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

MUSEO//12

Check out the latest issue of MUSEO, which features an interview with Shana Moulton, as well as a gallery of screen captures.

Remains

Would we no longer
Be ashamed of being
The remains of us
And what they are
Withholding while we
Decimate other peoples
Money is a necessary
Evil morality tells me
To blow it out my ass
Suck it up like I was
Not condemned by
Common sense the
Senses of your abstract
Loads depleted by
Grammar governance
And training let's make
A new orifice sew
It up let's fuck like
Dollar bills infinitely
Exchangeable but with-
out actual value
Would we no longer
Be a resource.

Bharat Jiva / No Gender launch event

Please help us celebrate the release of

Bharat Jiva by kari edwards
kari edwards: NO GENDER
Reflections on the Life & Work of kari edwards
edited by Julian T. Brolaski, erica kaufman, and E. Tracy Grinnell

Monday, October 12, 2009
@ Dixon Place (161 Chrystie Street)
doors at 7pm, event begins at 7:30pm sharp
Admission is $6 at the door

with readings by:

Rob Halpern
Akilah Oliver
Marcus Civin
Brenda Iijima
Bill Marsh
Tim Peterson (Trace)
Fran Blau
Julian T. Brolaski
CAConrad
Anne Waldman

kari edwards (1954 - 2006) was a poet, artist and gender activist, winner of New Langton Art's Bay Area Award in literature (2002). edwards was the author of have been blue for charity (BlazeVox, 2006) obedience (Factory School, 2005), iduna (O Books, 2003), a day in the life of p. (subpress collective, 2002) a diary of lies, Belladonna #27 (Belladonna Books, 2002), obLiqUE paRt(itON): colLABorationS (xPress(ed), 2002), and post/(pink) (Scarlet Press, 2000). edwards' work has appeared in numerous publications, such as anthologies Blood and Tears: Poems for Matthew Shepard (Painted leaf Press, 2000), and Electric Spandex: anthology of writing the queer text (Pyriform Press, 2002); as well as been exhibited throughout the United States, including Denver art museum, New Orleans contemporary art museum, University of California (San Diego), and University of Massachusetts (Amherst).

Speculating on Change at Vera List Center

Michael A. Cohen
Speculating on Change: Four Paradoxes of Our Urban Future
Friday, October 16, 2009 - 6:30 to 8:00 p.m.
The New School, Kellen Auditorium
65 Fifth Avenue, between 12th and 13th Streets
New York City
Admission: $8, free for all students, New School faculty, staff and alumni with valid ID
www.veralistcenter.org

Each year, an inaugural lecture launches the Vera List Center's annual theme, defining the intellectual territory that will be explored in public programs throughout the year. The lecturer introduces the theme in the broadest sense, serving as a guide to the range and richness of the topic at hand, and rooting the concept within The New School's intellectual tradition.

This year's programs call for a speculation on notions of "change," specifically some of the descriptions, procedures and perceptions associated with change that inform collective action, whether political, scientific, or cultural. The inaugural lecture is delivered by Michael A. Cohen, Director, The Graduate Program of International Affairs at The New School.

The current global economic crisis demonstrates the impact on the economic welfare and political stability of both rich and poor countries of accelerating global flows of people, ideas, capital and competition for control over human and natural resources. Cohen discusses cities both as sites of the greatest impacts of global change, but also as sites providing solutions to some of the challenges that result from such change.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Michael A. Cohen (Ph.D., University of Chicago) is Director of the International Affairs Program. He also works as Advisor to the Dean of the Faculty of Architecture, Design, and Urban Planning of the University of Buenos Aires. Before coming to the New School in 2001, he was a Visiting Fellow of the International Center for Advanced Studies at New York University. From 1972 to 1999, he had a distinguished career at the World Bank. He was responsible for much of the urban policy development of the Bank over that period and, from 1994 to 1998, he served as the Senior Advisor to the Bank's Vice-President for Environmentally Sustainable Development. He has worked in over fifty countries and was heavily involved in the Bank's work on infrastructure, environment, and sustainable development. He is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences Panel on Urban Dynamics.

Cohen is the author or editor of several books, including most recently Preparing the Urban Future: Global Pressures and Local Forces (ed. with A. Garland, B. Ruble, and J. Tulchin), The Human Face of the Urban Environment (ed. with I. Serageldin), and Urban Policy and Economic Development: An Agenda for the 1990s. Other recent publications include articles in 25 Years of Urban Development (Amersfoort, The Netherlands, 1998), Cities Fit for People (Kirdar, ed., 1996), The Brookings Review, Journal of the Society for the Study of Traditional Environments, International Social Science Review, Habitat International, and Finance and Development. He is currently completing a study of urban inequality in Buenos Aires. He has taught at the University of California at Berkeley, The Johns Hopkins University, and the School of Architecture, Design, and Urban Planning of the University of Buenos Aires.

What Came to Be Called Values

--for kari edwards after reading Bharat Jiva

I.
Since we are disciple
And we are disciplined

The sky rhymes with interpellation
And history rhymes with sorrow

I plays dead the real
Dead can't even counter-

fire or be recalled
At a speed faster
Than the speed of light

A sun without shadow
Shining in these holes
And other holy
Places of disagreement

Your shrapnel erotica
Your maze of skin
Tests living labor

Make us governable
Virtuosos yet you keep moving

A kind of angel of discourse
I.e. an instant

Messenger mediating
The memoir of our mnemotechnique

What came to be called values.

II.
Play dead no one no longer will
Will this maze of skin

Docile flesh performance who is a hostage
To their inherent values

I am listening to your time sense
To the gerunds in your breath

That won't let your body be possessed
By anything except catastrophe

And negative experience which is a mode
Of I without name or defense

Our death and their deaths become porous
Yet irreplaceable

Neither the sky or the earth are transcendent
But present a world outliving us.

OCTOBER 129: Chan and Buchloh

I don't normally read OCTOBER. And not because I don't admire it. I was raised on it, but for some reason I just forget it exists sometimes. Reading some of the current issue, I was very moved by Paul Chan's "The Spirit of Recession" and Benjamin Buchloh's "Raymond Pettibon: After Laughter." Chan is one of the most intellectual and politically minded artists I know working today, and his piece goes to show it as he takes apart the cultural politics (if not the obscure economics) of 'recession' through recourse to autobiography, essay, and polemic about the state of visual arts. Buchloh's "After Laughter" is a brilliant and clear reading of Raymond Pettibon's oeuvre situating the artist's work within a tradition of fine art and political caricature. His basic argument: that Pettibon goes beyond caricature in order to invent a rhetorically slippery drawing practice that can adequately respond to post-70s Right-wing 'spin' and (post-) Reagan-era power dynamics. Not having written (or even had an intelligent conversation) about Pettibon's drawings before, but always having admired them, I was very moved to read something that so clearly expressed my own intuitions towards Pettibon's work. Buchloh's article makes me wonder who is taking-up Pettibon's rhetorically astute caricature among a younger generation of artists. And what writers/poets have a sustained drawing practice in the service of their politics.

Twitter Crackdown

Twitter Crackdown: NYC Activist Arrested for Using Social Networking Site during G-20Protest in Pittsburgh * Elliot Madison was arrested last month during the G-20 protests in Pittsburgh when police raided his hotel room. Police say Madison and a co-defendant used computers and a radio scanner to track police movements and then passed on that information to protesters using cell phones and the social networking site Twitter. Madison is being charged with hindering apprehension or prosecution, criminal use of a communication facility, and possession of instruments of crime. Exactly one week later, Madison's New York home was raided by FBI agents, who conducted a sixteen-hour search. We speak to Elliot Madison and his attorney, Martin Stolar.

Listen/Watch/Readhttp://www.democracynow.org/2009/10/6/twitter_crackdown_nyc_activist_arrested_for

Books & Magazines I Received this Past Year

that I have not written anything about (yet) but enjoyed reading and would highly recommend to others:

Etel Adnan's There (Post-Apollo)
George Albon's Step (Post-Apollo)
Jose Felipe Alvergue's us look up / there red dwells (Queue Books)
Animal Shelter vol. 1 (ed. Hedi El Kholti)
Alan Bernheimer's Billionesque (The Figures)
Brandon Brown's Camels (TAXT)
David Buuck's 17 Reasons Why (Mission 17 Gallery)
David Buuck's Buried Treasure Island: a Detour of the Future (BARGE)
David Buuck's The Shunt (Palm Press)
CAConrad's Advanced Elvis Course (Soft Skull)
Damn the Caesars vol. 5 (ed. Rich Owens)
Marcella Durand's AREA (Belladonna)
Marcella Durand's Traffic and Weather (Futurepoem)
Rob Fitterman's The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (Edge)
Rob Fitterman's War, the Musical (Subpress)
Ted Greenwald's 3 (Cuneiform)
Ted Greenwald's In your Dreams (Blazevox)
Ted Greenwald's Two Wrongs (Cuneiform)
Rob Halpern's Weak Link (Slack Buddha)
Carla Harryman's Open Box (Belladonna)
Geof Huth's Eyechart Poems (Queue Books)
Brenda Iijima's Rabbit Lesson (Fewer & Further Press)
Lisa Jarnot's Night Scenes (Flood)
Paul Foster Johnson's Refrains | Unworkings (Apostrophe Books)
Judith Goldman's The Dispossessions (Atticus / Finch)
Erica Kaufman's Censory Impulse (Heretical Texts)
David Larsen's Names of the Lion (Atticus / Finch)
Sara Larsen's Novus (Earthworm Press)
Joel Lewis's Learning From New Jersey (Talisman)
MIMEO MIMEO vol.'s 1/2 (Cuneiform Press)
Miranda Mellis's Materialisms (Portable Press)
Geoffrey Olsen's End Notebook (Petrichord Books)
Rich Owens' Delaware Memoranda (Blazevox)
P-Queue vol. 6 (ed. Andrew Rippeon)
Prismatic Publics: Innovative Canadian Women's Poetry and Poetics (ed. Kate Eichhorn and Heather Milne, Coach House)
Frances Richard's Shaved Code (Portable Press)
Andrew Rippeon's Priest (Vigilance Society)
Satellite Telephone vol. 1 (ed. Robert Dewhurst)
Jennifer Scappettone's Err-Residence (Bronze Skull)
Joshua Schuster's Theater of Public Safety (Handwritten Press)
Dale Smith's Susquehanna (Punch Press)
Joanathan Skinner's With Naked Foot (Little Scratch Pad Editions)
Sasha Steensen's The Method (Fence)
Rodrigo Toscano's Collapsible Poetics Theater (Fence)
Rachel Zolf's Human Resources (Coach House)

Two Poems For Friendship

I.
Deserve your enemies my friend
Because the world is burning
From eloquence and all the fake

Shit that is made for consequence
To hide behind supposed disparity
And pretend to be the conscience

Of the world all I really wanted
Was to have an honest conversation
All the world wants for conversation

But your flaming leaves it cold
A kind of lack for lack's sake
A flick that can't cover our larger

Insalvageables distances grow
In our breath like some possible
Community formed in what remains.

II. The Progress of Our Naïveté
-for Rachel

Or "patiency" which is not
The opposite of agency as
Rob often says but the inverse

Of willing ourselves to con-
stantly be a master over
Objects the more one knows

The more one listens to
The gaps in everything we
Do like those soldiers abroad

Firing into a daylight not
Anybody's to destroy who
Controls those docile bodies

And what will be their subject
Is not just an abomination
Of what we cannot see

But a fleeing into the holey
Spaces they have made
Despite our beautiful theories.

ECOPOETICS 6/7 Launch at Artbook/X Initiative

ECOPOETICS 06/07 at Artbook/X Initiative

A nomadic, “pop-up” launch and open house Oct. 14th, 4-6pm. Readings from 5-6pm inside Fritz Haeg’s Dome Colony space at Artbook/X Initiative 548 W 22nd St., NYC.

Readings and performances with Rodrigo Toscano, Lee Ann Brown, Thom Donovan, Julie Patton, Emily Abendroth, Jonathan Skinner and others to celebrate the release of the latest issue of ecopoetics (06/07).

The editor of the magazine will be present from 4-5pm to discuss the project. / Ecopoetics 06/07 (covering 2006-2009), packed with poetry, prose, criticism, translation, interviews and artwork from nearly eighty contributors. An Australian Eco-Poetics section, guest-edited by Michael Farrell. A Theodore Enslin feature. Interviews with Gary Snyder and mIEKAL aND. New work from Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Benjamin Friedlander, Forrest Gander, Joan Retallack, Andrew Schelling, Gary Snyder, and others. Bilingual pages from Antonio Ochoa and Angélica Tornero. Collapsible poetics by Rodrigo Toscano. Rachel Blau DuPlessis’s “Nanifesto.” Artwork by Christine Boileau, Justin Clemens, Ray Meeks, Isabelle Pelissier and Stephen Vincent. Ten color plates. Bark beetle translations, sound walks, field pages, slow texts, dictionaries of imagined flora, and more . . . Copies of the magazine will be available for purchase, also available through SPD.

Notes On Conceptualisms Review at BOMB

Check out my review of Rob Fitterman's and Vanessa Place's Notes on Conceptualisms currently up at BOMB's blog. Thanks to BOMB editor Mónica de la Torre for her feedback and encouragement.

"Whereas conceptual art prioritized the dematerialization of the art object as a means of overcoming art-as-commodity, conceptualist practices in recent poetry deconstruct the authority of author and text by prioritizing ideas as the principle source of a work’s authority. Doing so, conceptualist writers invite their erstwhile readership into a discourse about poetry’s function as a site of institutional, epistemic, pedagogical, and social authority (rather than into debates about how “good” or “bad” a poem may be). Economics is still a big target for poetic conceptualism, but not so much the status of the poem as commodity since poetry tends to operate in a much smaller economy than that of visual arts (the poets whom I know best, for instance, tend to subsist through a gift economy by which the poet is communally vetted, whereas visual artists tend to operate in an economy of commodity exchange even when their works are contesting the very economic system through which their works find subsistence.)"

For Eleni and David

Armies swerve in your breath
Become porous to perfect rest
Insist their guts give out

That the plague is everywhere
We will have been without
Organs or an agreement

To no longer do violence
Committing shit in the other's
Mouth loving the face for when

It isn't eyes all full of ink
I would spill a million tons
If it would bring the dead back

And end these wars become
What we would have become
Were the world so cited.

Abigail Child is blogging

from Rome: http://abigailchildroma.blogspot.com/

Damn the Caesars vol. 5

Check out the fifth volume of Rich Owens' Damn the Caesars, which includes a gallery featuring new work and an interview by Brenda Iijima and Tyrone Williams.

Blood of the Beasts

--for Dorothea Lasky and Brenda Iijima, after Temple Grandin

The painlessness we all inhabit the
Stancheon and the pressure that holds
The body holds one within their own
Eternity what they must have felt as
They entered it not nirvana but a cold

Of the senses wiring the mind that is
Not us but is what we do from the remove
Of a camera that is not life being lived
But our deaths performed in advance

There is an automation of the eyes
That brings the whole to peace when
The animal is touched and not whipped
Ritual is what survives them the soul
Is anything that remembers this.