Intimacy

-with Rit

To those servants in Altman's Gosford Park
Separate because they share a name with
Their masters this is the history of an emotion

Before an emotion becomes an emotion
The subject before the subject was a subject
Space and time feels small with you here

A kind of parallel universe of labor thresholds
Separate upstairs from down intimacy
Anticipates a coevalness of souls not equality.

Con/Crescent 1

Check out Con/Crescent 1, a journal of emergent criticism coedited by Jamie Townsend and Nicholas A. DeBoer featuring work by Brenda Iijima, Bethany Minton, Andrew Schelling, Nicholas A. DeBoer, John J. Courie, Thom Donovan, CAConrad, Jamie Townsend, Marie Larson, Amanda Courie, Adrienne Dodt, and Stephanie Goldfarb.
http://www.concrescentpress.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=52&Itemid=58

Boy in the Balloon

It's like that
The boy in
The balloon
Supposed to
Be trapped
Is not actually
There the bal-
loon touches
Down the F.B.I
Are there we
All are rapt
By this spectacle.

It's like that the
Boy supposed to
Be secreted in
The weather balloon
Is not there when
The balloon touches
Down our sense of
The real is like
That buoyed by
Our attention.

It's like that
The boy in the
Weather balloon
Not actually there
When the balloon
Touches down is
Mistaken for
Reality the media
Secretes attention
Like it was reality
This is how we
Will have been
Seen through
History's eyes
Hopefully.

It's like that
There're eyes where
The head should have
Been there's a boy
In a balloon that
Is barely there that
Is almost a meme
Where we touch
Down doing the
Imaginary American
Thing again while
Wars go on
Elsewhere while
Hardship is all
One actually feels.

Fuck that balloon boy
And that balloon fucking
Dad their faces are not
Real in the real sunshine
Of national discourse
Hovering like an unidentified
Flying object something
Even more mythical
Dreaming of potential.

Fuck that balloon boy
Who didn't really climb
Into the balloon whose
Father was a motherfucker
Whose mother was a
Fox News victim like I want
To see a U.F.O. anyway
This is a poem for my
Friend Brandon Brown.

To Crown

My friend our dream of waking disavows us
It doesn't notice or give presence to the
Violence we pursue being in relation to
Other beings and blood spilled elsewhere

Than this labyrinth this space-time a site
Where I or you will not become grieveable
Inextricable from a genealogy of morals
Images flaring-up non-sensible of what we

Are capable of given to other visions the
Objective withdrawal of what we would
Have been unnamed just a mound of skulls
Inscrutable quiddity we will not awake

From refusing I have a dream yes we can
Is our bad faith for which skin and action
Has failed us the collective will to awake
Now time is only sufferance saving what we

Know the intelligible guns the accidental
Guts no names enough to crown these bodies
Tear-covered letters form a threshold
Fiction forgoes hell for a made-up sun.

In the In Between (at FANZINE)

Here is my full interview with Chen Tamir and Galit Eilat, curators of the Israeli-based Mobile Archive. Immense thanks to Casey McKinney, chief FANZINE editor, for his labor intensive work editing and designing:

"On the evening of September 15th, 2009 I attended a talk by Galit Eilat and Reem Fadda at New School University's Vera List Center about the Israeli Center for Digital Art’s Mobile Archive. The Mobile Archive is an archive of approximately 1000 DVDs permanently housed in Holon, Israel currently traveling throughout Europe and the United States. With each new destination it travels to, it grows by as many as twenty-five DVDs depending on the choices of the local curators and artists involved in the collaborative project. Currently, the Mobile Archive is being exhibited at Art in General in SOHO, New York, guest curated by the Israeli-Canadian curator, Chen Tamir, as well as curators Regine Basha and Adina Popescu.

During Eilat's and Fadda's presentations at the New School, I was struck by the curators' many insights about the geopolitical situation in the Middle-East, and the specific ways that native artists are addressing the ongoing conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. Fadda's description of Israel/Palestine as a "laboratory for mobility" was especially interesting, and something which I wanted to discuss further with Eilat and Fadda when the panel concluded. I was also very struck by a video Eilat showed from her Liminal Spaces project, which brings Israeli and Palestinian artists, intellectuals, activists, and scholars into dialogue with one another in order to think about and enact interventions into the bureaucracy that governs Israel/Palestine. This video showed Palestinians and Israelis speaking through the wall separating Israel from Palestine with one another via a two-way video conference. During this conference, to the surprise of the artists responsible for setting up the conference, Israeli soldiers policing the wall did not stop the conference and instead looked on with curiosity and amusement.

One of the issues foregrounded in the following interview, which took place on Friday September 18th between myself, Chen Tamir and Galit Eilat at Art in General, is the extent to which The Mobile Archive and Liminal Spaces are both creating genuinely new spaces for artworks to exist in cross-culturally. The Mobile Archive produces spaces for artists to show work that is in between private and public distribution, inclusivity and exclusivity, and which also challenge art's value as commodity insofar as the Archive prioritizes art's "symbolic" values––the ways that artworks can transmit ideas across cultures and create spaces for cultural dialogue. In the case of Liminal Spaces, artists and fellow travelers come together to find the loopholes in a bureaucratic structure. Much like the work of Eastern European artists such as the Slovenian IRWIN group, Liminal Spaces studies the situation in Israel/Palestine in order to intervene and act in ways that affect people's lives in the region on a day-to-day basis. Whereas the IRWIN group issues civilians passports, Liminal Spaces provides information about the Israeli military's use of checkpoints to police Palestinians and Israel's own civilian population."
--from In the In Between: a Conversation with Galit Eilat and Chen Tamir about the Mobile Archive