from All I Want is to be in a Band, Man (IV)

I want to be in a band, man
Like Rimbaud wanted to be in a band
Or more likely wanted to be like all this stuff
The barricades were filled up with
During the Paris Commune, or so I imagine
After Kristin Ross’s The Emergence of Social Space
Which my friend Dana turned me onto,
All that we are the lived duration of our sociality is like
Those barricades made in such a way
That all of these meanings—the meaning of
Our work and life—seem temporary, mutable and arbitrary, yet full.
I want to be in a band
I want to be full like those barricades are full
I want my life to have meaning—or measure?—
Like those barricades have meaning and measure
The whole world thinking about how it is being made
That would be a politics to strive to create.
The whole world represented by its being made, through its being made.
Gives up art to be a worker.
Gives up art to be an (art) worker.
Gives up politics for life.
Because life becomes politics.
I want to be in band, not just a group, definitely not just any public.
Because, as Fred Moten says, there has never been a public
That wasn’t denied to most of us, most people.
The public is what has been historically defined
By its exclusion of certain people and not others.
What would be a public
That didn’t exclude us and others?
A band then? A really big band?

from All I Want is to be in a Band, Man (III)

But I want to be in a band, still
Some unresolved, unforeclosed sociality
(That singing is) (That being in a band is)
Going down like Rimbaud, say
To announce an end to which pronouns
To announce the organs unformed by work
That begin in our play—
To prove that these hands are made and unmade
By the music any one makes
Who is not just ‘me’ singing
Through the violence of that voice
Or a name we impose
On something when we feel
It is special, particular—like a band
Needs a name, like one feels they need to
Distribute this feeling for being in a band
Protean form of revolt, like a public
Not quite public yet, in an assembly of notes—
Like a ‘people’ forms a public—these notes.

from All I Want is to be in a Band, Man (II)

The DJ functions like love
To spread these petals difference
To see we don’t sing too sweetly
The stench of common sense
Wasted on your lips
Kissing me into which future
Like an ark of horns I
Haven’t heard
Because I can’t, I cant
With ears blown off
With an archive like
The tides are rising too
Into song and all those little islands they will
Only seem to rise to it, drowned
These waves like a wall of sound
This is the remix of a disaster hymn
I made when no one could hum immune
Or even probably hear me

from All I Want is to be in a Band, Man (I)

I just want to be in a band, man
And play anything ourselves out of here
Hear these tones like water stutters water
Like sunk ships suture the social or social
History was what we were immersed in
I hear your voice on the other side of disaster
What plays its way out of disaster
Just like it wanted to be, just like it wanted
To be in a band, convince us we are living
In a different future-past because the tones
The political economy of noise with its puncture
Of the present might wake/make a plinth
Through this struggle to be all-too-human
Come back from these feeling tones—
Assemblage, stutter, DJ function

Review of Xavier Le Roy's "Self Unfinished" (@ The Brooklyn Rail)

Here is a link to a little review I wrote about Xavier Le Roy's recent performance of his Self Unfinished at MoMA:

Xavier Le Roy’s Self Unfinished, which I viewed in a packed audience at the Museum of Modern Art in early February, is among a series of works by Le Roy exploring the limits of what, recalling Baruch Spinoza, a “body can do.” Given Le Roy’s background in biology (he holds a Ph.D. in that field), one cannot help but think about the influence of the “hard sciences” on his choreography. This is especially true in Self Unfinished, where one encounters a body that evolves from a robotic state to a post-human one. This dramatic evolution attempts to imagine the choreographic body as radically “other”—destabilized by certain uses of costume, movements, blocking, and props.

Arthur Echo at Zebulon: reading with CAConrad

I will be reading with CAConrad from our collaboration, Arthur Echo, next Tuesday, March 8th at Zebulon Cafe in Williamsburg, Bklyn at 7PM. Many thanks to Roger Van Vorhees for organizing the reading.