Practice Sucks: R.I.P in Peace
When you’re learning to play an instrument, you just want to go solo and really Express Yourself. But there’s this nagging to practice, practice, practice. People are always telling you to train in the Traditional, so you know which rules to break. But, man, I didn’t want to be cooped up in the jail cell they call a practice room. I just wanted to go solo and Express Myself.
So there I was, ready to go. Without any practice, I just picked up my horn and blowed on it, man, I just picked up my ax and I shredded. No one could listen for long. But I was solo, I was free, and I wasn’t about to let people tell me that you can’t play the saxophone and a double neck guitar at the same time. I was like a dragon, like the Hydra.
And then I stopped for a second. I looked down at the velvet-lined cases and thought, man, those cases are not cases: They are coffins. That’s where my solos go to die. And so I promised my solos that I wouldn’t ever put them to rest. I came up with a motto, a mantra: LIP—that’s what I say—Live in Peace. Except it’s not really peace, I mean it is, but let me explain: this suffering, The Suffering, that is my solo, is the peace I’m looking for. It’s like Hézoos on the cross. He was suffering, but he was in peace, right? That’s how I am. So I say Live in Peace.
Hmm, I’m starting to rethink this phrase now, because I’ve never told anyone that before. Maybe it’s not quite right. Maybe it should be more like “Rip in Peace.” Yes! That’s a freeking self-reflexive acronym. Do you get it? R.I.P. in Peace!
That’s how my solos are. They are like self-reflexive acronyms. They are like two Ouroboros eating each other. My sax wraps around and tries to eat my guitar. The guitar hears it, and screeches, “No, Saxophone, I’m going to eat you!” And it does, and the sax tries to squeal back, but it has its mouth full with the guitar.
The two of them are howling like a pack of dogs. I have to tear them apart, which sounds like the bursts of an exploding supernova. Then the supernova-bursting sound rewinds as they chomp back down on each other. We go back and forth, back and forth. It’s like a jet hitting the sound barrier and then backing off, just enough to pull the throttle and Hit It Again. I feel like the Sun God up here. My instruments are like Horses of Fire! If I wasn’t down here in the subway, I would be setting the whole Earth in flames.
And if these dogs would just stop fighting. Man, I can not get them to get along. I used to be able to just say RIP, guys, Rip in Peace. But not anymore. I’m afraid that the solos have completely overtaken my soul. I thought this was going to be freedom, but it’s not freedom at all. I am a prisoner of my solos.
Nuclear Cataracts, Dr. Charles Coutela, Xanthopsia, Disordered Eye
Study with Rye Bread, Diskette, and Archive
Steer Skull, Fruit Fly Memories, The Curse of the Flying Hellfish
New seven-part essay on photototography and the politics of representation by Errol Morris: (Lisa Oppenheim show closed at Harris Lieberman; John Baldessari in frieze magazine; FSA/OWI over at the LOC). Researchers implanted a horrible memory into a fruit fly’s brain—dopamine gives some pleasure; not the case with fruit flies, in which case it delivers fear. … An’ another fake, plus some stolen artworks. Yesterday during lunch I got all excited about tontines, which today reminds me of “The Curse of the Flying Hellfish.”
October 16, 2009, 1 annotation
Track Bikes, Mud Wrestling, Highway Safety Spheres
Two track bikes are in the gallery. There is the sound of talking, of arguing, presumably coming from the track bikes. They are going on and on about network neutrality. It’s unclear who is for and who is against the principle. The conversation breaks regularly as they pop open cans of Coca-Cola Classic and Pabst Blue Ribbon—sometimes mixing the two. Projected on the wall is a Kenneth-Tin-Kin-Hung-meets-Kota-Ezawa-meets-Paul-Chan video of Bob Kahn and Vinton Cerf, co-inventors of the Internet Protocol, mud wrestling in an endlessly looped match, refereed by Steve Wilhite, inventor of the GIF file format. The background consists of a football field pockmarked with dark pools, resembling the landscape encountered by Digory and Polly in C. S. Lewis’s The Magician’s Nephew. The match plays out across many pools: Kahn breaks Cerf’s glasses, Three-Stooges-style, and grinds him into the mud; Cerf, appearing in a new pool drags Kahn by the beard across the ring. Wilhite, chopping his right hand in the air, slides from poolside to poolside. The concrete floor of the gallery is sprinkled with highly reflective Highway Safety Spheres, which refract the spotlights into horizontal rainbows. For each visitor, a rainbow; or actually a circle—the rainbows are more like rings.
2235–37
2235: A rat was seen in the Nassau Avenue subway station twisting an empty plastic bag of chips into a small hole in the wall.
2236: And a man was seen rubbing the two ends of his phone against his gums and lips between Metropolitan and Broadway.
2237: He was twice tricked: first of all into believing that he could multitask; and secondly that it was more convenient and efficient to do so.
Dreams, Backward Causation, the Hereafter
Obviously, This Man is, or may be related to, Captain Geoffrey (“Pirate”) Prentice, “manager” of other people’s fantasies. Backward causation, when what happens in the future doesn’t stay in the future, may be jinxing the LHC, and all other projects that seek to produce Higgs particles, says a series of papers by physicists Holger B. Nielsen and Masao Ninomiya (of the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics. But the question remains——
Bichon Frisé, American Scene, Van Gogh’s Letters
An exhibition at Art Since the Summer of ’69, a gallery run by Hanne Mugaas, Fabienne Stephan, and Paul-Aymar Mourgue d’Algue, titled “The Bichon Frisé in Art,” is based on an ongoing web-based project by Edward J. Shephard Jr., head of collection development for Binghampton University libraries. “This is an exhibition,” writes Shepard on his website, “of depictions of the Bichon Frisé in various works of art spanning over 2,000 years. It includes artworks that explicitly identify the subjects as Bichons or as ancestors of the breed, as well as other works that I … have deemed to be possible depictions of the Bichon Frisé or its ancestors.” Robert Gober curates a retrospective of work by American Scene painter Charles Burchfield at the Hammer museum. Van Gogh’s letters—“over 16,000 searchable words, 62 index topics, 1284 topic citations, and 1223 artwork citations,” according to the website Web Exhibits—are now online.
11 October 2009
Things Magazine posted about Cryonics. Taco Bell was the only restaurant in the movie Demolition Man, starring Sylvester Stallone. John Connelly Presents presents a slide show with a bunch of pie charts. The Serving Library is hosting two PDFs: Right to Burn and Message in a Bottle (an essay about Dr. Bronner’s soap). Video artist Borna Sammak had a solo show at Best Buy. About this time last year Natascha Sadr Haghighian held conversations with Avery Gordon and Tom Keenan at Whole Foods, the transcripts of which were printed in e-flux’s journal. I was walking down the street and saw a white plastic grid that had been smashed to pieces and thought, What a way to organize a city grid. I’m reading Gravity’s Rainbow; current sentence: “Inside the bowl, the two goldfish are making a Pisces sign, head-to-tail and very still.”
