Jean Lescure), for example, there's not the same sense of proprietary ownership. Conceptual writing shares something of the OuLiPo's sunny, eager optimism about the force of a potential future: the world is full of things to be taken and tried, to be improved on and experimented with, misused and retooled, played and played-out, shared and shared alike.

SMOOTH vs/ STRIATED: [Appendix II (“Table of our movements or position-at-night”) from T. E. Lawrence's Seven Pillars of Wisdom: A Triumph (Jonathan Cape, 1979 Edition), alphabetized by date in International Standard ISO 8601 notation]

2011-08-13T13:37:00.060+12:00

“[S]mooth space is constantly being translated, transversed into a striated space; striated space is constantly being reversed, returned to a smooth space. In the first case, one organizes even the desert; in the second, the desert gains and grows.”

– Deleuze and Guattari A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia

Aba el Lissan 1918-08-08 – Wadi Ghadaf 1918-08-18 – Jefer 1918-08-11 – Bair 1918-08-15 – Akaba 1918-08-05 – Rumm 1918-08-04 – El Umdeisisat 1918-08-19 – Akaba 1918-08-01 – Akaba 1918-08-07 – El Hadi 1918-08-17 – Aba el Heiran 1918-08-06 – Amri 1918-08-13 – Wadi Nejd 1918-08-03 – Um Kharug 1918-08-12 – Muaggar 1918-08-20 – Thlaithukhwat 1918-08-25 – Um Kharug 1918-08-24 – Kusair el Amr 1918-08-21 – Aba el Lissan 1918-08-26 – Ammari 1918-08-23 – Azrak 1918-08-22 – Wadi Itm 1918-08-02 – G.H.Q. 1918-05-15 – G.H.Q. 1918-05-05 – Aba el Lissan 1918-05-04 – Sinai 1918-05-14 – Imogen 1918-05-19 – Sinai 1918-05-01 – Cairo 1918-05-07 – Cairo 1918-05-17 – Sinai 1918-05-06 – Wadi Hafira 1918-05-16 – Hesa 1918-05-30 – Jerusalem 1918-05-03 – Fagair 1918-05-28 – Mudowwara 1918-05-25 – Disi 1918-05-24 – Towani 1918-05-29 – Akaba 1918-05-21 – Aba el Lissan 1918-05-27 – Akaba 1918-05-26 – Akaba 1918-05-23 – Aba el Lissan 1918-05-22 – G.H.Q. 1918-05-02 – Retm 1918-04-18 – Jurf el Derawish 1918-04-11 – Wadi el Hafir 1918-04-05 – Wadi el Jinz 1918-04-04 – Waheida 1918-04-14 – Shahm 1918-04-19 – Khabr el Abid 1918-04-01 – El Atara 1918-04-06 – Guweira 1918-04-13 – Aneyza 1918-04-03 – Odroh 1918-04-12 – Ramleh 1918-04-20 – Aba el Lissan 1918-04-25 – Cairo 1918-04-29 – Disi 1918-04-21 – Arethusa 1918-04-27 – Waheida 1918-04-23 – Aba el Lissan 1918-04-22 – Aba el Lissan 1918-04-02 – Umtaiye 1918-09-18 – Bair 1918-09-05 – Umtaiye 1918-09-14 – Ifdein 1918-09-19 – Aba el Lissan 1918-09-01 – Nasib 1918-09-17 – Azrak 1918-09-06 – Mezerib 1918-09-16 – Gian Khunna 1918-09-13 – Kiswe 1918-09-30 – Azrak 1918-09-20 – Deraa 1918-09-28 – Nueime 1918-09-25 – Umtaiye 1918-09-24 – Ramleh 1918-09-21 – Sheikh Saad 1918-09-27 – Sheikh Miskin 1918-09-26 – Um el Surab 1918-09-22 – Wadi Musa 1918-01-18 – Guweira 1918-01-11 – Nagb Shtar 1918-01-15 – Shobek 1918-01-19 – Abu Tarfeiya 1918-01-01 – Aba el Lissan 1918-01-16 – Wadi Itm 1918-01-10 – Tafileh 1918-01-20 – Mezra 1918-01-28 – Akaba 1918-01-02 – Alexandria 1918-07-08 – Palestine 1918-07-11 – Mansurah 1918-07-04 – Cairo 1918-07-09 – Mansurah 1918-07-01 – Cairo 1918-07-06 – Cairo 1918-07-13 – Akaba 1918-07-31 – Wejh 1918-07-03 – Akaba 1918-07-28 – Aba el Lissan 1918-07-29 – Borulos 1918-07-26 – Aba el Lissan 1918-06-08 – Sinai 1918-06-18 – Alexandria 1918-06-15 – Themed 1918-06-05 – G.H.Q. 1918-06-19 – Sultani 1918-06-01 – Jurf 1918-06-07 – Cairo 1918-06-17 – Wadi Mojeb 1918-06-06 – Arethusa 1918-06-10 – Cairo 1918-06-13 – Suez 1918-06-12 – Cairo 1918-06-20 – Jidda 1918-06-25 – Mansurah 1918-06-21 – Um el Rusas 1918-06-02 – Cairo 1918-10-08 – Sebaste 1918-10-05 – Kuneitra 1918-10-04 – Damascus 1918-10-01 – Sinai 1918-10-07 – Ramleh 1918-10-06 – Cairo 1918-03-08 – Nagb Shtar 1918-03-18 – Akaba 1918-03-15 – Akaba 1918-03-04 – Shobek 1918-03-19 – Cairo 1918-03-01 – Akaba 1918-03-17 – Borulos 1918-03-06 – Guweira 1918-03-16 – Borulos 1918-03-13 – Guweira 1918-03-30 – Suez 1918-03-12 – Sadaka 1918-03-20 – Akaba 1918-03-21 – Khabr el Abid 1918-02-08 – Hesban 1918-02-18 – Tafileh 1918-02-11 – Guweira 1918-02-05 – Odroh 1918-02-04 – Ghor el Safi 1918-02-14 – Basta 1918-02-09 – Tafileh 1918-02-19 – Seil Hesa 1918-02-17 – Wadi Dhahal 1918-02-16 – Shobek 1918-02-10 – Buseira 1918-02-13 – Wadi Araba 1918-02-20 – Rafa 1918-02-28 – Beersheba 1918-02-21 – Jerusalem 1918-02-27 – Ramleh 1918-02-22 – Wadi Itm 1917-08-04 – Alexandria 1917-08-14 – Jidda 1917-08-01 – Cairo 1917-08-07 – Akaba 1917-08-17 – Hardinge 1917-08-06 – Hardinge 1917-08-16 – Kuntilla 1917-08-21 – Akaba 1917-08-22 – Hardinge 1917-08-02 – Abu Sawana 1917-11-08 – Abu Sawana 1917-11-11 – Kseir 'Hallabat 1917-11-05 – Hamad 1917-11-04 – Minifir 1917-11-09 – Wadi Dhirwa 1917-11-01 – Tell el Shahab 1917-11-07 – Ghadir Abyadh 1917-11-06 – Wadi Itm 1917-11-30 – Ain el Beidha 1917-11-03 – Azrak 1917-11-12 – Jefer 1917-11-25 – Bair 1917-11-24 – Akaba 1917-11-26 – Wadi Butm 1917-11-23 – Ammri 1917-11-02 – Wadi Aish 1917-05-18 – Abu Raga 1917-05-14 – Kalaat el Zereib 1917-05-09 – Dizaad 1917-05-19 – Mellaha 1917-05-01 – Wejh 1917-05-07 – El Shegg 1917-05-17 – Wadi Hamdh 1917-05-06 – El Kurr 1917-05-10 – Abu Saad 1917-05-13 – Abu Tarfeiyat 1917-05-30 – Wejh 1917-05-03 – Wadi Arnoua 1917-05-12 – Wadi Abu Arad 1917-05-20 – Arfaja 1917-05-25 – Kaseim Arfaja 1917-05-24 – Bir Fejr 1917-05-21 – Isawiya 1917-05-27 – Maiseri 1917-05-26 – El Jaala 1917-05-23 – Khabrat Ajaj 1917-05-22 – Abu Markha 1917-04-08 – Wadi Hamdh 1917-04-11 – Km. 1121 1917-04-05 – El Fershah 1917-04-04 – Wejh 1917-04-14 – Abu Markha 1917-04-01 – Bir el Amri 1917-04-07 – El Fershah 1917-04-06 – Wadi Geraia 1917-04-10 – Magrah el Semn 1917-04-03 – W. Hamdh 1917-04-28 – Magrah Raal 1917-04-27 – Wadi Medeifein 1917-09-08 – Km. 587 1917-09-18 – Rumm 1917-09-11 – Guweira 1917-09-09 – Mudowwara 1917-09-19 – Wadi Itm 1917-09-07 – Mudowwara 1917-09-17 – Wadi Dumma 1917-09-16 – Hesma 1917-09-10 – Rumm 1917-09-13 – Akaba 1917-09-12 – Rumm 1917-09-20 – Rumm 1917-09-28 – Itm el Imran 1917-09-21 – Hawara 1917-09-27 – Wadi Itm 1917-09-26 – Akaba 1917-09-22 – Semna 1917-01-18 – Suva 1917-01-14 – Harrat Gelib 1917-01-19 – Nakhl Mubarak 1917-01-01 – Bir Waheidi 1917-01-17 – Yenbo 1917-01-03 – Wadi Dhulm 1917-01-20 – Cairo 1917-01-28 – Wejh 1917-01-25 – Habban 1917-01-24 – Abu Zereibat 1917-01-21 – Hardinge 1917-01-27 – Kurna 1917-01-23 – Nagb Dhifran 1917-01-02 – Sudr Heidan 1917-07-08 – Alexandria 1917-07-15 – W. Yitm 1917-07-05 – Guweira 1917-07-04 – Suez 1917-07-09 – Jeida 1917-07-19 – Km. 479 1917-07-01 – Bir Mohammed 1917-07-07 – Dufferin 1917-07-17 – Akaba 1917-07-06 – Cairo 1917-07-16 – Cairo 1917-07-10 – Cairo 1917-07-13 – Nagb el Shtar 1917-07-03 – Alexandria 1917-07-12 – Dufferin 1917-07-20 – Jidda 1917-07-22 – Fuweileh 1917-07-02 – El Wagf 1917-06-19 – Wadi Bair 1917-06-01 – El Jefer 1917-06-30 – Nebk 1917-06-03 – Bair 1917-06-20 – Bair 1917-06-28 – Ifdein 1917-06-25 – Minifir 1917-06-24 – Rijt el Herar 1917-06-29 – El Ghadaf 1917-06-21 – W. Maghara 1917-06-27 – Dhaba 1917-06-26 – Hemme 1917-06-23 – Wadi Mishnag 1917-06-22 – Ageila 1917-06-02 – Wadi Itm 1917-10-08 – Suez 1917-10-11 – Akaba 1917-10-15 – El Kasr 1917-10-05 – Km. 489 1917-10-04 – Suez 1917-10-14 – Akaba 1917-10-09 – Wadi Hafir 1917-10-01 – Rumm 1917-10-07 – Imshash Hesma 1917-10-06 – Ismailia 1917-10-13 – Shegg 1917-10-30 – Bair 1917-10-31 – Shedia 1917-10-03 – Kelab 1917-10-12 – El Jefer 1917-10-28 – Rumm 1917-10-25 – Wadi Itm 1917-10-24 – Shedia 1917-10-27 – Wadi Hafir 1917-10-26 – Batra 1917-10-02 – Abu Zereibat 1917-03-11 – Abu Markha 1917-03-15 – Wadi Tleih 1917-03-14 – Seil Arja 1917-03-10 – Wadi Gara 1917-03-13 – Wadi Turaa 1917-03-30 – Bir el Amri 1917-03-31 – Wejh 1917-03-03 – Wadi Kitan 1917-03-12 – El Jurf 1917-03-28 – Aba el Naam 1917-03-29 – Wadi Meseij 1917-03-27 – Wadi Serum 1917-03-26 – Lama 1917-03-02 – Kantara 1917-12-08 – G.H.Q. 1917-12-11 – Gaza 1917-12-09 – Wadi Hawara 1917-12-01 – Suafa 1917-12-10 – Cairo 1917-12-13 – Ramleh 1917-12-30 – Tell el Shahm 1917-12-31 – Akaba 1917-12-03 – Gaza 1917-12-12 – Akaba 1917-12-28 – Akaba 1917-12-25 – Guweira 1917-12-29 – Suez 1917-12-21 – Abu Sawana 1917-12-27 – Guweira 1917-12-26 – Wadi Itm 1917-12-02 – Arethusa 1917-02-04 – Suez 1917-02-01 – Wejh 1917-02-06 – Arethusa 1917-02-20 – Cairo 1917-02-22

DRAFT: The Burr [Auscultogram] [Listening-through Kafka's 'The Burrow']

2011-04-15T14:38:00.036+12:00

The edition used in determining the text was the Metamorphosis and Other Stories [Trans. Willa and Edwin Muir] London: Minerva, 1992. 127-166. [Click for a larger view of each page.]

2011-04-06T17:24:00.001+12:00

FROM: Page 44, Clark Coolidge Smithsonian Depositions / Subject to a Film [Vehicle Editions, New York, 1980] TO: Spratt's Medium Blog:

2011-04-05T10:26:00.002+12:00

SOURCES

William Carlos Williams: The Selected Letters; Patterson
Jean-Luc Godard: Pierrot Mon Ami; Lea Carabiniers
Alain Robbe-Grillet: Last Year At Marienbad
Salvador Dali: The Secret Life Of Salvador Dali
Joseph Le Conte: Elements Of Geology
W. B. Scott: An Introduction to Geology
Frederick A. Lucas: Animals Of The Past
Frederick Law Olmsted: Civilizing American Cities
Raymond Ditmars: Thrills Of A Naturalist's Quest
Paul Strand: (quoted in) New Yorker Portrait by Calvin Tomkins
Arthur Conan Doyle: The Lost World
Paul Goodman: Five Years
J. G. Ballard: Cage Of Sand; The Crystal World; Terminal Beach
The New York Times 281X74
Clarence E. Mulford: Hopalong Cassidy
Howard Hawks: interview in Cahiers du Cinema
Jack Kerouac: Desolation Angels
Royal Robbins: The North American Wall
Yvon Chouinard: Muir Wall - El Capitan
Claude Levi-Strauss: Triste Tropiques
Alan Holden & Phylis Singer: Crystals & Crystal Growing
The International Motion Picture Almanac, 1959
John McPhee: The Pine Barrens
David G. McCullough: The Johnstown Flood
The New Yorker
Steve Lacy: album notes to Solo 1972 (Emanem 301)
Bernadette Mayer: Memory
Don Judd: Arts Magazine reviews
Edward Abbey: Desert Solitaire
& the writings of Robert Smithson

FROM: Page 43, Clark Coolidge Smithsonian Depositions / Subject to a Film [Vehicle Editions, New York, 1980] TO: Spratt's Medium Blog:

2011-04-04T11:44:00.002+12:00

you turn. Aerodynamics posits a center, and nears and leaves it to sunlit pressure. Flat water, a vacuum. At some point he headed the front to land. Crystals on the boots, holes in all directions. An empty hallway, fingers on wave patterns. The flash revealed a sun blazing on Blacks Medical Dictionary. How did you know? No answer. A handbook of trits by water. He leads us to the steps, where the gaze locks into the sun. And a sun pulse termination brought him even higher. Pull out the File drawer and slow the budge of information. Sonic helictites of salt cause a delirium. And the night is altogether made up of a million stills. Spin, and the skin is dry. Bright overload, and the memory is concentrated. A tropic swarm of data, crystals pulling away in a sheen cause swoons. A close-up of yellow steps tumbles from the center of the spinal column. It puts me in mind of the earth arcs from pole to pole. In supersaturate space a ledge faces its twin. Between these two cliffs, which preserve the distance between my gaze and its object, time, the destroyer, has begun to pile up rubble. Sharp edges have been blunted and whole sections have collapsed: periods and places collide, are juxtaposed or are inverted, like strata displaced by the tremors on the crust of an ageing planet. Some insignificant detail belonging to the distant past may now stand out like a peak, while whole layers of my past have disappeared without a trace. Events without any apparent connection, and originating from incongruous periods and places, slide one or the other and suddenly crystallize into a sort of edifice which seems to have been conceived by an architect wiser than my personal history.

FROM: Page 42, Clark Coolidge Smithsonian Depositions / Subject to a Film [Vehicle Editions, New York, 1980] TO: Spratt's Medium Blog:

2011-04-03T19:27:00.002+12:00

A dissolve from red air to reddish water made frontal can be most intense. I noticed my shoes and a steel container soon covered flush with the brushing sand grains. Some miles west was an empty locked shack by the turnout broadcasting hat sizes from within. Far and about. I watched the wires dip to the water, the strata strike to the edge of the bowl. A string was wound around and around the stake to slowly draw the earth in. We listened to the figures and stood around in pools. Radials proved to be a good deal. Steel belts around the arms of truckmen and fluttering wet red ribbons. To tell of Snow You couldn’t read but go there. More or less waters in a different stage. A postcard of wheel animalcules fading into the sound of liquid titrating. The foam remained to the height of a knee. The loaders were blowing sagebrush, near comatose in a Silver smell of abstraction. A ladder bridged sky and ground. Is it a zenith or a rubber caliper? And all the low masses fell with loud splashes, as a nervy oculist would hit the brakes. The avalanche was grey and spun a blur of white pages in the hand. There's no time for narration. The water is to be continued. The oil seeps sharply in low relief. A lead hook sways over the sod, as a quick Load rips the road to black and white impressions. I load my camera as shades are drawn on the sun. Can you see me? I'm afoot below tilting. The sun seizes, lasting oil on a flat of pink. colloidals. And basalt over limestone the sound circles the site. Worms rotate in a box of Pacific radio tubes. We’ve put the cap back on it though heats will still arise. Sag to the center of the bones, so this rotation may be termed narration. Flatten the spin to a stamp, wet film pressed in a volume. Run to the point of you walk all the way back. The star adjusted on the collar and the sage is beginning to pinken. A shot of mud salt rock and water will fix you any way you

FROM: Page 41, Clark Coolidge Smithsonian Depositions / Subject to a Film [Vehicle Editions, New York, 1980] TO: Spratt's Medium Blog:

2011-04-02T22:07:00.003+13:00

Bureau and ask about this untoward red. No thing has ever led a man where all time must lead. A miniature pan of gastroliths lifted closer to the glasses. My ape apart, there was little calm to these manifestations. I cracked a thick orange book and viewed white pages in a low reddish light. No water and the words were late. The wall of cases has not changed since I have been here, and given the speed of tourism the eras are running backwards. The tracking device ticked with an overload of particles from an unforeseen quadrant. Sun burning outside plate glasses and saucers in the morning sky. I have a moving eye, that's all it signifies, the summer desert. And the motes in the retinal liquid a poet once termed "flaws". The car sounds like a deserted hall. The building is closing and the dinosaurs are late. A bell tolls in a sunspot, the batteries have run to acid base. You have wired the considerations wrongly, you have stood up in the steaming bucking car. The corridors have been cleared of all but noise of radio star. Step in here a moment to examine the contents of an egg carton. These are not natural numbers, these transitions to an echoing ticking. The lightbulbs are burning. The walls, holding in the outside, then the inside. All water is connected to itself beneath. The door was pulled off the cave and calcium dust rose. The sounds of hospital respiration contained with a bag. It's simple: first a buzzing, then a grid that moves us to stand some place, the edges all removed to the outskirts of a city. He speaks of a slow move across a map as a kind of whirlpool narration. A flat slab placed over the enamel potty. Outside the car noise were parallel aluminums in borax. And we snapped a picture to send later and say "This was really nowhere". In the sun, in the red some increasing blues, in the pan that ended in the brain. We started to get the point but surveying the bowl somehow lost it. The wind had the sound of water with rock chunks grinding together.

FROM: Page 40, Clark Coolidge Smithsonian Depositions / Subject to a Film [Vehicle Editions, New York, 1980] TO: Spratt's Medium Blog:

2011-04-01T11:01:00.003+13:00

is crowded. For example, one piece was painted blue, instead of blue. That was about the last I saw of professional handling. I leaned on one arm. The rooms are buzzing and I see things red. Then out. Too much light on gravel flat track of yellow dusts, the truck one is in, ticking too loud. The history of the earth shuts off, to tiny views of a sun in eruption, tin cans in Manchuria, a partridge through dry leaves. The map in the glove compartment's too hot to open. Leaving the ledge of book paper torn over and dumped into the winds of the Great Notch, distances have accumulated. Two shots that follow each other do not necessarily follow each other — the same goes for two shots that do not follow each other. Movie frames a shale pile smolders in back of the dry goods store. And how do we know that a clock doesn't tick backwards? Tracks of times like a story pile down to the edge of what eyes can see. A lecture on the earth's pieces on missing pages by Thomas Clark. Then 30 seconds of a dust plume and a car honks. A rundown Plymouth broadcasting rare blood types. In a dust bowl with no sockets, rocks hitting the bottom of the page. I'd choose the borders that can be seen. Can I have your word? But the block was pasted with map squares. Ensuing a discussion hemmed in with deformed shore lines, the racers extended as far as salt would allow. In terms of the metronome, would a parrot ensue? Lightbulbs over Paradise. But if you take a walk the gardens would retreat to their concrete forespans. But I'm interested, can a road of particles be properly styled a thoroughfare, the surrounding flats a landscape, the sun an unstable ball? He is disturbed by the rhythms of ossified cephalopods in the truck. What was bright becomes whiter, a slide from the yellow end, and how many books can be stacked on a repeating surface. In a film the dust could be returned to its giant pebbles on the grounds. Call the Water

FROM: Page 39, Clark Coolidge Smithsonian Depositions / Subject to a Film [Vehicle Editions, New York, 1980] TO: Spratt's Medium Blog:

2011-03-31T13:02:00.003+13:00

Lobsters swim in a pool of milk. A rattlesnake being milked into a glass clamped to a tabletop, the glass fills up with venom to the sound of the rattles. A row of pineapples burns on a beach as we are told how yellow fever is to be prevented. A row of pineapples burns on a beach as a bibliography on toxins is itemized. Some dead tarantulas buried in apple sauce. Feathers blowing over smashed watermelons. A bramble of stabilized fragments taken from things obscure and fluid, ingredients trapped in a succession of frames, a stream of viscosities both still and moving. Everything about movies and moviemaking is archaic and crude. You can only stand a piece or two. Quite a few of my pieces have been worn out. That came back. They sent a letter that seemed to be missing. Just information. I saw a painting by Newman with fingerprints down-room. Somewhere else a woman leaned the same way against a Rothko. A man, in time, become slow and careful. The room showed people, a few of whom are idiots. Newman one time leant back against a Pollock. You can't even get enough light. A man bought the face of a box. I counted sixty-four mistakes in the Still. The fast and constant space. Damage. Time too. That came back to sleep a second time leaning against a stack. A man eating, no thinking, no sitting or lying down. Glasses to be on everything. Ruined the surface to fill up the space and left it outside for two years. Between the open doors. Where a portion of, sat, the essay had to be destroyed. You can seldom see much of what is being done. And for people to sit or lean on everything. The museum caved in. A medium sized bundle of papers on the bed of their truck. There should be rooms somewhere, where the walls and floor were not in the same room. I remember a big fingerprint between shows. For a long time art has been back. Though 10% has never arrived. Almost always everything

FROM: Page 38, Clark Coolidge Smithsonian Depositions / Subject to a Film [Vehicle Editions, New York, 1980] TO: Spratt's Medium Blog:

2011-03-30T12:16:00.004+13:00

Initial dips. Quartz in the brain. Intrusive sheets. Joint blocks. Kettle moraines. Dull descriptions in a book. Lacustrine deposits. Limit of perpetual snow. The earth dips out of sight. Old Red Sandstone. Partings in coal. Peneplanation. A string of shell beans inside an icicle. Perched Blocks. Pitch of folds. Blue ink on Texas. Rill marks. Rock powder. Screw pines. Language and soil blown away. Shearing Planes. Sill tunnel. Clouds made of paper. Sink holes. Slickensides. Spits. Antarctic spare time. Stacks. Step faults. Pink fossils. Sun cracks. Table mountains. Throw. One-celled nothings. Tongues. Twinning of crystals. Erosive hoods. Underclay. Upwarp. Valley train. A guide to grit. Vein stuff. Wino gaps. A landslide of maps. Zone. The equation of my language remained unstable, a shifting set of coordinates, an arrangement of variables spilling into surds. I was haunted by the shadowy lump in the middle of my work. Like the eye of a hurricane it seemed to suggest all kinds of midfortunes. It became a dark spot of exasperation, a geological gangrene on the sandy expanse. Apprehensions of the shadowy point spread through my memory of the work. The perimeter of the intrusion magnified into a blind spot in my mind that blotted the circumference out. All and all it is a cyclopian dilemma. I was told that the boulder was one of the biggest in Holland. I am telling someone the plot of a movie that was never made. In a clearing with a few weeds and a heap of rotten bananas, Captain Beefheart is heard singing "I Love You Big Dummy". Fish heads and tails protruding from crushed bananas remind one of The Tomb Of Virgil. Palm trees and sun through a purple filter to the Suite Espanola. Grapefruit floating in a creek past rare jungle flowers and plants. From above, a circular heap of bananas and the stray bananas surrounding it. Coconuts landslide down a sandy hill.

FROM: Page 37, Clark Coolidge Smithsonian Depositions / Subject to a Film [Vehicle Editions, New York, 1980] TO: Spratt's Medium Blog:

2011-03-29T12:21:00.003+13:00

If you look at the map, you'll see it is in the shape of a margin — it has no center. It's a frame, actually. As I look around the margin of this map, I see a ranch, a place called the sulphur pond: falls, and a water tank; the word pumice. But it's all very elusive. If you are flying over a piece, you can see its whole configuration in a sense contracted down to a photographic scale. There are people in Scotland who claim that after being photographed they get sick. Also there is a tribe somewhere that believes cameras blight the landscape. After all the camera is a mechanism — a Cartesian eye. Pictographs are painted on the rock; petroglyphs are carved in the rock. In some places you find only petroglyphs, in other places only pictographs, in some places both. The pictures... are found on flat surfaces along the canyon walls, often at heights now inaccessible to a man on foot. (Because of erosion.) They are functional rather than horizontal. They usually appear in crowded clusters, with figures of a later date sometimes superimposed on those of an earlier time. Abysmal deposits. Accidents to rivers. Fossilized venom. Adjutant birds. Arctic ids. Block Mountains. Poets celebrating grottoes. Bottom-set beds. Brittle stars. Data from drilled holes. Capture of rivers. Consanguinity of rocks. Derivative rocks. Measurements made behind stationary stores. Downthrow. Dry mines. Snapshots of poison gas. Dykes. Fault scarps. Foreset beds. Things fail to appear. Giant granite. Giant kettles. The world through the eyes of a Devonian lung fish. Hade of fault. Heavy spar. Hog backs. A bat of obsidian. Infusorial

FROM: Page 36, Clark Coolidge Smithsonian Depositions / Subject to a Film [Vehicle Editions, New York, 1980] TO: Spratt's Medium Blog:

2011-03-28T12:37:00.003+13:00

The arguments for the object deprive the artist of any existence in the dimensional perspective that has broken away. The container is a gauge, and not of the material of time or art. Double perspective is composed of "hardpan". Sediment consists of a bottom to depths of water. A conformity is made up of beds. It follows from this that there is or was beneath every mountain a line of fused or semi-fused matter that we will call sub-mountain liquid. The field geologist follows the strike up in the form of a cone or dome. Let it be borne in mind. The Giant throws up a column. The Giantess throws up a large column. The Beehive throws up a splendid column and plays until the water will cool. Throwing large stones into the tube has the effect of partially or wholly quenching the strata of the flanks. A bulging of the surface is then seen and a globe termed The Turban. Cones project inward from the outside. It's fine. The black is discrete, hard, and projects. There aren't any other colors and divisions. The surface bends to the mark. The bands are often adjacent. It's not a coherent environment. The drawings are interesting too. The textures vary a lot. It and a small satellite hang from the ceiling. The young and old followers were ignored. A black band ripples centrifugally. This has quite a sweep all the same. It's elementary space. The white shapes are rugose. At an angle everything changes. The first was done in 1956. It is pretty oldfashioned. The rods elongate the dots. But several are very good. But there is no force to these. They aren't so wide, spare and loose. The color is good. This is interesting. The yellow is a wide thin blade. Three small squares of blue are left. Now they're a new wave. The space is flattened.

FROM: Page 35, Clark Coolidge Smithsonian Depositions / Subject to a Film [Vehicle Editions, New York, 1980] TO: Spratt's Medium Blog:

2011-03-27T14:05:00.003+13:00

did you get it right thought: The earth's surface and the figments of the mind are in many ways more astonishing than the drills and explosives that can produce shafts and dissolve into "poured paint" from a container. They seem to turn the less to the artist who knows this state. "What the'' All differentiated technology becomes meaning. Perhaps that's why certain architects hate bull. Today's highly refined technological tools are not reveries. This slow flowage makes one conscious, yet it crushes the landscape of logic under a glacial clarity that avoids the idea of temporal space. Various agents, both fictional and real, have a devastating kind If primordial grandeur. From the material they operate on, loaders scoop and drag soil all over the place. At the low levels of consciousness the artist has no anthropomorphic overtones. A serenification takes place. A molten substance is poured, like splashes of marine sediments, that swallows up boundaries. This brings to mind some kind of wasted charm. The dipper of the giant mining power shovel is located at different points in the city. Steel is a tough hard metal, suggesting "solid materials". But no materials are solid. They quote. The names of minerals and minerals themselves do not differ from each other, so that mind and matter get endlessly confused. Sadism is the end product of sides.

FROM: Page 34, Clark Coolidge Smithsonian Depositions / Subject to a Film [Vehicle Editions, New York, 1980] TO: Spratt's Medium Blog:

2011-03-26T18:23:00.003+13:00

less, without blame innocent, torch, firebrand, stream of blamelessly blameless flame of light, bursting out, act-ness, worthy of blame, cul-blaze, Mark trees by pable, paring off part of the bark, mark blanch, whiten, par-out a way or path in this manner, boil, parboil and skin, as almonds, mark made by paring bark from grow white, a tree, white spot on the face of white, a horse or cow, pale, blancmange, blazon, publish or Jelly like preparation of sea-moss, proclaim extensively, herald, em-arrowroot, corn-starch or the like, blazon, embellish, adorn, eat art of accurately describing coats of bland, mild, balmy suave arms, blazonry art smooth of delineating or of explaining coats, blandishment of arms, coat of arms, art of expressing fondness, artful bleach, make pale or white caress, amenity pleasure, grow pale, flatter bleak, unsheltered deso-blank, white or pale late, cheerless cold cutting, not written or printed upon or keen, bleakly bleakness marked, void empty vacant pale, confused unqualified complete blear, make the eyes unrhymed, paper unsore and watery, becloud bedim written upon, form not filled in observe, inflamed and watery lottery ticket which draws no prize dim or blurred, with inflammation empty space, mental vacancy modification of blur... And the main thing is we begin with a white sink a whole new language is a temptation. Men on the wall in postures please take your foot by your hand and think that this is pictures, picture book and letters to everyone dash you tell what the story is once once when they were nearly ready thursday july first was a thursday: back windows across street I'm in sun out image windows and so on riverdale, did you know that, concentrated dash was all there was mind nothing sink… with my white pants in it. I don't remember this don't remember thinking one on one white and whiter the word picture, sing on the wall in pictures

FROM: Page 33, Clark Coolidge Smithsonian Depositions / Subject to a Film [Vehicle Editions, New York, 1980] TO: Spratt's Medium Blog:

2011-03-25T09:46:00.003+13:00

calm and order. There were two thousand of them, each a perfect cube 15 feet in height, regularly spaced at ten-yard intervals. These were arranged in a series of tracts, each composed of two hundred blocks, inclined to one another and to the direction of the blast. They had weathered only slightly in the years since they were first built, and their gaunt profiles were like the cutting faces of a gigantic dieplate, devised to stamp out rectilinear volumes of air the size of a house. He walked on into the centre of the maze, eager to shut out the rest of the island. After a few random turns to the left and right, he found himself alone, the vistas to the sea, lagoon and island closed. But let anyone go out into the country near San Francisco, in any direction, and he will rarely find his interest thus stimulated. The surface of the ground beyond the immediate foreground commonly seems hard, bare, dead and bleak; what few trees there are appear stiff and rigid, and are as dull and monotonous in color as they are ungraceful in form. Even the atmosphere, when it is not foggy and chilly, is colorless and toneless. Only in the far distance is there any delicacy and softness. The Classical attitude toward mountains is gloomy. For a long time people thought mountains were evil because they were so proud compared to the humble valleys. If the Breath is the Valley, then Name is the mountain. Let your work upon the mountain be directed by sound art, and the older the results the more they will be valued. Sword etc., flat part of an oar or calamity, sudden vio-dashing young fellow, lent gust of wind; forcible stream of leaf, air, blare of trumpet or horn, blamable deserving of Explosion as of gunpowder, blame, find fault with Blight; censure, Imputation of a blatant Brawling noisy, Speak ill, blaze, Burn with a blameful meriting flame, send forth a flaming light,

FROM: Page 32, Clark Coolidge Smithsonian Depositions / Subject to a Film [Vehicle Editions, New York, 1980] TO: Spratt's Medium Blog:

2011-03-24T15:53:00.003+13:00

cornet and guitar, respectively, in a quartet piano singing, with a trio bass and flute, respectively, in a quartet guitar, leading a trio drums, leading a trio tenor saxophone, leading a quartet piano, with his group band, with vocalist saxophones, stritch, manzello, flute, black mystery pipes, etc. leading a sextet piano, with bassist singing and playing piano piano, leading a trio guitar duo The action is frozen into an array of plastic and neon, and enhanced by the sound of Muzak faintly playing in the background. At a certain time of day you may also see a movie called The Petrified River. Some artists see an infinite number of movies. The slippery bubbling ooze from the movie The Blob creeps into one's mind. Even more of a mental conditioner than the movies, is the actual movie house. To spend time in a movie house is to make a "hole" in one's life. As he entered the first of the long aisles, Traven felt the sense of fatigue that had dogged him for so many months begin to lift. With their geometric regularity and finish, the blocks seemed to occupy more than their own volumes of space, imposing on him a mood of absolute

FROM: Page 31, Clark Coolidge Smithsonian Depositions / Subject to a Film [Vehicle Editions, New York, 1980] TO: Spratt's Medium Blog:

2011-03-23T12:02:00.003+13:00

Tanks Are Coming. Target Unknown. Tawny Pipit. Taxi. Tears From Simon. Teenage Bad Girl. Tension At Table Rock. Ten Thousand Bedrooms. Texas Dynamo. That Way With Women. The Thin Man Goes Home. This Is Korea. Three In The Saddle. Three Stripes In The Sun. Throw A Saddle On A Star. Thundering Gunslingers. The Titfield Thunderbolt. Toast Of New Orleans. Tony Draws A Horse. Trigger Fingers. Trooper Hook. Twist Of Faith. Two Fisted Stranger. Two-Man Submarine. Two O'Clock Courage. Two Smart People. U-Boat Prisoner. Under The Tonto Rim. Underground Guerillas. Until They Sail. The Upturned Glass. Uranium Boom. Utah Blaine. Vacation Days. Violence. Voice Of The Whistler. Wake Up And Dream. The Walking Hills. We Want A Child. Weird Woman. Wetbacks. When Gangland Strikes. When The Lights Go On Again. Where Are Your Children? Whip Hand. Whistling Hills. The White Tower. The Wild Oat. Wiretapper. Without Reservations. Woman From Headquarters. Women In Bondage. World In My Corner. X The Unknown. A Yank In Korea. The Yellow Cab Man. You Can't Ration Love. The Young Guns. Zombies On Broadway. The Pine Barrens Are Not Much To Look At. If a fire starts, it is like someone put a new chair in my living room. Wagons loaded down with salt pork, bedding, goods of every kind, rolled down flood-gullied roads from Ebensberg and Loretto, splashing up showers of mud the color of a new baseball glove. And just above the hideous pileup at the Stone Bridge, on a billboard at the depot, there was a large poster, undamaged by the flood, which several reporters made a point of mentioning. Put there a few days before the flood to announce the arrival of Augustin Daly's A Night Off, its very large headline read, "Intensely Funny". guitar, with his quartet

FROM: Page 30, Clark Coolidge Smithsonian Depositions / Subject to a Film [Vehicle Editions, New York, 1980] TO: Spratt's Medium Blog:

2011-03-22T12:22:00.003+13:00

Talkie. The Mozart Story. Murder Without Tears. Mystery Of The Black Jungle. The Next Voice You Hear. The Night The World Exploded. Night Time In Nevada. No Minor Vices. Objective Burma. One Body Too Many. Our Hearts Were Growing Up. Our Vines Have Tender Grapes. Outcast Of Black Mesa. The Pace That Thrills. Partners In Time. Pillow Of Death. Pistol Harvest. Pool Of London. Prehistoric Women. Problem Girls. Public Pigeon No. One. Race Street. Radar Secret Service. Radio Stars On Parade. Range Beyond The Blue. Rationing. The Red Danube. Red, Hot And Blue. Red Snow. Remains To Be Seen. Renegades Of The Sage. Retreat Hell! The Return Of October. Return Of The Ape Man. Rhubarb. The Ride Back. Ride The Pink Horse. The Rising Of The Moon. The River Changes. The Road To The Big House. Roaring Westward. Rock Around The World. Roll On, Texas Moon. Roggie's Bump. Rope Of Sand. Rough Tough West. Run For The Sun. Rustlers On Horseback. Saddle Leather Law. San Diego, I Love You. Sand. Satan's Satellites. Screaming Eagles. Sea Hornet. The Second Face. Secret People. Sensation Hunters. Shack Out On 101. Shaggy. Shake Hands With Murder. She Wrote The Book. The Ship That Died Of Shame. Shoot First. Short Grass. Show Business. Silent Dust. Sing A Jingle. The Singing Sheriff. Sky Full Of Moon. Slightly Terrific. The Smallest Show On Earth. Smart Girls Don't Talk. The Snow Creature. The Snow Was Black. Song Of The Sarong. The Space Children. Spook Busters. The Square Jungle. Stage To Blue River. Stakeout On Dope Street. Star In The Dust. Stolen Face. Stop That Cab. Strange Triangle. The Sun Comes Up. Sunday Dinner For A Soldier. Superman And The Mole Man. Sweethearts Of The U.S.A. Swell Guy. Swing In The Saddle. Sword In The Desert. Take It Big. The

FROM: Page 29, Clark Coolidge Smithsonian Depositions / Subject to a Film [Vehicle Editions, New York, 1980] TO: Spratt's Medium Blog:

2011-03-21T10:15:00.003+13:00

Corridor Of Mirrors. Count The Hours. Crashing Las Vegas. Crime Against Joe. The Crooked Circle. Cyclone Prairie Rangers. The Dam Busters. Dangerous When Wet. Daredevils Of The Clouds. The Deadly Mantis. Death In Small Doses. Desk Set. Destination Big House. The Devil's Hairpin. Dial Red O. Docks Of New Orleans. Dulcimer Street. Eighteen And Anxious. Elephant Stampede. Eve Knew Her Apples. Ever Since Venus. Experiment Alcatraz. Face Of Marble. Fangs Of The Arctic. Fence Riders. Feudin' Rhythm. Fighting Guns. Finger Man. Fire Over Africa. The 5,000 Fingers Of Doctor T. Flaming Bullets. Follow Me Quietly. Four Guns To The Border. From Hell It Came. The Frozen Ghost. The Fuzzy Pink Nightgown. The Gal Who Took The West. The Gamma People. The Garment Jungle. The Gentleman From Nowhere. The Giant Claw. Girl Rush. The Glass Alibi. God Needs Men. The Great Mike. Green Grass Of Wyoming. Guest Wife. Guns Don't Argue. Hat Check Honey. He Ran All The Way. Hear Me Good. High Hell. The Hitler Gang. The Hoaxters. Hold That Hypnotist. How Do You Do? I Ring Door Bells. Idea Girl. I'm From Arkansas. Incendiary Blonde. The Iron Sheriff. It Grows On Trees. It Happened Tomorrow. Jet Job. Johnny Doesn't Live Here Anymore. Jump Into Hell. Jungle Of Chang. Juvenile Jungle. Keep Your Powder Dry. The Kid From Broken Gun. King Dinosaur. Kiss The Blood Off My Hands. Last Days Of Boot Hill. The Law Comes To Gunsight. Lawless Cowboys. Leadville Gunslinger. Letters From My Windmill. Lost Boundaries. Love On The Dole. Lure Of The Swamp. The Magnetic Monster. Man Or Gun. The Man With My Face. Mark Of The Whistler. A Medal For Benny. Men Are Children Twice. Merton Of The Movies. Mr. Walkie

FROM: Page 28, Clark Coolidge Smithsonian Depositions / Subject to a Film [Vehicle Editions, New York, 1980] TO: Spratt's Medium Blog:

2011-03-20T15:56:00.003+13:00

crossed by a distinctive latticework, a vast portcullis that will one day spread outwards to the planets and stars, halting them in their courses. Pete'll hold 'em with one leg in th'air if they happen to be taking a step when he sees 'em, he laughed. Sets hard titter against soft snickers. Puts hard guffaws onto soft giggles. From one side of the dome around the edge curve to absent listeners on the other. Swelling brass and strings over fading pinks that have held the acoustics to auditorium. From the flat diameter of chairs the hemisphere begins to lift to deepening black and star points come out of it. As if an upper magnesia peeled leaving bare limes. Spaces between distances between intensities from origins of lit time could keep the eyes up all night. Buildings go away in a manner of music fading. Then the double-ended rattle insect dumbell shape starts to turn, list in 3-dimensions disorients tilting seats, speeding rotation overexposes retina lines. A whirling silence, locked empty, automatically noone to see within black globe... About Face. Above Us The Waves. Alaska Seas. Allotment Wives. And Now Tomorrow. The Argyle Secrets. Arrow In The Dust. As You Were. Back Trail. Bail Out At 43,000. Bamboo Blonde. Barbed Wire. The Basketball Fix. The Beast Of Hollow Mountain. The Beginning Or The End. Behind Green Lights. Below The Deadline. The Big Clock. The Big Night. The Big Noise. The Black Parachute. The Black Sleep. Blind Spot. Blonde Dynamite. Blonde Ice. Blood On The Moon. Blood On The Sun. Bop Girl. Border Saddlemates. Botany Bay. The Boy With Green Hair. The Brain Machine. Bright Leaf. The Broken Star. The Brute Man. Bugles In The Afternoon. A Bullet Is Waiting. Check Your Guns. Cigarette Girl. The Clouded Yellow. Code Of The Silver Sage. Colonel Blimp. Congress Dances. Copper Canyon.

FROM: Page 27, Clark Coolidge Smithsonian Depositions / Subject to a Film [Vehicle Editions, New York, 1980] TO: Spratt's Medium Blog:

2011-03-19T16:14:00.003+13:00

This discomforting language of fragmentation offers no easy gestalt solution; the certainties of didactic discourse are hurled into the erosion of the poetic principle. Poetry being forever lost must submit to its own vacuity; it is somehow a product of exhaustion rather than creation. Poetry is always a dying language but never a dead language. As for Apatite, fraud is a matter of bones. Biotite peels from Biot's sheets. In a pinch, Feldspar may be used as a field chalk. Garnet eats a granular pome. Mica becomes a lamina of the crumb. Oligoclase takes a little breaking. Olivine shapes an olive suffix. Orpiment, a gold's pigment. Pectolite is solid. Prase holds mastery of the Greek leek. Psilomelane reveals a bare black. Quartz, the German unknown. Take a cave powder and you've Realgar. A french red may be got from Rutile. Sphalerite's a slippery blend. Sphene, a Greek wedge. And then there's Spodumene or wood ashes as gems. Stilbite? Shine it. Tourmaline's, to the Sinhalese, both Carnelian and a suffix. Zeolites are boilers. And Zircon, a silicate of jargon. Just as a super-saturated solution will discharge itself into a crystalline mass, so the super-saturation of matter in our continuum leads to its appearance in a parallel spatial matrix. As more and more time "leaks" away, the process of supersaturation continues, the original atoms and molecules producing spatial replicas of themselves, substance without mass, in an attempt to increase their foot-hold upon existence. The process is theoretically without end, and it may be possible eventually for a single atom to produce an infinite number of duplicates of itself and so fill the entire universe, from which simultaneously all time has expired, an ultimate macro-cosmic zero beyond the wildest dreams of Plato and Democritus. And I am convinced, Paul, that the sun itself has begun to effloresce. At sunset, when its disc is veiled by the crimson dust, it seems to be

FROM: Page 26, Clark Coolidge Smithsonian Depositions / Subject to a Film [Vehicle Editions, New York, 1980] TO: Spratt's Medium Blog:

2011-03-18T14:36:00.003+13:00

slowly revealed a seascape above the sea, an immense screen of clouds, in front of an oceanic sky, tapering off into parallel peninsulas, as a flat, sandy coast might be seen from a swerving, low-flying plane, stretching its arrows into the sea. The light-rays, which were now almost horizontal, illumined only the sides of the waves that were turned towards them and left the rest in shadow. The water therefore stood out in relief, with clear, emphatic shadows, which seemed to have been hollowed out of metal. All transparency was gone. A great many crystals of the same material start growing at about the same time in many different places. They grow until something gets in their way, or until they get in one another's way, and then they stop. Since they start with no knowledge of one another, they all have different orientations, and when they meet they cannot join to form a single big crystal. The result is a polycrystalline mass. Its component crystals all have the same kind of orderliness, but they all have different directions of that orderliness. Polaroid contains crystals that behave like tourmaline. The process by which Polaroid is manufactured turns all the crystals the same way, so that the film is much like a broad, thin, single crystal plate of tourmaline. But if one identifies and examines the words one finds them beginning to separate and to act independently. The dictionary seems a vastly supersaturated solution of languages, roots entangled along sunken axes, originations buried in the dawn of man. Dangling amalgams of image and speech gradually propel themselves through all quadrants of the mind. A language must be carefully guarded and closed in sommon usage for its clastic energies to be held in check. Words and rocks contain a language that follows a syntax of splits and ruptures. Look at any word long enough and you will see it open up into a series of faults, into a terrain of particles each containing its own void.

FROM: Page 25, Clark Coolidge Smithsonian Depositions / Subject to a Film [Vehicle Editions, New York, 1980] TO: Spratt's Medium Blog:

2011-03-17T12:16:00.003+13:00

"Man, that was really a fantastic lead. What exposure! Congratulations!" "Thanks, Dad." Suspended over space, we hung one above another, like laundry between tenement flats. The corners, dihedrals, jam-cracks, bulges, are all indistinguishable parts of the great, overhanging wall. The pitches never end, and one day merges into another. I recall only bits and pieces. A horrible flaring chimney sticks in my mind, and the most difficult pendulum in my life. Always the overhangs and bulges keep us from knowing exactly where to go. And I remember a wonderful Peregrine falcon eyrie deep back in a chimney; soft white pieces of down stuck on to the crystals of grey granite. Banks of suspended slate hung over a greenish-blue pond at the bottom of a deep quarry. All boundaries and distinctions lost their meaning in this ocean of slate. It was as though one was at the bottom of a petrified sea and gazing on countless stratigraphic horizons that had fallen into endless directions of steepness. Syncline (downward) and anticline (upward) outcroppings and the assymetrical cave-ins caused minor swoons and vertigos. The brittleness of the site seemed to swarm around one, causing a sense of displacement. Each individual crystal in the granite stood out in bold relief. The varied shapes of the clouds never ceased to attract our attention. For the first time we noticed tiny bugs that were all over the walls, so tiny they were barely noticeable. While belaying, I stared at one for 15 minutes, watching him move and admiring his brilliant red color. In the direction of the sun, a new bar now rose up behind the previous one, which had hardened into a uniform, confused cement block. The sky no longer held anything but pink and yellow colours: shrimp, salmon, flax, straw; and then this discreet richness could be felt fading away too. The photographic plate of night

FROM: Page 24, Clark Coolidge Smithsonian Depositions / Subject to a Film [Vehicle Editions, New York, 1980] TO: Spratt's Medium Blog:

2011-03-16T18:03:00.003+13:00

even when I go down and out into the street, later I will go to the window and look out, but not now, there is a bookcase over by one wall, it is full of thin books, some are of different colors, some of the colors are the same, they are not very far away, if they were I could not see them, perhaps that would be nicer, there are pictures on one wall, I will not describe them, there is also a mirror, I can not see myself in it, instead I can see part of the wall behind/above me and one window on the wall next to the mirror, that makes three windows now in my room, but it doesn't allow me to see any more than I could when there were only two windows, the mirror is of no use, it only gives me one more thing to catalog, if I broke it would I have 7 years bad luck, or would I improve the appearance of my room, what would my face look like if I looked for it in the mirror, what if the mirror were empty, is it not really empty anyway, I am wondering who invented the mirror, or maybe it was not invented but merely found, why did I say "merely" just then, is it not just as meaningful to find something as to invent it, is it perhaps not more meaningful, my gaze shifts to the phonograph on the bureau below the mirror, it is green and has a bad sound, my records are next to it, stacked end-wise, their edges facing me, by squinting my eyes slightly they become a close group of vertical lines, the phonograph becomes a green rectangle, the mirror above it a rectangular patch of grey light, I look at the rest of my room in this manner, I am studying its abstract possibilities, mmmmm, tiring of this distraction I open my eyes fully again, of course it looks the same, nothing has changed, I didn't expect it to, tho perhaps I hoped it might, my room is illuminated by a grey light, the light comes from the windows, from outside where, over the street, grey clouds hang, over New York City, they are the source of today's mood.

FROM: Page 23, Clark Coolidge Smithsonian Depositions / Subject to a Film [Vehicle Editions, New York, 1980] TO: Spratt's Medium Blog:

2011-03-15T14:03:00.003+13:00

without buying even one. I made a film in which the characters spoke so fast that the characters kept stepping on each other's lines. I personally speak slowly, but people generally talk, talk, talk without even waiting for other people to finish. Actually a historic occasion and finally we dopey poets ask him for the last advice, he stands there looking thru the muslin curtains of his livingroom at the New Jersey traffic outside and says: "There's lots of bastards out there". I've wondered about that ever since. The room is small, it is like a small box, but it is longer one way than another, just a little longer, maybe that doesn't matter but, it has a top and sides and a bottom, one top and four sides and one bottom, the top leads in all four directions to the four sides, the four sides lead directly to the bottom, the bottom remains, the bottom also leads directly in four directions to the four sides, the four sides lend directly to the top, the top remains, all these things have four sides, all these things also remain, now it occurs to me that this sequence is eternally in motion, from both directions, and/or from other directions that I haven't mentioned, these are up to you, just as they have been up to me, I did not desire this task, neither probably do you, well, it is out of our hands now, I am in my room, it is my only place, there are also things here with me, there is a bed with a metal frame and a green blanket on it, I am lying on the green blanket on the bed with the metal frame, my gaze, undirected, lies from second to second on the different things, there is a table, there are two windows, beyond them is air/space, four stories below this air/space is the street, there are also things in the street, but some of them have motion, I can not sec them now, I am lying on the green blanket on the bed with the metal frame, I am in my room, I am the only object in my room which has motion, I have not escaped from my room, I do not escape

FROM: Page 22, Clark Coolidge Smithsonian Depositions / Subject to a Film [Vehicle Editions, New York, 1980] TO: Spratt's Medium Blog:

2011-03-14T15:34:00.003+13:00

The night Carson knocked the owl over. I’ll go out on a temperature mountain. Cent calls by the way. Vista cardboard. Subgum forks. The Seven Caves. The tribute to the aluminum cylinder. Packed to line up the sights. They buried the openings among the blocks to be carted away. Ball courts. Dogs should have license plates. Front and back. A plastic thermometer. Stalactite plunged in cement. Fossil tubes. Animate gossamer rides on amber beer. Gothic Avenue is dusty. Selected AM radio stations. Cod portions. Vermillion. The seven woods or the open range. The bulk of ideas. The coffee change dry gales. He was willing to do that so long as it mightn't prevent his seeing at least where he was. The letter flounder. The ping at the heels in place of Newman's art. The series of meaning (continued). Put on a dressing gown and house shoes. See fit to the toaster, the pinnacles abutment. Even to work he cannot abide, thought could be possible. Sham muffler pyramid music by Henry Miller. A boy in glasses lives on mulberry trees. It like comes and goes. Some. There was a large iron ring tacked to the news. In it yachts the size of Stella Polaris. Nowadays more than ever. Will. Oil. Snake Butte as a youth in Los Angeles. Cans of our times. Doing one's best as a cutter drummer. Dots on enameled-steel plates, singly or in groups, by the former. Nourishment at all hours. White snake. Alexander Caverns is now under what? But there were too many books the eye blurs. Colors and shelves. Turning the head slanting the floor to pick out words on spines. People ask for titles the store hasn't in stock. Upstairs a half-floor, a loft of more books, and variant magazines in stacks. A phone-book of book titles titled Books In Print on a table marks a tiny gravity anomaly. At last look up to the door and walk out

FROM: Page 21, Clark Coolidge Smithsonian Depositions / Subject to a Film [Vehicle Editions, New York, 1980] TO: Spratt's Medium Blog:

2011-03-13T14:40:00.003+13:00

of small hilltown, mercury vapor and sage odor under pole and wire stringers. Some sagebrush here, a little cactus there, trails and hoofbeats going nowhere. He steps off the bus into an air of postcard and other varnished shots. In other words, there's nothing to grasp onto except the cinders and there's no way of focusing on a particular place. One might even say that the place has absconded or been lost. This is a map that will take you somewhere, but when you get there you won't really know where you are. Behind the glass sunporch door, he smashed the china horse figurine and swallowed the fragments. Dreaming of ham-radio and radar projects he strung a line of string through the tops of all the backyard trees. Carrying snaredrum ride- and sock-cymbal through the street, and a photo was taken of that. Threw beercans off the escarpment to clink in the invisible scree below, lights came on in the trailers across from Diamond Hill. A town named Borax. A town named Creed. A town named Beryl. A town named Lund. A town named Rhyolite. A town named Beatty. A town named Horse Cave. A town named Contact. A town named Arthur. A town named Sand Pass. A town named Pyramid. A town named Duck Water. A town named Subtle. Slopes, steps, sites and spots. Offices. Billerica highways. The beach in Nevada. Putting back the rusty disc to cover any strata that might be loose. Maps. Straights. Caves.

FROM: Page 20, Clark Coolidge Smithsonian Depositions / Subject to a Film [Vehicle Editions, New York, 1980] TO: Spratt's Medium Blog:

2011-03-12T17:36:00.003+13:00

LIMITED DAMAGE VICTIMS The researche eLs said that work even among th f they had sn rned to post uffered no aft yndrome could "J develop' e could prevlo wrote onsly have don al case, "now and th w LequIre his herefore soom whole attention tIre hIm' Tas attent asks which re tion toa numb equire simaltaneons ber of factors and thi s are quite b is he inteDpr beyond his capacity, rets by saying Stress g that he cann monnts, and w not concentrate. I ache ad irrit some patiemts tIbility." Thus a line of thick sediments becomes a line of softening and therefore a line of weakness, and a line of yielding to the lateral pressure, and therefore also a line of mashing together and folding and up-swelling — in other words, a mountain-range. The lightbulb got caught in the washingmachine. The tenor was reflective of lions. Hams were seen at a point on the range. And the warm roll had a pat of butter. There was reddish water in the glass. The raw and mighty West, the greatest stage in all the history of the world for so many deeds of daring which verged on the insane, was seared and cross-barred with grave-lined trails and dotted with presumptuous, mushroom towns of brief stay, whose inhabitants flung their primal passions in the face of humanity and laughed in condescending contempt at what humanity had to say about it. Everybody knew somebody had to know the greatest music the world has ever known. And the Dawn has its limits. To a bus through Arizona. Cold green light through thick glass plate, the backstreets

FROM: Page 19, Clark Coolidge Smithsonian Depositions / Subject to a Film [Vehicle Editions, New York, 1980] TO: Spratt's Medium Blog:

2011-03-11T14:15:00.003+13:00

Their common focus, that elusive final definition of himself which he had sought for so long, still remained to be found. Timelessly the sand swept towards him, its shifting contours, approximating more closely than any other landscape he had found to complete psychic zero, enveloping his past failures and uncertainties, masking them in its enigmatic canopy. A lot of space went by, highschool. And if, did we figure, if we changed. There were after all more than the three of us there and then some days sun and some were not. The time always there rang on the wall and did not matter, we were Occupying, ourselves, room. Rooms. Home rooms. Home and rooms, for sure it was not there. Tomorrow changed for the lesser somewhere around there. Things less particular, but bigger? Typical highschool day: A large scale loss of edges. I remember voices. And shoe rumble of loose floor boards between places. Seats. Hot afternoon glass too long and windowshade. "I've gone fishing but never farming.'' ''So, did Caesar?'' Blank. The cat was not there, but chairs, though to call them that is to devaluate their stance as seats. So, Stance? Sit. As it he she you or we sits. And stance implies some thing set. Gone. Afternoon lunch pegs, the thought of which, not fancy. Just dust. And not in the air between rooms or windows. Shelves. Tip me off. On me. Once done, never gone. Dream. This was not truly done, afternoons. Dull talk from one, over but not of, books, what were, in, they? Memory load to/too long for sensation, it has gone. The number of a symphony held out like andiron hook of black brass from fire wall, living room. I don't know how to write in space, and given another side of the will never will. Sharp globe cheese brought near to getting it eaten ...

FROM: Page 18, Clark Coolidge Smithsonian Depositions / Subject to a Film [Vehicle Editions, New York, 1980] TO: Spratt's Medium Blog:

2011-03-10T16:07:00.003+13:00

as viewers of TV millions of times) at least twice: once in this show's character's supposed span, and once when sent back to 30's Chicago as Kirk of the Enterprise in Star Trek (probably shot on this same lot anyway). Mission Impossible is all about the regulars posing as guest stars, which they really are when disguise-transformation is completed anyway. The first thing Graves says to Shattner, once back in the 30's, "What is this act you're pulling?" "Casey" (Linda Day George) looks like a combine of at least three other actresses (Yvette Mimieux? Ann Francis? Debbie Reynolds?). The condition of increasingly limited set. What, the resultant of an overconcentration of like-molecules? Can replicas he remade infinitely? Seeing things again just means that they're still there. "Sending people back in time", and using "plots within plots", allows TV people to reuse the materials they've already got (made years ago). A "movie" within the 30's set looks like original Untouchables footage anyway. And Shattner ends busting through into a "Western" set: just as easy to shift over to the next "room" as the next "frame"? Giving up my planless and fruitless search for company, I go far off on the empty beach. And what if I were Robinson Crusoe? I would collect kinds of insects and shellfish, whatever has a will of its own. Everything - the waves, the sun - has a rudimentary will of its own. Soon the nature of things becomes a Thou for me. There is a return of the forgotten and the landscape is peopled with its gods. This company of the chosen solitude, or resigned solitude - it comes to the same thing - is what I really want, but I am so impatient. He stepped on to the balcony and looked out over the desert, at the red dunes rolling to the windows directly below. For the fourth time he had moved up a floor, and the sequence of identical rooms he had occupied were like displaced images of himself seen through a prism.

FROM: Page 17, Clark Coolidge Smithsonian Depositions / Subject to a Film [Vehicle Editions, New York, 1980] TO: Spratt's Medium Blog:

2011-03-09T13:56:00.003+13:00

correct is out of the question; for, as Dr. Woodward writes in the preface to Extinct Monsters, "restorations are ever liable to emendation, and the present will certainly prove no exception to the rule". As a striking instance of this, it was found necessary to change the figure of Hesperornis, the original life-like portrait proving to be incorrect in attitude, a fact that would have long escaped detection but for the Pan-American Exposition. However, the reader may rest assured that these restorations are infinitely more nearly correct than many figures of living animals that have appeared within the last twenty-five years, and are even now doing duty. "So you shall," said Challenger. "For some days I have exerted my whole brain force upon the problem of how we shall descend these cliffs. We have satisfied ourselves that we cannot climb down and that there is no tunnel. We are also unable to construct any kind of bridge which may take us back to the pinnacle from which we came. How then shall I find a means to convey us? Some little time ago I had remarked to our young friend here that free hydrogen was evolved from the geyser. The idea of a balloon naturally followed. I was, I will admit, somewhat baffled by the difficulty of discovering an envelope to contain the gas, but the contemplation of the immense entrails of these reptiles supplied me with a solution to the problem. Behold the result!" A can in a field. Has everybody see this? Next slide. The earth movers bury it, its axis snaps invisibly. The air once inside is out here now. The white room is black between slides. Science is a shack in the lava flow of ideas. There are no objects outdoors. He walks into warm ice space. Shattner, primed to be sent hack to a past he's already been to (and so have we

FROM: Page 16, Clark Coolidge Smithsonian Depositions / Subject to a Film [Vehicle Editions, New York, 1980] TO: Spratt's Medium Blog:

2011-03-08T14:38:00.003+13:00

of the Bushmaster. My thought was that the bag would be quite heavy. "Everything all right up there?" called my father. It was thrilling to cut the cord on a bag containing a fer-de-lance. A sage-green, chevron-marked serpent slid out. Its head was gracefully widened and rounded at the rear in outlines suggesting a speedy point upon a shaft. It snapped back its anterior third into a loop like a lateral S. Its tongue flashed with such vigor of oscillation that its head jiggled. The glass was slid shut with a bent wire. The eye and brain are like a camera lens and a photographic plate. The lens flashes the impression. The plate retains it. My glance at the Bushmaster was not more than a flash, before things started to happen, but from that flash I could have sat down and written a fairly detailed, academic description of the creature. You see, if you want to photograph growing plants, flowers, grass, or whatever, and if you want to do it at a very small lens opening and with a long exposure — two or three minutes — then you have a problem, because there's always a wind, and they move. I solved that by trial and error. I found that when I sensed the wind coming I could close the shutter, wait until the wind had passed, and reopen the shutter. The plant would have always returned to the exact same spot it had been in before. That way I could get an absolutely clear, needle-sharp picture. Painted animals. And what's worse, painted dinosaurs! The Hall of the Jurassic, when the Dinosaurs held carnival... Imagined tissue held between varnish and plaster in dim museum rooms, I look up to the past. The restorations of extinct animals may be considered as giving as accurate representations of these creatures as it is possible to make; they were either drawn by Mr. Knight, whose name is guarantee that they are of the highest quality, or by Mr. Gleeson, with the aid of Mr. Knight's criticism. That they are infallibly

FROM: Page 15, Clark Coolidge Smithsonian Depositions / Subject to a Film [Vehicle Editions, New York, 1980] TO: Spratt's Medium Blog:

2011-03-07T11:38:00.003+13:00

I will go further, and tell you that if you cannot afford to keep a single man so employed, there are hundreds of little places on the mountain within which, if you can but persuade yourselves to regard them as sacred places and save them from sacreligious hands and feet, the original Gardener of Eden will delight your eyes with little pictures within greater pictures of indescribable loveliness. if you have ever looked through an old-time stereoscope, you'll remember the thrilling fascination of three-dimension pictures. Simple to operate. Compact. Precision built of durable plastic and metal for years of perfect operation. Accurately ground and polished glass lenses. A thick harmonica. Hollow dentist's drill. A white chunk of quartz on Formica counter. A great volume full of big words. Bare trees under a tent. A hill of beans, a mountain of teeth. Plastic trim.... Tonight John McLaughlin talks to a man who has forsaken the computer age for the Victorian Era, turning his own personal clock back to the 19th Century. He also talks to a man who is building a concrete sailboat.... And a cement pit full of snakes, fronds and water, molded rough turtles trying to crawl out of eachother's own way and the anyway slither of the snakes beneath. Guideman in snakehat snakeboots flexes the rattles with a snakehook, holds a balloon in range of rattler strike tourists can take pictures of. Inside a plywood floorbox an 18-foot King Cobra, labeled to "stand" to manhead-height, they feed a 6-foot blacksnake every sunday, it cowers farcorner to a monster from another continent. I see sluggard Gila Monsters, their pinks a rustier orange than in memory, and hold up a Rainbow Boa in a photo. I now see my crewcut then. Rubber-lined doors of the snakehouse. 9-yearold boys send away for Coral Snakes from Florida mailorder and open 'em up in Brockton amazed. I was disappointed in the weight

FROM: Page 14, Clark Coolidge Smithsonian Depositions / Subject to a Film [Vehicle Editions, New York, 1980] TO: Spratt's Medium Blog:

2011-03-06T18:04:00.003+13:00

"CANDIES", "EGGS — 20¢ per Doz.", "PYLE'S PEARLINE for easy washing". On the wagon on the left: "IVES BROS. GROCERY". Above the door: "IVES BROS." Beyond the window, half hidden by the grapevine "165 — IVES BROS. — 167". Ives may have meant to mention all this in one of the interpolated balloons. And at the foot of the cellar stairs began the cave. The caverns is renowned throughout the world for its magnificence, the spaciousness of its rooms and passages, and the number, dimensions, and variety of its stalactites and stalagmites. There are approximately 35 rooms along six corridors, all naturally formed. The cave is covered by a filigree of pink and white translucent crystals, and by tiny pools of water reflecting much of the beauty. One huge heart-shaped formation, known as "The Great Heart", is ringed with twisting helictites and aragonite crystals. So beautiful are some portions of the cave that the caverns were kept locked for decades, becoming known as Secret Cave to prevent identification and vandalism. After 300 feet the cave becomes impassable because of water, which a nearby town utilizes as a water supply. A motel surrounds the cave entrance. A SECTION OF THE BRIDAL CAVE PARKING LOT The area was so flat that only the closest things could be seen, nonetheless with an overwhelming presence of boundless space. Twisted brass rods into ACME lettering illuminated in neon. Coin slots on everything. Doors that immediately opened out the back to whistling flats. Cars noiseless on rubber strips. Night always approaching, the sky becoming still higher. We passed through on our way to The Deluge, an electric Devonian visible only from 20th story lounges in the Camphor Towers....

FROM: Page 13, Clark Coolidge Smithsonian Depositions / Subject to a Film [Vehicle Editions, New York, 1980] TO: Spratt's Medium Blog:

2011-03-05T16:14:00.003+13:00

spellingtests bookreports crayondrawings of P-38s submarines and Jap Zeros flying to pieces across a sky of radiating red lines. I kneel on a thumbtack and stare at the silver disc flush with my kneecap. I stare, eyes tear, iced air.... The whale was there, above in the air, suspended by iron rods, plywood interior and glass eyes, one of which rolled out and broke before they could auction it for benefit. Halls of glass cases, objects to be read as in books, lines of aching, dust fingered on surfaces. Tourmalines, concretions, agates. Locations, Latin names, maps, mock-ups, reconstruction vistas of blown glass and plasters. How could there be circles in a rock? Green-lit tank of giant grouper, snout out. Blue light through hallways, overlookd the room below. Then tapped the wrong uncle and spoke intimately.... Coal-seams with their underlying clays are fossil swamp-grounds; dirt-beds are fossil soils or forest-grounds. The one graduates insensibly into the other, and both are occasionally found in all strata. A slight popping of the knee in the Great Hall of Dinosaurs. A high dim-lit mutter space with barriers. Ancient bones illuminated from behind. The American Dinosaurs were, some of them, reptile-footed, some beast-footed, some bird-footed, and some belonged to a most remarkable family not previously recognized. Whittled apple branches (once sliced the thumb to bone) become mammoth jungle snakes with just a few hours days weeks of the imagination sustained when hung up in the garage and labeled in crayon beneath. The titles are still there, though the cars, and in fact the whole place, are gone. Charlie Ives and his brother Moss kept a store in their grand-mother's wood house. Though faded, the three signs to the left of the door read:

FROM: Page 12, Clark Coolidge Smithsonian Depositions / Subject to a Film [Vehicle Editions, New York, 1980] TO: Spratt's Medium Blog:

2011-03-04T13:14:00.003+13:00

and empty setting, very far away from this complicated frieze that runs just under the ceiling, with its branches and its garlands, like dead leaves, as if the floor were still sand or gravel.... I would get down on all fours and in such a way that my knees and hands would touch; I would then let my head droop with its own weight while swinging it in all directions like a pendulum, so as to make all my blood flow into it. I would prolong this exercise until a voluptuous dizziness resulted; then and without having to shut my eyes I would see emerging from the intense darkness (blacker than anything one can see in real darkness) phosphorescent circles in which would be formed the famous fried eggs (without the pan). These eggs of fire would finally blend with a very soft and amorphous white paste; it seemed to be pulled in all directions, its extreme ductility adapting itself to all forms seemed to grow with my growing desire to see it ground, folded, refolded, curled up and pressed in the most contradictory directions. This appeared to me the height of delight, and I should have liked everything to be always like that! In the grade school room the windows fascinated, though they remained nearly the same wallpicture, with great slight variants of a woman sweeping her driveway. Tipping stacks of manilla sheets and chalk noise, blackboard dust. Sun angles on gouged varnish dark desk, the crawl time of electric tickface. A tiny teacher in the front of the room far too distant to call on anyone. Brown paper is stretched from heavy wooden-cored rolls across the back wall in diorama and I’m to paint the dinosaur scene up there from jars of shit-smelling poster paints. The paint stays up a month, thick layers cracking over stegosaurus allosaurus diplodocus steaming in Mesozoic marshes, a project to be folded up square and incinerated with trash heaps of

FROM: Page 11, Clark Coolidge Smithsonian Depositions / Subject to a Film [Vehicle Editions, New York, 1980] TO: Spratt's Medium Blog:

2011-03-03T15:32:00.003+13:00

There has been no use in my trying to keep pace with your letters. My mind has been too occupied most of the time with disturbing cases and all the other detail of a life such as I lead. There are a thousand things that keep crowding me in my efforts to get through the day with anything like the number of things done that stare me in the face each morning. At times I must shut off certain interests in order to be able to preserve something of my health and approximate sanity. It's put me in mind of painting in silence. The low crusts of cave architecture, lime mammoth time bear, the ear put to rock under the hill. Rusted hallways ornamental to the dip and strike beneath grey city. American paperweights. An L-shaped parking lot around the back of the long low brick factory-like building. The sidewalk of coarse sandy cement, and the parking lot filled in with lime-sprayed gravel. Low grey featureless cloud cover at noon. No breeze, temperature in the high sixties. Inside the building are rooms filled with head-high chests of inch-deep drawers filled with rectangular pasteboard dividers. Everything happens at the animal level. And even this animal level is seen from a vegetable, if not mineral, point of view. Not knowing the words he examined doorstops, knobs, runners, baseboards, lintels, cornices, curbings, carpet tacks, staples, corking, beaverboard, mantels, thermapane, sills, curtain rods, doorjambs, latches, laths and louvres spotted with hornets. Overloaded with a dark and cold ornamentation of woodwork, stucco, moldings — marble, black mirrors, dark paintings, columns, heavy hangings — sculptured door frames, series of doorways, galleries, transverse corridors … silent halls where the sound of footsteps is absorbed by carpets so heavy, so thick that nothing reaches the ear — as if the ear itself were very far away, very far away from the floor, from the carpets, very far away from this heavy

FROM: Page 10, Clark Coolidge Smithsonian Depositions / Subject to a Film [Vehicle Editions, New York, 1980] TO: Spratt's Medium Blog:

2011-03-02T13:42:00.003+13:00

and only door. And there are no doors. It was the doctor that brought me to my senses. I couldn't say I needed that then but I needed that then and I need it now. A swing. A thirst for more than one. Outside the building the sign was thin, GAS, and swung over a circle of slate flags, in a purplish sinking daylight. And the people in cars in colors of loose concept. The blue-green pool at this temperature has a flatness and no amphibians to disturb.... What common language to unravel? ... combed into straight lines from that rafter of a rock's lip. A black drawing book slammed down booms against a red-backed folder on the floor at the same instant a shotgun goes off out in a copse back of the well. 500 sheets of Substance 20 8 1/2 X 11 Sphinx Aristocrat Mimeo Bond (white stock) lain on a slab of plywood propped on cardboard moving-boxes in a corner. The desk is littered, but I prefer that scatter, I know where everything is as it goes years undusted. For a wastebasket beneath, a rectangular aluminum Extra Dry Antiperspirant Spray cannister a paper snaps. The windows directly above, misted with cigarette smoke accumulates, facing west through oaks birch hop-hornbeam. An uncoated captain's chair, stable. Pictures to remain unseen on the other walls while the work goes on. Or possibly a mere glimpse (Leger), an interstice in process, smoking drinking writing. An afternoon is a morning that comes up the other side. And a long bath for reading the late afternoon before dinner hour. Quiz shows, coffee and letters.... No, I'm not dead, just existing along. Today especially with the cold rain falling this way, approaching the Fourth of July, I'm just barely existing.

FROM : Page 9, Clark Coolidge Smithsonian Depositions / Subject to a Film [Vehicle Editions, New York, 1980] TO: Spratt's Medium Blog:

2011-03-01T15:56:00.003+13:00

. . . and it is a place in a state, a book, a movie like any other. The back of a dry goods house on Wop Hill, the sun coming through the bushes. The doctor moves a bit in his car rolling past, or is it through?, the outskirts. And the Great Quarry of Leach enclosed in no way an appropriate setting, abutted upon noone in any manner. A feldspar in red leaves. The pool is blue in green in white rim-cupped edges. The oranges are loose. Walking the picket wall along, a man whose thoughts twitch as billboards blank the light. It's a gnat, its pulse, a nylon purse under ultraviolet fixture in daylight. Even the large houses are small, inside the television a blue in grey. A football star with "Glass" on his jersey back. Nothing is lacking nor waiting for the fire in the grate, the mumbles over walnuts, the glance past an andiron. I have gone here to come away glanced, and moved upon. And a grasshopper of red basalt, boot-long, tumbles from the core of his mind, a rubble-bank disintegrating beneath a tropic downpour. Then Passaic Center loomed like a dull adjective. Each "store" in it was an adjective unto the next, a chain of adjectives disguised as stores. One second I was born, and then found that I lived there. The trees have been red so long that many feel it will never rain again. The face is open, a grey pen on a steel filing cabinet, heads circle flat against a wall gone unnoticed since its paint. It was as if a cleavage, a time had opened in the floor. And a move towards the nearest

Jérémie Bennequin from "OMMAGE / A la recherche du temps perdu"

2011-03-01T12:53:00.001+13:00

Images from Jérémie Bennequin's "OMMAGE / A la recherche du temps perdu" project, a procedural / durational work in which Bennequin erases, at the rate of one page per day, the entirety of Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time (seven volume Gallimard edition). More infro and images here.

A Voice and So Much More: Henri Chopin live at Espace Gantner, Bourogne, France 2005.

2011-02-01T13:08:00.000+13:00

“Performance art delivers the instant to the vertigo of the emergence of Universes that are simultaneously strange and familiar. It has the advantage of drawing out the full implications of this intensive, a-temporal, a-spatial, a-signifying dimensions from the semiotic net of quotidianity. It shoves our noses up against the genesis of being and forms, before they get a foothold in dominant redundancies – of styles, schools and traditions of modernity. But it seems to me that this art doesn’t so much involve a return to an originary orality as it does a forward flight into machinations and deterritorialised machinic paths capable of engendering mutant subjectivities. What I mean by this is that there is something artificial, constructed, composed – what I call a machinic processuality – in concrete poetry’s rediscovery of orality. In a more general way, every aesthetic decentring of points of view, every polyphonic reduction of the components of expression passes through a preliminary deconstruction of the structures and codes in use and a chaosmic plunge into the materials of sensation. Out of them a recomposition becomes possible: a recreation, an enrichment of the world (something like enriched uranium), a proliferation not just of the forms but of the modalities of being. Thus not a Manichean, nostalgic and old fashioned opposition between good orality and wicked scripturality, but a search for enunciative nuclei which would institute new cleavages between other insides and other outsides and which would offer a different metabolism of past-future where eternity will coexist with the present moment.”

– Félix Guattari "Machinic Orality and Virtual Ecology" Chaosmosis: An Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm. Trans. Paul Bains and Julian Pefanis. Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1995. 90.

Caroline Bergvall’s Deleuzian Stuttering: “Via: 48 Dante Variations”

2010-12-14T15:11:00.002+13:00

Caroline Bergvall’s “Via: 48 Dante Variations” explores – via a list of forty seven different English translations of the famous opening tercet of Dante’s Inferno – the variable lexical, syntactical, and semantic values immanent within a single familiar poetic utterance. For this piece, Bergvall collected all the English translations of the Inferno’s opening tercet (“Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita / mi ritrovai per una selva oscura / che la diritta via era smarrita”) archived in the British library “up until May 2000” or “[e]xactly 700 years after the date fixed by Dante for the start of the Comedy’s journey.” [1] (Bergvall notes that before finishing the project two new translations had already been published.) From this exhaustive procedure emerged forty seven different translations or variations spanning nearly 200 years. These are organized alphabetically, each variation followed briefly by the translator’s name and the date of publication. In the summer of 2000 Bergvall recorded a performance of “Via” in collaboration with Irish composer Ciarán Maher. [2] In a controlled and measured delivery, she unhurriedly reads all forty seven translations, accompanied by a discreet digital treatment of her voice by Maher, a processed filigree of vocal micro-particulars runs underneath her reading voice and provides “Via” with its final, fugitive ‘variation’: “Using calculations set up via his software, he [Maher] unearthed an added line, an imperceptible grain, my voice’s fractals, and we let it run, hardly audible, underneath the structure of the reading voice, inextricably tied to it, yet escaping it, releasing from it a surprising beauty, magnified shrapnel of interior sound. The 48th variation.” [3] Over the piece’s ten minute duration the repetition of specific words and phrases creates a clear pattern and distinct set of sonic expectations – “midway,” “dark wood,” “straight road” and “journey of our life,” for instance, recur insistently – while small variations in wording from one translation to the next blip against the flow. Take for instance the following three variations (variations 18, 33, and 34 respectively):

In the mid-journey of our mortal life,

I wandered far into a darksome wood,

Where the true road no longer might be seen.

(Chaplin, 1913)

MIDWAY upon the journey of my days

I found myself within a wood so drear,

That the direct path nowhere met my gaze.

(Brooksbank, 1854)

MIDWAY upon the journey of our life,

I found me in a forest dark and deep,

For I the path direct had failed to keep.

(Wilstach, 1888) [4]

Thus the dark wood is also “darksome,” “drear,” and a “forest dark and deep,” while the “straight path” modulates into both “the true road” and “the direct path.” In performance, these subtle lexical substitutions and syntactic shifts produce a fascinating, sustained aural play of difference and repetition, movement and stasis, a kind of linguistic or text-sound counterpart to the music of Morton Feldman, or minimalist composers Steve Reich, Terry Riley, and Philip Glass.

The placing-in-variation of canonical or “major” literary works through musico-poetic performance may well constitute a paradigmatic instance of the Deleuzian process of linguistic minorization or stuttering. In this respect it would be interesting to develop and expand (and, ultimately deterritorialize, as one must) Deleuze’s concept of minorization with reference to Mac Low’s diastic processing of Pound’s Cantos – Words nd Ends from Ez – and Cage’s “Writing for a Second Time Through Finnegans Wake.” Both of these poems are procedural treatments or readings-through of iconic modernist texts that double as notations for aural performance, even if only the virtual performance of a silent reader. [5] Briefly, though, we can note here that through their critical dismantling of canonical works, the interventional, viral poetics of Mac Low and Cage – along with work by William Burroughs, Kathy Acker, Susan Howe, Vito Acconci, Antoine Beuger (calme étendue (spinoza) [Edition Wandelweiser] 2001), and Michael Maranda's Parasitic Ventures Press – clearly substantiates Deleuze’s notion of a minor usage of language as the performative placing-in-variation of the dominant forms of public language from within, including here the unravelling of hegemonic notions of text and canon. Such explicitly intertextual work, moreover, also substantiates Deleuze’s notion of the minor text as overtly a collective assemblage of enunciation open to multiplicity, difference and variation, an idea opposed to the majoritarian illusion of the literary text as the individuated and stable enunciation of a great or “master” writer supposedly creating ex nihilo.

Deleuze’s important reading of Italian playwright Carmelo Bene, “One Manifesto Less,” provides a highly suggestive exposition of stuttering as a species of intertextual praxis or performativity, and one that can usefully illuminate Bergvall’s poem. “Is there not … great interest” he asks, “in submitting authors considered major to treatment as minor authors, in order to rediscover their potential for becoming?” [6] Bene’s 1977 production of Richard III is, for Deleuze, exemplary of such a minor treatment. In this extremely truncated and heretical adaptation, Bene’s begins by subtracting or “amputating” approximately half of Shakespeare’s lines, cutting whole scenes while freely rearranging others. In performance, the remaining textual fragments are then placed in a state of variation, their linguistic and sonic components undergoing continuous modulation through dramatic enactment, resulting in a series of stuttered iterations of Shakespeare’s lines. Deleuze proposes as a concrete example of this process Lady Anne’s remark “I loathe you!” According to Deleuze, Bene’s Lady Anne repeats this phrase continuously, modulating its syntactic and acoustic components like a jazz musician improvising changes on a melody, each variation constituting not only a different speech act with a different semantic content but also a different acoustic event as well, the words being variously “whispered, stammer[ed] or deformed” while at the same time the voice itself is rendered “scarcely perceptible or quite deafening” through electronic treatment. [7] In this way, the statement becomes “no more than the sum of its own variations, which make it escape every apparatus of power capable of fixing it and which enable it to dodge every [linguistic] constancy.” [8] It is through a minor use, then, – which Deleuze describes as “the ‘theater’ of the language,” [9] – that Bene deforms or even destroys Shakespeare’s majoritarian text, but this process also entails the creation of a new minor idiom within Shakespeare’s original play, the production of sometime new and different – a strange, musicated language of stammers, near-inaudible murmurs, and stop-start Steinian iterations. [10]

In “Via” Bergvall submits Dante’s famous tercet to precisely such a process of Deleuzian minorization: via her electronically-treated recitation of the variously translated tercets, she succinctly places the linguistic and acoustic particulars of Dante’s lines in a state of continuous, chromatic variation. Like Bene’s setting of fragments from Richard III, this is performance as iteration as difference. [11] And like Bene – whom Deleuze describes as more a “controller,” “mechanic,” or “operator” [12] who intervenes strategically in pre-existent texts than a playwright or director in any traditional sense – Bergvall reduces her role as poet to an impersonal and mechanical operation, content to function as a kind of writing- or stuttering-machine that merely selects, arrangers, and processes others’ words. Procedural and intertextual, Bergvall’s fascinating musico-poetic experiment – like the plundergraphic writing of Kenneth Goldsmith, who’s monumental work Day transcribes word for word an entire edition of the New York Times – clearly situates “the beginnings of writing not in the white silence of the page but in the noise of written language, in the business of its cultural machines, in the lifted pages of existing books and documents.” [13] So although “Via” may seem a more austere and formalist work than “Say: ‘Parsley,’” given that installation’s playful manipulation of colloquial and idiomatic language within public space, one can say that the former, though it probes a canonical literary text, is in fact no less concerned than the latter with placing the variables of a public language in a state of variation. [14]

In discarding chronological sequencing in favour of alphabetization, Bergvall carefully avoids any false sense of teleology toward some final, perfected English version of Dante’s tercet, instead using paratactic form to emphasize the historical and contextual relativity of translation. “Via” demonstrates that no two translations of the Inferno are the exactly the same, that each translation is an actualization of a particular point on a virtual line of continuous variation that passes through all possible instantiations of Dante’s lines. Indeed, from this perspective, Dante’s “original” can no longer be privileged as the basal statement which then undergoes various subtle nuances in meaning as it is diversely translated within different historical contexts. Rather, it occupies a certain point on that virtual line of semantic values, a line that includes all of its various English translations as well. Performative repetition with continuous variation – what Stein would call “insistence” – actualizes this virtual line. [15]

But what is the nature of the voice implied in this procedure of stuttering? Bergvall adopts a sober, formal, and slight terse mode of delivery that Brian M. Reed likens to “an instructor’s voice on language-learning tapes,” carefully avoiding not only the kind of vocal histrionics characteristic of Bene’s post-Artaudian theatre of cruelty, but also the natural affective cadences typical of the traditional, “unmediated” poetry reading as well. If, as Deleuze says, stuttering is “the theatre of the language,” then perhaps the closest analogue to Bergvall’s distanced and impersonal use of voice is Samuel Beckett rather than Bene. Many of Beckett’s plays and performance pieces demand flat-toned, intonation-less voices. [16] As Charles Krance notes, Beckett frequently “admonished his performers when their deliveries threatened to spill over into conventionally lyrical overtones,” and he describes Beckett’s own 1970 reading of “Lessness” as “characteristically monotone.” [17] Yet, paradoxically, Beckett’s performance, like his equally minimal plays, “nonetheless exudes a ‘compelling musicality.’” [18] Bergvall’s permutational poem not only shares affinities with Beckett’s experiments with repetition and variation, it is also strangely “musical” despite, or because of, the rigid formalism and sober delivery. It is worth exploring this connection in more detail.

For Krance, as for Deleuze, the fraught and strangely implacable permutations so characteristic of Beckett’s late dramatic works are in effect enacting or embodying – like John Wiese’s ‘power radiophonics’ (see post below) – a kind of strained process of “musical parturition” [19]: through the exhaustive, near-incantatory use of serial repetition with variation, Beckett exhausts stories and suspends sense, taking language to its limit where the empty word becomes a pure asignifying sound or arbitrary sonic vibration. Deleuze, as we have seen, noted a similar trajectory a propos Bene’s treatment of language. In Beckett’s writing, however, the asignifying and sonorous limit need not necessarily lie only at the end of the permutational series; insofar as this sonorous limit subtends the language itself, it may also occur “anywhere in the flow: between two terms, between two voices or [within] the variations of a single voice – a point that is already reached well before one knows that the series is exhausted, and well before one learns that there is no longer any possibility or any story.” [20] Deleuze here invites us to attune to – to listen for – the limit as it surfaces intermittently as a near inaudible murmur, tremolo, or resonance in or behind the current of the enumerating Beckettian voice, rather than merely at the culmination of the series (which can potentially be interminably deferred). As Krance explains,

Because Beckett music is structured primarily along patterns of reiterated permutations, resolution can only (theoretically) occur within these patterns themselves (hence, the fundamentally Beckettian paradox whereby “a step forward is, by definition, a step back”). Hence also the indispensability of his (music’s) being heard (again, if never fully understood), and then again, only fragmentarily. [21]

It is important to note that “music” here does not refer to a structural or formal music, or anything resembling lyric harmony, but rather an unformed sonorous material outside or beneath the lexical range. The point of Beckett’s sober ‘step-forward, step-back’ iterations, according to Krance, is to produce an intensive usage of language capable of releasing from within its own quasi-mechanical iterability this elusive, fragmentary, “predominantly quiet” [22] music, a music sounded in (sounded din) those fleeting moments when language, strained through incessant repetition, “vibrates like a musical instrument or hums like a machine.” [23]

In Beckett, this disjointed, iterative storytelling frequently corresponds to the compulsive manner in which the narrators pace out the same enclosed spaces (pace May in Footfalls, the old woman of Ill Seen Ill Said) and the physical exhaustion – and eventual deliquescence – that this obsessive movement entails (in the Trilogy, Molloy’s stiff leg, Moran’s crutches, and Mahood’s bodily dispersal). “It is true that,” writes Deleuze, “in Beckett these affirmative disjunctions [reiterated permutations] usually concern the bearing or gait of the characters: an ineffable manner of walking, while rolling and pitching.” [24] In other words, “the characters speak like they walk or stumble, for speaking is no less a movement than walking: the former goes beyond speech toward” disarticulate sound, “just as the latter goes beyond the organism toward a body without organs.” [25] The stuttering incipit of “Via” condemns Dante to a similar entropic movement: like a Beckettian protagonist, his quest is continually interrupted, forcing him to restlessly pace the closed-circuit of the “dark wood.” (Indeed, Dante’s predicament in “Via” instantly evokes the relentless closed-circuit choreography of Beckett’s minimalist experimental teleplay Quad (1982), in which four cowled players monotonously pace the lengthwise and diagonal lines of a marked square until they have exhausted all possible pathways and combinations. Like much of Beckett’s work of course, Quad is itself influenced by Dante’s Inferno. [26]) This series of false starts, moreover, may be extended indefinitely through the addition of new translations, just as the limit in Beckett may be deferred through further variation. In correspondence with Marjorie Perloff, Bergvall draws attention to the ambiguity of this stalled movement, which can be apprehended as being both liberation and prison:

Unlike the graphic causal horror of linear travel, these point by point interceptions spin a spiraling musicality, its horror is abstracted, a build-up of interrupted motion, pulling together into a narrative of structure, stop-start, each voice trying itself out, nothing looped, yet nothing moving beyond the first line, never beyond the first song, never beyond the first day, the forest walls, the city walls, my body walls. Having to look for points of exit, further in, further down, rather than out. [27]

As in Beckett’s work and much minimalist music, escape or release from extended repetition remains immanent to the iterative partitions themselves.

The Beckett comparison allows one to see how Maher’s electronic treatment of Bergvall’s voice functions precisely as this point of escape: positioned as the final, “48^th variation,” the fractal track is that asignifying limit toward which the series strains, [28] while simultaneously underpinning its quietly distressed ‘step-forward, step-back’ permutations. As in Beckett, the limit surfaces here as a kind of molecular Steinian agitation in and behind the soberly enumerating voice, blurring the resonance of the narrator’s words. Similar to the musique concrète reductionism of Ralf Wehowsky (Pullover Table Of The Elements, 1996) or Christof Migone (Vex Ohm/Avatar 1998), in which concrete sounds (including voice samples) are processed and abstracted into minute clicks and dry islands of metallic hiss poised on the edge of audibility, Maher pulverizes Bergvall’s voice, reducing it to an allusive micro-scattering of digital penumbrae. Radically altered, these indistinct, ethereal vocal sounds invoke the residual “echoes” and “fragments” [29] that Krance hears in late Beckett. This becoming-sound or becoming-molecular of the voice liberates it from the constraints of discursive meaning, and simultaneously draws the self into a parallel becoming-other. In extending the voice – and by extension the body – beyond its “natural” capacities through technological prosthesis, Bergvall thus succeeds in moving beyond both “the first line” (the limitations of discursive meaning) and the physical limitations of her “body’s walls” via a post-semantic sonorous line of flight located “further down, rather than out” – that is, in the fractals of the voice, the electronically manipulated sounds of the body. (Significantly, Christine Hume hears this sound as “auscultation”). [30] Treated beyond recognition, the processed voice not only ceases to be tied to the biological parameters of the individual body as limiting territory, but is sonically dispersed in a way that renders the ‘place’ of the voice – as in “Say: ‘Parsley’” – highly ambiguous and non-localizable.

It is here that the sonic dimension links up with the thematic one. A commentary on both literary and social forms of translation, “Via” self-reflexively thematizes the experience of many bilingual and multilingual speakers who – like the Italian Dante and his nomadic passage through English – remain in exile from their mother-tongue, forever lost and wandering within the wilderness of their adopted language(s). But as in “Say: ‘Parsley’”, Bergvall envisages “foreignness” not as state of exile to be transcended through linguistic mastery, but rather as a political strategy of positive linguistic (and cultural) displacement, a gesture of resistance to Nationalistic, monoglossic language politics and the “the nativist myth often given to language belonging, that one’s body is unalterably the shape of one’s first language.” [31] “To be in language,” writes Bergvall, “is not only to be caressed, held, nurtured by ‘intuitive’ or tonal waves of recognition and belonging.” [32] This, for Bergvall, is the lesson of Beckett’s writing:

Beckett’s traffic from English to French, and back into English by way of a translated French is an expectoration of the English language’s occupation on the colonised Irish body. His leitmotifs of speech loss, language stutter, assisted memory, gestural language all point to the dislocation experienced in the move, and to the feeling of liberation it also opened up. Fighting off one language with another language, transforming in the process both the spat-out source language and the adoptive language. [33]

In the act of stuttering, then, – whether in transit between languages or as a “foreigner in one’s own language” – the voice’s body is anything but static and inflexibly organized. With or without the aid of modern sound technologies, the fluid, amorphous corporeality peculiar to the voice can be stretched and contorted into fascinatingly strange (and inhuman) sonic bodies (see the sound poetry of Henri Chopin, François Dufrêne, Carlfriedrich Claus, Arrigo Lora-Totino, Ernst Jandl, and Sten Hanson). In sharp contradistinction to the “tonal waves of recognition and belonging” proper to the mother-tongue and its naturalized articulations of a stable body contour, the sonic metamorphosis that Bergvall’s voice undergoes in “Via” sounds something closer to the spatio-temporal territory of Beckett’s “unspeakable home”: that troubled (and troubling) nonplace or tense state of inbetweenness where one moves ceaselessly “from impenetrable self to impenetrable unself” – restlessly, that is, from one language to another as from one body to another – “between two lit refuges whose doors once / neared gently close, once away turned from / gently part again.” [34]

[1] Caroline Bergvall FIG (Goan Atom 2). Cambridge: Salt, 2005. 64.

[2] This performance was first presented at the tEXt02 festival in Exeter in 2002. It is available on the CD Rockdrill 8: Via: Poems 1994-2004 (Optic Nerve, 2005), as well as a free download from both Ubu Web and PennSound.

[3] Bergvall FIG (Goan Atom 2) 64.

[4] Ibid. 68, 70.

[5] See the introduction to Mac Low’s Representative Works, 1938-1985 (New York: Roof, 1985) and Garrett Stewart on silent reading as itself a performative, embodied act in Reading Voices: Literature and the Phonotext. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990.

[6] Deleuze “OML” 208. In The Deleuze Reader. Ed. Constantin V. Boundas. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993.

[7] Ibid. 213.

[8] Ibid. 211.

[9] Ibid. 210.

[10] For another electro-acoustic deformance of Shakespeare see Simon Emmerson’s Ophelia's Dream II, a work for voice and magnetic tape first before by the English avantgarde vocal group Singcircle in December 1978 as part of the MusICA series. From the liner notes to Singcircle’s Mouth Music LP (Hyperion, 1983):

Ophelia is 'represented' by the 2 sopranos, who are trapped in various ways by the other singers, by the musical material and by the technology. The character splits in two and then steadily disintegrates until her words break down into an undifferentiated noise – the rush of water, perhaps. No sounds are pre-recorded or electronically produced. All are vocal sounds altered 'live'. This idea is one of a series Emmerson has written in recent years which develops the idea of a 'natural theatre of technology' – that is, any incidental movements or gestures in the performance are not choreographed, (and certainly not 'music theatre' in the sense many recent composers have used the term) but follow from and are indissoluably (sic) part of the necessary function of the electro-acoustic technology. The text is derived from permutations and combinations of fragments of the following sentences and phrases from Shakespeare's Hamlet:

To be

Ophelia

Sing sweet Ophelia

With true love

Like sweet bells jangled out of tune and harsh

White his shroud as the mountain snow

Farewell Ophelia and remember well what I have said to you

'Tis in my memory locked and you yourself shall keep the key of it

[11] Although because of the nature of the constraint “Via” on the whole leaves normative grammatical and syntactical structures in place, Majena Mafe’s “Via Error – 48 Variations of Dante Variations (variations of bergvall (of dante))” – a conceptual rewriting of Bergvall’s poem from memory – pushes the process of stuttering farther by thematizing the connection between wandering and error, her mistranscribed quotations placing more strain on normative syntax than Bergvall’s ‘original’. See the Bergvall special feature in HOW 2 (vol.3 No.3, Winter 2009), curated and co-ordinated by Sophie Robinson.

[12] Deleuze “OML” 206.

[13] Bergvall “In the Place of Writing.” Assembling Alternatives: Reading Postmodern Poetries Transnationally. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2003. 329.

[14] This is more pronounced in Bergvall’s “Shorter Chaucer Tales.” For another (quasi)-musical deformance of Dante, see Emmett Williams’s “Musica: a Dantesque Litany for Nine Voices” in 0 to 9: The Complete Magazine: 1967-1969 (Ed. Vito Acconci & Bernadette Mayer. Brooklyn: Ugly Duckling Presse, 2006), which is made up of the nine most frequently used words in the Divine Comedy as tabulated by a computer.

[15] Indeed, Stein’s credo, summarised by Steve McCaffery as the assertion “that there is no repetition, that each reiteration of an identical within a series registers with a slight variation in emotional insistence” (Prior to Meaning: the Protosemantic and Poetics. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2001. 280 n42), finds contemporary validation in the modulating emotional resonances of Bergvall’s poem, each variation on Dante’s theme registering a slightly different emotional tonality from the last. As Karen Mac Cormack says, “Emotions manifest in stutters, too." Implexures. Tuscon, Arizona and Nether Edge, Sheffield, Chax Press and West House Books, 2003. 73.

[16] See in particular the television plays Eh Joe (1965), Ghost Trio (1975), and … but the clouds … (1976). Beckett describes the voice in Eh Joe, for example, as “Low, distinct, remote, little colour, absolutely steady rhythm, slightly slower than normal.” Collected Shorter Plays of Samuel Beckett. London: Faber and Faber, 1984. 201-202.

[17] Krance “Beckett Music.” In Samuel Beckett and the Arts: Music, Visual Arts, and Non-Print Media. Ed. Lois Oppenheim. New York: Garland Publishing, 1999. 54.

[18] Ibid. 54.

[19] Ibid. 54, emphasis in original.

[20] Deleuze “The Exhausted.” In Essays Critical and Clinical. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997. 157-58, my emphasis.

[21] Krance 55.

[22] Ibid. 58; here Krance is quoting from Howard Skempton’s “Beckett as librettist” in Music and Musicians 25, no. 9 (May 1977): 5-6.

[23] Jean-Jacques Lecercle Deleuze and Language. New York: Palgrave, 2002. 242.

[24] Deleuze “He Stuttered.” Essays Critical and Clinical 111.

[25] Ibid. 111. See also “The Exhausted” in the same collection: “Beckett’s great contribution to logic is to have shown that exhaustion (exhaustivity) does not occur without a certain physiological exhaustion […] a fantastic decomposition of the self […] the indefinite exchange of mathematical formulations and the pursuit of the formless or the unformulated” 154.

[26] See S. E. Gontarski’s “Quad I & II: Beckett’s Sinister Mime(s)” in Journal of Beckett Studies, No 9, Spring 1983, 137,138, and Graley Herren’s “Samuel Beckett’s Quad: Pacing to Byzantium” in Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, No 1, Volume XV, Fall 2000, 43-60.

[27] Perloff “The Oulipo Factor: The Procedural Poetics of Christian Bök and Caroline Bergvall.” In Differentials: Poetry, Poetics, Pedagogy. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2004. 222, emphasis mine.

[28] Moreover, on Bergvall’s website there is a mix of “Via” that “increases the audibility of the track of fractals that accompanies the reading.” Bergvall texts are always in a state of transformation; thus one can imagine other potential mixes where the fractals come to overwhelm and obliterate the reading voice entirely.

[29] Krance 54.

[30] See Hume’s review of “Via” in Raintaxi: Online Edition. Spring 2007.

[31] Bergvall “A Cat in the Throat: On Bilingual Occupants” Jacket 37, 2009. N.p.

[32] Ibid. N.p.

[33] Ibid. N.p.

[34] This is from Beckett’s libretto to Morton Feldman’s opera Neither; here is the full text: “to and fro in shadow from inner to outer shadow / from impenetrable self to impenetrable unself / by way of neither / as between two lit refuges whose doors once / neared gently close, once away turned from / gently part again / beckoned back and forth and turned away / heedless of the way, intent on the one gleam / or the other / unheard footfalls only sound / till at last halt for good, absent for good / from self and other / then no sound / then gently light unfading on that unheeded / neither / unspeakable home” Samuel Beckett: The Complete Short Prose, 1929-1989. Ed. S. E. Gontarski. New York: Grove Press, 1995. 258. The album Home, Unspeakable (Trente Oiseaux, 1996) by electronic composers Bernhard Günter and John Duncan is based on this short text. From the liner notes: “The music on this CD was inspired by Samuel Beckett’s libretto for Morton Feldman’s chamber opera Neither. It is constructed as a series of musical ‘places’, which in their entirety form the topography of a ‘landscape’ we feel might be described by the final words of Beckett’s text: unspeakable home.” This near inaudible, silence-ridden music bears comparison with Maher’s fractalized voice track.

John Wiese – Selected Visual Works

2010-02-03T12:03:00.002+13:00

[Text originally published in the exhibition catalogue accompanying John Wiese’s Battery Instruments sound installation, High Street Project, Christchurch, New Zealand, 8-29 December 2009.]

Botanically speaking, dehiscence signifies a splitting open or a gaping by a divergence of elements, especially as part of an organic process […] a seed pod dehisces to discharge its mature contents.

– Ed Cohen [1]

The fraught and strangely implacable editing-cuts so characteristic of John Wiese’s sound work are in effect enacting or embodying a kind of strained, stuttered process of pure sonic parturition. Similar to the musique concrète reductionism of RLW and Bernhard Günter, Wiese operates microphonically upon his source material, reducing with each frantic edit the tangible if elusive physicality of sound to fleeting apparitions of ectoplasmic arrhythmia and skitterish, micro-scatterings of sonic penumbrae. Throughout his solo work and numerous collaborations, Wiese’s sure compositional hand makes itself felt in and through the distinctive dynamic rigor that links and affirms the recalcitrant materiality of unruly monadic aggregates across the space of their own difference. Whittling substantial bodies of sound down to tiny, molecular blips stripped of their musicological mandate to mean, what we might call Wiese’s materialist ‘poetics of dehiscence’ splits open the Schaefferian objet sonore to release a teeming, fecund ‘sound-in-itself.’

A similar approach informs Wiese’s visual designs, which are based on radically treated letters and type forms. Many of these present constellations of minute lettristic errata that foreground the opaque materiality of scattered and dismembered graphemes, forming a visual counterpart to the precise editing and jump-cuts of his music. Wiese’s collages, like is music, are all edges, discreteness, fragments, and collision. Rupturing the integrity of the formed letter shape, these unruly concrete poems mark a return to the material base of language, zeroing in – like some of Bruce Andrews’s early visual work, viz. StandPoint – on a restive interplay of microscopic forces and intensities in (or beneath) the signifying graphism of writing.

The collages treating less solid type forms (see the fourth, fifth, and sixth images below), moreover, suggest nothing so much as ‘entoptic floaters’: those minute bits of debris in the vitreous fluid cast of the retina visible as “small opacities [that] appear to drift and flinch across the field of vision like the transparent bodies in water seen under a microscope” [2], and ‘phosphenes’: those spectral, dissipative streaks and lines that emanate from within the eye itself rather than from an external light source. Francis Ponge, among others, has explicitly figured phosphenes as fragmented type:

To begin with, let’s acknowledge that people, with their vision disrupted by fever, hunger, or simply fatigue, sometimes undergo a fleeting and no doubt benign hallucination: they notice – from one spot to another across the field of vision, shifting in a particular way, by animated, jerky, successive backwards leaps followed by slow returns – a type of tiny marks […], barely delineated, translucent, in the shape of rods, commas, perhaps other punctuation marks, which, without concealing the whole world from them, do obliterate it in a certain way, moving around there superimposed […] [3].

Along with the causes Ponge lists, phosphenes may also be triggered by traumatic blows to the head, electroshock, a variety of drugs and – most significantly – loud noises (although – to crib a track title from Wiese’s Soft Punk album – these “Casual Psychedelics” are most commonly stimulated through a simple rubbing of the eyes.) The phosphenic collages, then, may well figure forth the quasi-synesthetic invocations of dismembered typographic chimera induced in the listener by the violent, unpredictable, and abrupt transitions of Wiese’s frequently aggressive and extreme music.

Alternately, the pieces based on broken line fragments (see the first three images below) are visually evocative of a number of classic avant-garde experiments in textual deletion and erasure. They share certain affinities, for instance, with Marcel Broodthaers’s seminal (image), in which the conceptual artist replaces the lines of Mallarmé’s Un coup de dés (“A Throw of the Dice”) with black cancellation bands positioned and sized on the page according to the typographical layout of the original poem. “The result,” as Craig Dworkin observes, “is a geometric, constructivist design in which the calm expanse of Mallarmé’s over-sized page is interrupted by the hard-edged precision of the fixed forms that punctuate it” [4]. By eliminating or censoring reference, Broodthaers lays bare the underlying rhythmic structure of Un coup de dés and elevates an experience of the material duration of poetic form over semantic meaning.

Broodthaers's (image)

Similarly, Man Ray’s 1924 visual poem Lautgedicht (“Sound Poem”) consists of schematic figures of straight lines designed to reproduce the pausal melody and rhythm of the conventional lyric poem: language reduced to the state of a totally illegible, pre-semantic materiality. As in (image), we find the same visible notation of a wordless music in the spatial disposition of lines and pauses. Both of these works thus help bring to near tactile presence what Bruce Russell – following Agamben and, further back, Deleuze – terms ‘repetition and stoppage’: that basal material-rhythm structurally constitutive of montagic cinécriture and (traditional, at least) poetic lineation alike [5].

In John Wiese’s line-works, however, a wavering, Steinian vibration (“[A]re you willing to moisten rapid repetition with angular vibration [?]” Stein asks) agitates the cool, geometric clinicism and strict linearity of these earlier experiments, surfacing as a kind of inaudible visual murmur, tremolo, or resonance that cuts the straight lines of the static lexeme at angles oblique to inscription [6]. Unlike Man Ray’s poem, which evokes the measured melodic structures that have always underwritten lyric utterance, Wiese’s disaggregating line-segments again offer a kind of proto-semantic linguistic image of the multiple dishevelling vectors subtending his ever mercurial music.

References

[1] Ed Cohen “Poesis, Autopoesis, Autopoethics.” Culture Machine, Vol 3. (2001). http://www.culturemachine.net/index.php/cm/article/view/285/270; No pagination.

[2] Craig Dworkin Reading the Illegible. Evanston, Northwestern University Press (2003).

[3] Quoted in Dworkin, 61, emphasis added. One may note that, perhaps not coincidentally, Wiese’s initial interest in typography coincided with a bout of mono, the symptoms of which include fever, fatigue, and malaise.

[4] Ibid. 150.

[5] See Bruce Russell “The Cinema of ‘Pure Means’: John Wiese’s Battery Instruments as History Lesson.” Battery Instruments Catalogue, Christchurch, HSP (2010) 28-35; and “Time under the Rule of the Commodity: Notes Towards an Epistemology of Tape Music.” The Book of Gilded Splinters, Lyttelton, Ekskubalauron Press (2007) 6-9.

[6] Gertrude Stein “Saints and Singing: A Play.” A Stein Reader. Ed. Ulla E. Dydo. Evanston, Northwestern University Press (1993) 397.

John Wiese Selected Discography

Zombie LP, Presto!?, 2009
Circle Snare CD, No Fun Productions, 2009
Dramatic Accessories LP, Ultra Eczema, 2008
Soft Punk LP/CD, Troubleman, 2007
Fronts (with Bruce Russell) 7", Helicopter, 2006
Teenage Hallucination: 1992-1999 CD, Troniks, 2005
Magical Crystal Blah 3 CD, Helicopter, 2004

derek beaulieu – Selected Visual Works

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for helen 3

for helen 4

for helen 5

for kevin

for kristen 1

for kristen 2

for kristen 3

rectangle 1

rectangle 2

red

Author of four books of poetry (most recently the visual poem suite chains) and two volumes of conceptual fiction (most recently the minimalist visual novel local colour), derek beaulieu’s work is consistently praised as some of the most radical and challenging contemporary Canadian writing.

Publisher of the acclaimed smallpresses housepress (1997-2004) and no press (2005-present), and editor of several small magazines in

Canada

, beaulieu has spoken and written on poetics internationally. Toro magazine recently wrote “using techniques drawn from graphic design, fine art and experimental writing, [beaulieu] vigorously tests the restrictions, conventions, and denotations of the letters of the alphabet.”

beaulieu’s fractal economies (talonbooks, 2006) included a cogent and widely-discussed argument for poetry which worked beyond strict meaning making, pushing the boundaries into graphic design, gesture and collaboration.

beaulieu lives in Calgary where he teaches through the Calgary Board of Education and at the University of Calgary. He can be reached at derek@housepress.ca

Thanks to the author for allowing these poems to be posted here.

[The left margin of Sir Thomas Urquhart’s "Lexicidion," from The Trissotetras. In The Works of Sir Thomas Urquhart of Cromarty, Knight: Edinburgh, Maitland Club, 1834. 132-145.]

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