Monday, February 28, 2011

"Prop State" - pt 6

Scene: Noon, jungle

A Pig Farmer looks out over a sty. The air is filled with curling, vaporous squeals. The guides are pulling ropes taut from out of view, seemingly erecting a tent, or other temporary structure.

Pig Farmer: The faceless masses...

Guide 1: Tighter now...

Guide 2: (humming, then singing) I pressed my mouth against your back/

Guide 3: (singing) The pinkish skin of a sweet young sow/

Pig Farmer: You there!

Guide 2: (singing) Believed my head to have split in half/

Pig Farmer: Your singing is upsetting the hogs, tra la la...

Guide 1: We won't be a minute here, our ropes are almost set.

Sunday, February 27, 2011

visibility

"Prop State" - pt 5

Scene: Night, factory

Alfred Jarry addresses the shareholders, who are represented by the guides. The light in the factory flickers to some hidden music. A podium has been erected, constructed of books of various critical theory, to assure the shareholders of the seriousness of the operation. Baruch de Spinoza waits behind a deck of turntables.

Jarry: (reflectively at first, then stronger)

Oh my friends.

Was it Diogenes who wrote in the absence of friends? We have no morals to share here, no wisdom of profitability. We have lost our way in a poetics of production, the worker and the reader sleeping in the same bed. We are no heteronomous fellows!

Oh my friends.

I would rather return to the cliff than go on living in such a trance. Could it be believed that the fac- tory we have dreamt of for so long will finally come to pass? Who could believe it? We have imagined into the world a new-world. We have adorned our placards with slogans and IP addresses, lengthened our toe- nails to get purchase on the new grass, grown our hair like the ravens, and filed our teeth. We understand time in ways that others refuse to: factory time is simply a wider time than that of the world outside. It is within this wide time that our new worker will labor, her feet protected by company slippers, and her palms padded with company gloves. Our workers will be protected from market pressures, will create, in their entrails, small inviolate economies meshing into the factory body with small sounds of surprise.

Oh my friends.

Our workers will be in no single vector state. No need for lectures here. No. Ha. You know very well what I’m talking about, being educated men. Into this wider time we will be able to slip more workers, more ethics. We alone will recognize the worker as more than a cog, as more than a machine to be used up and discarded, but instead marshaled according to a new model. Our workers will be recognized in the factory as friends. They will be recognized as a distinct series of moving vectors, each with a specific trajectory. They will have souls, will have wide conduits in the quantum computer, will be busy formulating programs for fading and loving.

It is these quantum workers that will drive our factory. We will have no fixed points, but a constantly shifting matrix butressed by suicidal love for the culture of the West. That sweet decaying vapor that we call the individual. Darwin, in his later years, grew to hate birds.

Gentlemen, this is what we are up against!

Spinoza: (starts record and sings)

We return/
Through advances in simple vertigo/
To a new understanding of our actions./
We have set aside chisels and nets/
Busying our times/
With stretching strings/
And building lutes/
To sing materialist songs.

Monday, February 21, 2011

"Prop State" - pt 4

Scene: Evening, campus

Henri Rousseau is surrounded by guides, who attempt to extricate him from the derrick. They be- come increasingly tangled, and must use the improvised weapons to saw each other free.

Guide 1: I pulled him in to kiss him.

Guide 3: His breath was salty.

Guide 2: A sea opening up a horizon.

Guide 3: I bit his tongue.

Guide 1: Spat it out.

Guide 2: And felt a love like never...

Rousseau: George Bataille once wrote to me about the mouth, writing in a fit of anger, the kind of rage that ran like a dark thread through his optic nerve, sensitizing it to demon vibrations in architecture, writing as he stood, pointer in hand, before a cadaverous sheet...

Guide 1: What?

Guide 3: Tell us.

Rousseau: (distracted) A computer worm reset my homepage to http://www.divinedicks.ru ...

Guide 1: Worm?

Guide 2: A worm gave me a gift. The gift of a particular shade, a shade you wouldn’t even believe....

Guide 3: I saw a shade of blue out at sea once.

Guide 1: I was once on an island.

Guide 2: A shade you wouldn’t...

Guide 1: There was a drug, distributed freely by the tourism industry, distributed to fat germans in ships, to pale comics on shipboard clubs. Sends the user down a glittery surface, forgetting each inch, a kind of program of which the user is just runtime. In it, a two-sided world infinitely reproducible, transparent, moveable, through microadjustments of the fingers. But this drug....

Rousseau: (interrupting)
Economics is far closer to the occult than any of us would like to think. It is simply the ruling classes’ proclivity for a world within a world. A riddle like that of the secrets of the market where they squat.

Guide 2: No poem is for the reader. No picture for the beholder.

Guide 3: Blue the shade of a giant molecule...

Guide 1: Viva quanta!

Rousseau: Bataille once wrote to me of animals, the animal’s mouth. This mouth is a prow, plowing through the waves. It is the foremost projection of a sleek horizontality. A ship’s silhouette, a straight line from mouth to anus. Not so, for men. For men, eyes have driven the mouth into obscurity.

Guide 2: Forget our names.

Guide 1: Mouth the songs.

Guide 2: No need to speak.

Rousseau: Something has happened, but what?

Chorus of Guides:
But as in landlessness alone resides the highest truth, shoreless, indefinite as God...so better is it to perish in that howling infinite, than to be ingloriously dashed upon the shore, even if that were safety.

For worm-like, then, oh! Who would crawl to land?

Tuesday, February 15, 2011

"Prop State - pt 3

Scene: Noon, jungle

Henri Rousseau stands at a kind of improvised derrick. It has no drill, only the support structure. He wears a full climbing harness and carries ropes.

Rousseau:

I am devoted to the hidden face of American happiness. There is no foe worth overturning that is not first worth painting.
(He fiddles with coupling, attempting to climb the derrick. It is obvious that he is afraid to go above the first bracing, and may be experiencing spells of dizziness and vertigo. Music swells. Baruch de Spi- noza appears and begins to sing as Rousseau unsuccessfully climbs.)

Spinoza: (sung)

In there, Solar anus and political death /
In there, some Ego loss/
In there, some spirit guide/
In there, some burnt ember/
In there, some thrice sinewed boy/
In there, some frame music/

Scene: Evening, factory

Alfred Jarry cleans the gearing on his bicycle. The golden light ricochets around the noiseless fac- tory. There are hollow notes sung from the birds lining the rafters. He addresses a camera mounted high on the factory wall.

Jarry:

Gentlemen, I am building a new survival poetry; the old one was riddled with holes. My poem keeps tipping over; I’m trying to put too many ideas into it. I need to start from the ground up. That’s why I bought this factory; to renew the face of the world. To hold it to its promise.

What is this deep water? I can see only the end of the political age. I shake hands with this man, with that man, and the dumb pleasure of theater dissolves into something resembling theater, but entirely unlike it. Have you heard the story of the orangutan? This stupid monkey, sitting with a pile of dogeared books, his face fat with the pleasures of his cage, his shit neatly stored in a drawer....flexible....would you believe that he could suck himself off? What sort of man runs free? What sort of man has the buying power of his own dick? Anyway, this monkey, this demon seducer, left to his own devices, wrote a novel. The novel, written on black paper, was unpublishable. We asked several, and they agreed. But then there were the calls. The meetings. What have got to lose, they finally agreed. And overnight: a sensation. In short, this fatuous pleasure machine, this hairy man-child had managed something that none of us had been able to conjure: to sketch a new model for production, that avoided all the old economic pratfalls. All the activists, the orchestra owners, the Smith and Wesson holsters, the Volvo-drivers, the stage-managers were forced to admit: they had all been trumped, by this long-toothed soothsayer. The world was new again. The faces were new again. They had become the whole. Even this face. Do you remember?
Is this not the face? Let me come closer.

(Sets down tools) Is this not the face?

Monday, February 14, 2011

"Prop State" pt 2

Scene: Noon, jungle


Henri Rousseau, brush in hand, fingers soft in kid gloves, boots muddy from the peat, brushes the sweat from under the rim of his hat. He carries with him a book of poems by Swedenborg and a dirty bundle of schematics that he has begun to draw. The sky has opened up after the morning rain, and it is difficult to see, from the brightness hemorrhaging the particulate air.

Henri Rousseau:

I remember you...I have left my children, my half born, my stillness. Could we have a picnic here, among the pines? Could there be sacrifice, banishment from empire, soothsaying and entrails, faceplates shattered by warring clans? Could there be the frontispieces of mantels, broken church doors, succulent fruit and vegetables?

Could there be nothing less than the total despair of the stadium, the dull buzz of the crowd gone mad for blood? I remember you, I think.

I remember you from your paintings.

Your lines were drawn in hues of grey, soft colors of the factory floor, the servant’s quarters. Was there nothing more between us but shades?

There is a factory ahead! The trees are filled with birds, kept at bay by the arms of schoolchildren. The factory is dark now, but only a few years ago, strode across this valley, this river-welt, with fantastic steps. The factory is dark now.
I wrote my novel on blackened paper, I forced on my amnesiac brother a recognition, I balanced the ardor of millions, I opened my window onto the world-as-window. The factory is dark now.

Guide 1: (far away) The factory is no longer dark; it has been bought!

Rousseau: The factory is dark now, but has been bought.

Scene: Noon, factory

Alfred Jarry sits at a desk in a wood paneled management office in the dark ribs of the factory. His eyes are half-closed, his fingers at his temples. He has adopted this somewhat iconic pose to further im- press the shareholders, who will appear at the factory shortly. He is positioned so as to be silhouetted by the strong midday light, presenting an image that is comforting and self-aware. The bicycle he rode to the factory leans against the office wall, its frame speckled with mud from the road. The furniture is not the drab angles one would expect, but are sharply drawn, colored, and facing each other with the respect that comes from knowing one’s place in history. The factory, for now, is silent.

Friday, February 4, 2011

protexst


protexst

"Prop State" - pt 1

PROP STATE


Mortals have settled in their minds to speak of two forms, one of which they should have left out, and that is where they go astray from the truth. They have assigned an opposite substance to each, and marks distinct from one another. To the one they allot the fire of heaven, light, thin, in every direction the same as itself, but not the same as the other. The other is opposite to it, dark night, a compact and heavy body.

-Paramenides, "The Way of Truth." 50/55

Let our luggage pass duty free through the gates of heaven.

-Apollinaire, written on Henri Rousseau's tombstone.






A school rests on the edge of a jungle. Or rather, in its center. Lush and full of frightened and confident animals, the jungle is not benign, and not malignant, containing a hidden organizational system. In fact, it resists easy categorization, although it often serves as a meeting place and archive. A factory spreads caustically in the center. Of the school or jungle, it is often not clear, as both move back and forth through time, as if photographed by many lenses. The campus appears surrounded on each side by strip malls and conference centers. Several guides to the school regularly present tours and generate the initial pedagogical and administrative structures. They prefer subtle music. Although anonymous workers, they control the descriptive model of the school. Their ambitions to middle management are misplaced. Henri Rousseau, wanders the jungle, hoping for some sort of sloughing off: the antipodal grace of the surviving cave-people; the poetry that was surrendered at Thebes, ground to dust, and reappeared in the gilt slo- ganeering of anti-Fordist activists. Baruch de Spinoza, breaks from grinding lenses, to sing hymns. Alfred Jarry, vigorous bicyclist and factory owner, only wishes to write again, but feels a sense of duty to his shareholders. A Pig Farmer, leaning on his now useless spade, hopes for the continued modernization of his profession, through advances in genetics and skin fabrication.

ACT 1:

Scene: Noon, campus

Public Address, sent as a series of messages to every mobile device on the campus:

_______ ___________________

and then, seconds later:

alas.

Scene: Evening, campus

Guides enter, fashioning weapons from whatever is at hand. They are ethical, conserving what resources they can, using what
is available to them sparingly. They make their way slowly through the smog of the campus steamrollers, the sharp smell of asphalt, the muted evening heat of the blackened surface. The light is blue-green, the white masks at their mouths glowing in the dusk. They speak the same language.

Guide 2: This humidity....

Guide 1: We are not certain that this school is asleep. We are early; the air is cool.

Guide 2: (gesturing)
To the left you will see the cantina, where the students organize, and present impromptu lectures. These lectures aren’t researched, but are created on the spot, from the information available in the air.

Guide 1:
Above are the cliffs, where the despondent throw themselves. Above the cliffs, the gods.

Guide 3: (introspectively)
How many legs are required for suicide? Do octopuses commit suicide?

Guide 2:
How many legs are required?

Guide 3: (murmured)
How many...

Guide 1:
Who will forgive us our metaphors? Who will descend to present us with safety vests?

Guide 3:
Who will remember the swine-herders, the lonely drop-shippers, the faithless sheep-cullers, the pull-men, the neo-structuralists, the antiquarian book dealers?

Chorus of Guides:
When we were young, our mothers taught us to write, to write in language that could float in the air for others to pluck. We had a name for this floating, but we are old, and have forgotten it. Our mothers met under the freeways, always leading with spray cans towards the tunnels; the drainage was our teacher. The edging of the jungle was all that we needed to know. There was no end point, only subterranean truth.

We bring this memory to our work; we apply ourselves daily. There was a moment when we seemed necessary: that moment when dull faces turn towards a microphone, blushing with pricked conscience and the expanse of surprisingly ancient radio waves.

"Prop State" - excerpts

The following posts will be excerpts from an artist book that I'm working on.