FINDING THE ROOOT / OBSERVATIONS / INTERVIEWING
66 DAYS WITH DAVID-BAPTISTE CHIROT
by Jared Schickling
[extract] this takes place by becoming aware of the flows of time seen in the dust motes in a light coming through the drawn venetian blinds of late winter’s afternoon—and mixing with these whorls of smoke from slowly burning cigarettes—if one begins to look with the sense of time being what one is seeing—then one finds that which is hidden in plain sight […] so Picasso will be more prone […] than others to see a bull’s head emerge from a trashed bicycle
Re: interview
From: David Chirot ( * @gmail.com)
Sent: Wed 3/04/09 8:32 PM
To: * ( * @hotmail.com)
[deleted] am so behind with so much justfrom the time lost on the old compueter itis ridicoulous / plius i made another long seriesof rerangem,tnsof these heaps of paers images works panitings p[ost cards etc etc and as usal the room that began okay now looks like it isone way to rejoining its more uisual way of looking [deleted] [insert] [received Thu 3/12/09 5:31 PM] the paint when applied in all sorts of ways and with all sorts of things mixed with it is “finding its way” to as nothing is pre-set or “envisioned” as a “completed project” [insert "Death from this Window" #s 020, 023, 024] sunday night they had pale rider on the cable tv the american movie channel ionthemidts of another of its clint eastwood orgies / i did see joe kidd again for the first time in eons and alsohang em high the spaghetti westrn trilogy and most of the whole seriesof dirty harry iflms i just put themon as the tv is to my left dueo to the small space- / and i can see itoutof the periphery of the eyee and hear it fine as i work on other things [deleted] [insert] [received Wed 3/18/09 9:53 AM] the presence of an otherness is in action as the person. myself in this case reminds and improvises with the flow of the paint or the clogs of poured powders that splatter and thrash about or blow across surfaces leaving trails as one sprays them with the paint. or throws things on to the surface. and. all one can do is practice all the time to train the eyes and hands and ears to be prepared and open aware and loose enough from all the discipline to trust in whatever happens, whatever one finds around the next corner, the unexpected and uncannily familiar all at once. the completely new. in the completely old broken and worthless or junked meanwhile on the tcm cable channel--the star of the month is ronald regan [deleted] if truth is stranger than fiction--does that include science fiction??-- / or isnt reality just science fiction in reverse [deleted] i am goingbackwards [insert "Death from this Window" #s 026, 032, 033] in the sense that i am continualyu realizing how incredibly [deleted] [insert] [received Thu 3/12/09 5:31 PM] also the chemical reactions of unexpected mixes etc of the rubBEings crayons with various surfaces and objects degrees of heat and dampness of cold and heat. the wind or the rain, snow. all these things which cannot be calculated that arrive out of the blue to work with. ever an improvisation and adventure. that one is ever working to be able to accept more and more of this into if i amnot that already-- / abrazos-- *
On Sun, Mar 1, 2009 at 10:32 PM, * < * @hotmail.com > wrote: I’ll never watch Eastwood the same. This is good. After your critique of certain poetic practices, you note alternatives: “reading shakespeare and villon--one sees on the page and hears with the ear--how unfixed thelanguage is--one stil understands what is being written / said.” I’m curious about that “unfixed.” There’s an unfixed that doesn’t work for you, words removed from the ground under ones feet, paraphrase, one to enable / justify no accountability. Can you describe an unfixed language actually involving the planet one inhabits? Would you talk more about the unfixed? For myself, something I’ve been thinking in your observations, and to paraphrase, about the “anally retentive fixed word,” the slow dribbling of certain writing, the “finely crafted line” recalling the author more than substance and there, its “con,” its politics, the fixed and “fetishized” word that you stress a visuality more mindful of speed, energetic time, stressing machinery’s standardization of visuality. I can’t help wondering. Reason though it grow big and strong through mastery seems to take pleasure in its own dismantling. The thing’s excess is the difference of the word but the word calls it, spells it. Which makes me. I use it, but doing much of its own work, given them like one receives a consciousness. Which seems ponderously slow, effects instant ever, this life is old, more adaptable (corruptible?) than people. Curious to hear your thoughts.
Re: interview
From: David Chirot ( * @gmail.com)
Sent: Wed 3/04/09 1:37 PM
To: * ( * @hotmail.com)
[deleted] endsup going down rabitholes [deleted] ca start to run waway with one and from one andone is chasing eafter it to see where itis going andnot always may itnow itslef let oaloneoneslef knowing anything at all [deleted] fixity / itmay havesomething to do with the solid stateof entropy [deleted] [insert] [received Mon 3/16/09 8:13 PM] the printing press altered the range of being able to present arrangements in patterns of words which previously as in Illuminated Manuscripts were done by hand. with the printing press, one begins to find that a wider and wider range of poets are using the “pattern poetry” shaped literally and figuratively by religious manuscripts and forms of notation from alchemical and Pythagorean influenced works, in which one finds the multiplicity of meanings of a single image, a single form, a single letter. many of these had an allegorical character, so that even in the works of Puritan writers in the American colonies in the English language, there is, with the ban on images, developed a form of visuality within the words themselves to convey a spiritual image of an allegorical character, again bringing forth the multiplicity of meanings found in forms. (i have to rememeber what this is called. Edward Taylor is an early American colonial poet who worked in this manner) beings which come to me / a new arrived theother morning in a half senetnece which iddnt get a chance to write down until abt 24 hours later when i felt that it had feld leaving but the remains tattered torn of the second half of a frist clausein a sentence that was like th bridge to nowhere that srh palin claimed to have stopped and didnt mention that in its place she had a built a road to nowhere, which led to where the bridge to nowhere wasn’t! / theidea of surreptisouly constructing the road to the cancelled bridge and bothof them going nowehre [deleted] [insert] [received Mon 3/16/09 8:13 PM] the impact and fascination with all manner of machines and speeds increased by motors applied to automobiles, the cinema camera and projector, the telegraph, the x-ray, the airplane. all of these “speed up” the Visual eye in a way that “carries” the possibilities of the mechanical eye into the human. and vice-versa [insert "Criminal Wall of Silence" # 086] wil go back to see what trian of thought iahd been on to pcik it up and see where it goes / something i think aloton is time--how works exists through and in time and obduratelyendure as though a challenge to it when accepting at the same time so to speak [deleted] [insert] [received Mon 3/16/09 11:14 PM] weathering, rusting, demolition, burning, war, use by humans and abuse by them. things traveling in time so that letterings and words “wear down” yet not entropically into a “steady state.” but negentropically, which is that the process doesn’t stop, “hit a wall” a cul-de-sac of confinement. but goes on through into the negentropic “re-cycling / re-generation” or really “out of noise arises music” a pardox for example is that by enduring for so long the messages of the cave paitings have been lost / what stil is there andone recongizes immediatel yis a communication / the comunication signals one stongly today from some time so far long ago / and yet al this iimmediacy is compounded by its being “undertood” but not “translated” as it were into wrods of the present time / thisis part of theongoing mysteries and fasciantions [deleted] [insert] [received Wed 3/18/09 9:53 AM] faster and faster one races along the lines of acquisition now might not want to write insuch a manner that what is apprehended by others asbeing “intelligble” becuase using the words of aliving language--yet at the same time the words letters sounds al have something which is hidden--andtravels through time remaining so-- / how much of the actual writing down, themarks on aper or a screen, are dispalcements, erasures, knockings ouof plavce in line, of these that are visble of others which have become eradicated / in office sihave been to through the years for poor people etc they have asign thatsays / “if it isnot in writing it never happened” / how ominous for theilliterate or those who cannot radthe sign asitis inenglish only-- / now--does thismean that by writing, one makes things “real, solid, substantial”--“ethcedin stone of atr least paper--” / so al the things which hapen and are not noted never took place-- / is this not the case with every new method of writing, in that it seeks in some sense toreplace, displace, make vanishtheprevious one(s)-- / ifone studies the trajectory of the “avant garde” and “manifestos” for example, there is a continaul loss of ernrgy--and an entropy setsin approahing some “solid state” or SOLID STATE state as in government-- / thatis a question i have for some formsof writing today-- / i read somepieces re “slow poetry” and ithink that poetry is already becomiong far too slow / sothat a slowing down supposedly ofpoetry wd turn iit into akind of mummy-- / animated by a conjurer known as the authroity thepoetof today [insert "Criminal Wall of Silence" # 091] and so poetry wd just be / what / i mean wlaking abt like zombie?? / i think that far too little is understoodof speed in relation to perceptions the senses a sounds and also to with in writing itself / the speed of writing is nothing to do with technological advsnements [deleted] thisis very slow indeed compared to thekinds of speed [deleted] [insert] [received Mon 3/16/09 8:13 PM] a paradox then is that the handwritten is reintroduced in the midst of this maniacal age with its fascination for speeds in all dimensions and spheres of activity and production. handwriting in a sense becomes something even faster than presses, because one cannot wait, in the shortened time awareness of the iWar, one cannot wait for the proofs, the corrections and the printer’s galleys. one has to “get the word out” as quickly as possible in writing via email in factaremoving incredoibly slowly because their main goal is simple to go from a here to a there wchich exist only as a coding-- / not as a real distance eitherin space or time, but something which creates a different form of of the appearnceof speed / to be moving fast to be moving slowwith writing what do these entail / is itnot in part the action of the attention / by speed reaing and gbling down booksof peotry and by skiming rather than reading attentively, there is the ideaof a speed goingon / instead this is drearilyslow becuase the attention ismissing outon most of what is hapning and so operating at a very low level of energy [deleted] [insert] [received Mon 3/16/09 8:13 PM] Malevich in the later 1920’s wrote an amazing essay on the intuition being always far more swift than any machine will ever be capable of moving. creating movement as well as in the action of production. and intuition not being as perishable as the huamn body of John Herny, who “beat that machine down” even though it kills him itis not a fixity or an unfisixty i think but perhaps realy a form of dilacetics [deleted] [insert] [received Wed 3/18/09 9:53 AM] things expose themselves the fleeting within the etrernal and the etrnal within the fleeting / that which is eternally beautiful for example caughtin the speed of passingmoment when dress islifted a certain way by awind blowing as awoman cross a street-- / that ismodernims for the poet-- / in emerson’s nature which has alot re the poet in it-- / he also writesof shiftingsof speed in relation with perceptions and writing-- / speed comes not from the object nor the machinesput to use nor the time it takes to traverse a distance / or thetime itakes to arrivein ones comprehension / but speed is the actual useof the attention on eht objects and things and beingsinthe world-- / the speed comes from within--iot islike the camera which can shift the angles of perception the speedof the film the chnaings oflight and shwodows the sense that even ithe short duration of taking a snap shot, thereis a movement in ime froom one moment to the next one so that in the interval so much has happend that the foto isalways in one way laggingbehind the action-- / like the conception in artistole that a poems meaphors are a step behind action / the dreamof rimabud was for poetry to precede action / and this he accomplished by writing before [deleted] whic might bewhy his compalints of bordeom inthe adult phase are so continaul!! / itis very dul to be trappedin livingout what one had written with such high speeds when young--and finds thepace now altereredinto ;lagging further and further beihind the speed of the writing / so that he dies realy becuase of being forced literaly to slow down with the amputationof hisleg fololwing the last incredibly painful year of his iminishing mobility / still he writes with hisold sense of speed in his verylast unfisnhed letter / i am conmpeltelyparaluyzed therefore iwish to embark early!! / (my exclamtions [deleted] with these words--) / olson raves abt thisintheprojective verse manifesto when he is shouting faster citizen faster one thought folows immediately upon another one preception right afternaother / totry torid himselfof the “after thought” which is the realtion of writing to action inthe aristotlien mode he so hhates and despsises-al his rants agsint me “hairy stotle--” / but he isnot--if one reads much of olsons peorty exceptinthe later partsof maxiums is itnot a very ponderousy slow moving hulk a lotof the time-- / huffing and puffing for breath woking its way up that hil in which the gatesof hel are found in a placein the town, what is it caled like a sewer hole-- / and thehil itselfismoving through time at speeds which ccnahbge with thein thecontextsof th actions and remdoellingsof landscapes aournd it / around it i mean / h what a form of fixity is isone in time-- / thatis, when writing ceases to move in and with and through time but unmoored from this exists as it were ahistorically / in tha sense an unmoored ahistoricity creates the vaccumwhich itis said nature abhors / (how doesone know if natue realy does abhor a vaacuum-- / if words are simple set out in an ahistorica framing and are supposed to exist as though freed fomr thecontxtsof time and hsirtory-- / thn in what ways do they move-- / with what are they realated--and how can the be claimed to be having anyaffecton anything around them [deleted] [insert] [received Mon 3/16/09 8:13 PM] for example, the Russian Futurists while creating the revolutionary Visual Poetry poems of a Mayakovsky, in Zaum used instead the handwritten letterings accompanied by hand made images, printed on non-traditional “paper” such as wall paper scraps and left overs, and other detritus of the “cutting room floor” so to speak of printing houses, interior decorators’ stocks and the like and that he writer is continauly trying to impress one with their birilance of pyrotechnics and flash and etc / itis actauly very much lie aperson whostandsup and wants to be the centerof atention and starts talingloudly or falshing around shiny objectslikemoney or some kindof watch or cel phone etc-- / the eeffort to be takenseriously andimmediately as a very important person / a very important poet!! / i donthave any real commentary onthis other thannoticed it so much-- / andwondered why that is-- / espcialy when there is the tlak of the death of the author / the author goes to such lenghts to distinguish themslvesloudly and celary beforeones sesnes-- / a ral death of the authormight begin with books beingputout, poems aperaing like those generic sectionsof supermaekrts in wich everything has asimplelable o it al the same / and books too’they had just a titleon them andno authors name / generic books--among the generic other tiems and thepichard susbtitutes for tuna and the sunflowe butter replacing peanut butter etc / a mixof the anonymous and the “sunstitute” basedon its valuein money / the cheaper the better [deleted] [insert] [received Mon 3/16/09 8:13 PM] one of the main points of The Look of Russian Literature is that this new Visual Poetry [Zaum] was created during a period when the Russian language as it is written was undergoing a decade-plus long crisis of determining which old letters, no longer sounded even though “still there” visually, had to be abandoned and new letters for new sounds included. this instabiliy and period of doubt and uncertainty over what is the actual lettering and sound-representation of notations creates a freedom that had not been there when the lock of a calcified written lanaguge held things in an ossified standardization that was literally “behind the times” thleesonepaid then the btter the food wd taste!! [deleted] [insert] [received Mon 3/16/09 8:13 PM] Visual Poetry in Russia then plays a part in the presentation of this great drama, this great period of determining what the Future / Futurist direction and forms of the Russian written language will be. (it was finally determined by those great levelers and standardizers, the Bolsheviks, after the 1917 revolution and also what may be claimed to be “revealed” by writing) / the more “stanadrdized” way of looking at this question may be that of “opque” and secrecy in terms of governments and “transparency” as being something both demanded from governments etc and a form of false sincertiy or simply a delusion in writing-- / this seems to be really an extremely reductive way of examining writing and the uses to which words are put, for one may produce the semblance of transparency which is in actuality a “camouflage” for both an profound opacity and a deep “nothingness”--as well as a current of thought which is the oppositeof what it seems to be, purports to be, on the surface-- / a reductive approach, in which there is an either / or of “transparency” and “opacity” operates as a form of camouflage in that it distracts the attention from erxamining what isin front of it [insert "Criminal Wall of Silence" # 107] so that “side issues” and “buzz words” become areas in which a hair splitting of terminologies may beunderatken so that the actual questions and actions going on at the moment pass by unnoticed-- / either / or, transparency / opacity--the discourse is very much of the Bush “for us or against us” variety, not so different from many tenets of what is called poetics [deleted] the important thing is to steer the reader clear of any form of sketpicism, questioning, reserach, investigation [deleted] [insert] [received Mon 3/16/09 8:13 PM] i bring this up becuase a simliar situation existed for a very long time in what is now the United States, as there was no real standardization of spellings, sounds, grammar and styles of writing for some centuries, up to the time of Webster, who introduced the first standardization of rules of spelling and grammar, etc into the American written language ideas which seem to be “so true as to be natural” [deleted] [insert][received Mon 3/16/09 8:13 PM] the idea of this standardization, as in one such case, is to centralize what is to be the “official language of these United States,” so that documents and poetry, prose and newpaper articles will all conform to a standard that does not vary, even though the American spoken language, as in all countries, varied and still does though less so, very greatly from region to region, from one year to the next as new immigrants arrived and others became second third and tenth generation Americans a question i have myself is why there is such an obession with the “turth facotr” in American poetics--that is, the idea that poetry in some way “tlls the truth”--or, that is, ceratin kindsof poetry do this and others are just a form of mush headed mass of cliches and on-ideas-- / an aspect of this is to produce a sense of “intelligence” which is greater than that of the “mainstream” or “normative”--ie to produce an elite-- / a paradox in poetry is the cotinual assertion f its “marginality”--on theone hand this is akind of “mourning of the loss of centralioty of poetry”--andontheother a “plus” as the marginal is oftenvalorized as being farmore the “truth” than the “central”-- / on theone hand one mourns one’s “marginalization” andon the other valirizes it is a new form of centrality-- / at once abject and triumphant, at once outin the cold and seated before the comfortbale hearth-- / to beboth a victim and a superpower-- / “to have one’s cake and eat it, too”—“tohave the best of both worlds” --
On Thu, Feb 26, 2009 at 9:11 PM, * < * @hotmail.com > wrote: [deleted]
On Thu, Feb 26, 2009 at 4:45 PM, * < * @hotmail.com > wrote: You draw from Rimbaud. What do you draw from Rimbaud? Why do you go to Rimbaud? What is Rimbaud to you? Why “Gaza / Rimbaud?”
Re: interview question
From: David Chirot ( * @gmail.com)
Sent: Fri 2/27/09 12:36 PM
To: * ( * @hotmail.com)
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[delete] [insert] [received Sun 3/15/09 4:10 PM] and not only seeing, but learning how to see. and thinking about it. turning it about from every angle. so the awareness of perception in visual terms as well as in the psychic realms, is intensely important in shaping language rimabud was one of the great “shocksof recongition” in mylife when i stunmbled by chance on a poem by him in dtention hall in the 7th or --no eit grade [insert "Death from this Window" # 044] they had those revolving racks with tonsof paperbakcson them--mainly signet classics new american library some penguins etc and scholastic books / the poem wasin a thick scholasticone something to do with the worlds poetry or poetry of the world etc- / i had read most al theother books that looked intersting and so oepned thisone up and turned to / emilydicksinon and somehaiku [deleted] the sleeperin the valley / by theendof that short poem i felt as sthough my had had been blownoff and alsmot an ecstasy state / i hadnever readnaythinglike it before / not so much just the words but the words between the words and lines and letters that were igntied by the visible ones [deleted] [insert] [received Sun 3/15/09 4:10 PM]choosing colors and the right detail thought [deleted] gotta findout abt this guy!! / and by endof the year we werelivingion france and iwas reading itinfrench-- / when i was reallyoung the poets who most effected me i mean affected though effected is poretty good too / were rimbaud bauldealire nevral emily d and whitman [deleted] [insert] [received Sun 3/15/09 1:44 PM] this way of seeing since childhood has been the way i have seen things i think in part. well to me the visuality of things is also the relaying into the air of sounds, and vice-versa colors and sounds evoke immediately images and they unroll like movies. and enter and journey among memory dream and imagaintion i actauluy spoke like that myself growing up there ventually [deleted] [insert][received Sun 3/15/09 4:10 PM] manner of seeing is to be there and watch listen be not seeking anything when i was six there was akid next to mein school who was called “mock bean” [deleted] [insert] [received Sun 3/15/09 4:10 PM] just “taking things as they come” because this way of being there is a way of non-involvement in the shaping of the world as much as possible. though as Heisenberg showed the obeserver does effect the things observed. but one may be moving through these things with the things as it were coming to oneself, rather than one going to them then i dsicovered one day when saw itin writing his name was the far more prosaic and uniteresting “amrk” [insert "Death from this Window" # 003] mark i mean-- [deleted] [insert] [received Sun 3/15/09 1:44 PM] so for me an immense amount of influences in visual poetry are found throughout simply being in the world and moving in it. or being forced to sit still or confined to a tiny space wherever one is there is so much to see and hear and touch for touch since the beginning since i touch from one side and the objects touch back [insert "Death from this Window" # 004] i reared riumabud al the time and the last monht or so have been rearding alotof theones i havent in ages--the earlyoines and les stupra les vieux coppees etc-- / verval and baudlaire always reading to and thatincoludes esp their prose works-- / aurelia by merval [deleted] many of the prose works journals and critcail essays by baudelaire [deleted] anotherpoet who i was agaga abt with the first liones i read is and stil is francois villon / in fact i ish i liked someplace whereon cd just speak 15th century frnech al the time! / in the writing of celine one finds again that 15th century kindof voice of villons- / it had baeen banished, like the poet-- / for centuries-- / from the freenchlanaguge and villon was somewaht negleacted [deleted] / in english there was a vogue for him starting inthe 19th century ,with swinburne for example dpoing translations / (under a psuedonym stepehen rodefer did an amzing villon book manyyaers ago--) / (under the psuedonym jean calais--it also has fotos of paris locations and old images from the time period-- / [deleted] a poet i like very much writing right now is murat nemet-nejat-- / i think his work is extraordinary--i was just rearding various ms he has sent me -- / and kent johnson also alotof his work i really like very much also-- / the new ccollection of his, or wel relatively new, is from last year--theone titled / homage to the last avant-garde- / is really terrific- / - itis a collection / zelected and the rnage ofmodes he uses his astonishing-- / i’ve been reading locra agin [deleted] also rummaging abt as per usal in dada writings except for tzara [deleted] a gas bag though of al people nowin the us he is singled out-- / he was bascialy a PR guy and in theusa now many attibrut to him everything to do with dada / as so often, the facts are ignroed in order to constrcut a figure [insert "Death from this Window" # 053] who takes a placein apnatheon in roder to suppress the actuality of things-- / i think tzara is merbaced as theone who is th least dada of them al and also very safe as hisworks before he beacme a comunist are al very apolitical / the other dadas are farmore dnagerous subversive poltical and --wel farmoreinteresting! / i wil write yu more re mr rimabud-- / rightnow i better shut up or wil go on all day! [insert] [received Thu 3/19/09 12:21 PM] apologize for sending such a load of junk yesterday morning, i am not sure what possessed me. usually i wouldn’t send anything like that as i realize as soon as done that what i am doing is trying to regurgitate a lot of ideas which in a sense i used to have and have thought differently on since then and continue to differently all the time. like recapitulations which come out as immense hairballs do from a cat the Gaza etc show cal is ongoing- / before ths one i had one that startedin july 2006 re lebanon and palestine as theinvasion of lebanon and some attackson gaza beganin thatmonth-- / i got involved long ago with the palestinain causes off andon [insert] [received Thu 3/19/09 12:21 PM] into ever more series of memories and images which are involuntary [insert "Death from this Window" # 036] and in recent years much more becuase what i first read was so much like what hapened with theindians in theusa- / at that time i was in the american indian movement whcih made it al themore pwoerful to read of the same things being repeated / notmany people realy realize that as the us basks inthegoow of electing obama they are also supporting apartehid [insert "Day on Fire" # 051] and the usa has never signed the international recongiton of the rightsof indegnous peoples-- so itis a repeating of the same old story of sttlers vs “stateless cultureless peoples” whose land water cultures have to be destroyed som some “superior rcaes” can move in and claim everything and also claim mandates from God-as was done here and is in Israel State -- / doing Gods work then turnsinto the cal to genocide-- / there is an old theme in american culture that is “rgeneration through violence”-- / you find it growing steadily in the mike hammer works, the frist seven, by mickey spillane--the last oneof that series esp is realy amzing-andnot unlike the endingof jim thomspson’s pop 1280 / that is, mike hammer and the sheriff in pop 1280 start towonder if their slaugherting ays arenot actauly “doing the Lord’s work, toiling in the vineyards of the Lord” etc-- / the gallows humorof the thomspon is quite amzing when setalongside the screwinessofmickey spillane! [insert] [received Mon 3/16/09 11:14 PM] i should note that a huge amount of American humor, including Mark Twain’s, in the US for some decades revovled around the incongruities between the written and spoken lanaguges [insert] [received Mon 3/16/09 8:13 PM] Artemus Ward [insert] [received Mon 3/16/09 11:14 PM] “boy constructor” is a “boa constructor” who himself stopped writing then and became a memeberof ithink the witnesses-- jevhovahs witnesses for the seventh day adventists--and di no wrting at al for abt a decade-- / then “relapsed” back into crankingout his gory tales-- / clint est wood is theone more recnet american artist to really understand portary thisin the trioology of / high plains drfiter-pale rider and the unforgiven-- / the protagnists--maybe you know al three--they are always on tv it seems! andirghtnow of course amc channel having yet anotherof its clint mearthons fivenights a week etc / but in drifter the one who does the regeneratin’ is a ghost / in pale rider itis a starnge preacher / andin the unforgiven itis a man of violence convertedby his dead wife to relgion who goes back to violence to do good--to save the good while damning himself stil further / only to retire andmove away and open a dry good s store as the eptiah tells the viewer-- / i attached abuynhc of the “after rimbaud’s ilumaintions” that appeared at the galatea site with someimages thenext issueof drunken boat hasmoreof these plus someother of my “translations” of some peoms mixed with words from other writers-- / morelater [insert "Death from this Window" # 051] and thank you so much for the questions! / abrazos *
On Thu, Feb 26, 2009 at 1:06 PM, * < * @hotmail.com > wrote: [deleted]
Re: (No Subject)
From: David Chirot ( * @gmail.com)
Sent: Thu 2/26/09 4:30 PM
To: * ( * @hotmail.com)
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On Tue, Feb 3, 2009 at 12:29 PM, * < * @hotmail.com > wrote: [deleted]
Re: New American Press and MAYDAY
From: David Chirot ( * @gmail.com)
Sent: Tue 2/03/09 4:41 PM
To: * ( * @hotmail.com)
[deleted]
On Mon, Feb 2, 2009 at 2:08 PM, * < * @hotmail.com > wrote: That was a great response. Thanks. Here’s some more. Feel free, take your time, if the response is even half as insightful as the last, it will have been worth the wait. “i dont regard words orletters as necessary for visual poetry / a crack inthe sidewlak ifone is folwoing i as aform of poem and soudning it out-- / well--there re no ltters there but certai visual soundpoetry@ / bob cobbing and i used to walkd down sidewlaks doing this and also sounding out shaowds oftrees as the move in the brezes on the side walks andtehir cracks / anything can be a nottation, as core / and one can do this by touch also.” I don’t want to reduce what you just said to a quibble. “Anything can be a nottation, as core”: Is there, for you, a difference between music and poetry? And to keep the interrogation going, to wrest more of your artistic sense from you, you make a distinction, I think, between word and image—among other things, words as fixed in time, as fixing time for all time, my paraphrase, and image / visuality as more amenable to the act of experiencing, operating in time, with time, subject to time, again my paraphrase. You seem to have a peculiar relationship to visuality born of a desire to render the flux not otherwise possible via static, printed pages. My question, and it might be simple, but please indulge me, the visual element of much of what you’d call visual poetry is as static an artifact as the printed page, no? My own encounter with such visual work, if I might try and sync it up with what you’re saying, is that I lack ready words for this visual (etc) encounter. What am I seeing (etc)? What do I read? I have a very similar experience when I try to apply the best-failing word to any given thing or experience. What do I call that? How do I say it? And in the poetry I admire, how do I read that? What am I reading? Which is to say, the word-which-leads-to-more-words, “opening” as you say, operates in time at least similarly to the way the image works in time for you, if I’m reading correctly. What I’m reading also sounds similar to the distinction made between printed and oral texts. One fixes words permanently, establishing a constant interface between authorial idea and reader, fating the encounter to a realm of abstraction, conception. Whereas the oral text, in its performative-participatory aspect, breaks down such boundaries, existing primarily at the moment of utterance and encounter before sinking into the abyss of memory, making authors and readers out of everybody until its probably altered recitation, given memory’s operations and tendencies. One takes part in an oral text in a more fundamental, physical way (one uses all of ones body) compared to how one takes part in a printed text. Can you say more about the difference between word and image? Or anything else that strikes your fancy?
Re: New American Press and MAYDAY
From: David Chirot ( * @gmail.com)
Sent: Tue 2/03/09 12:47 PM
To: * ( * @hotmail.com)
5 attachments
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[deleted] [insert] [received Sun 3/08/09 2:52 PM] everything is “writing” in the sense of annotation. textures, forms, colors, fragments of letters numbers words wow!! / you are like the best [deleted] imean this with al my heart as [deleted] the gaping chasms opening among them and your [deleted] thin veneer and expose even moreof the gaping holes / i can’t eve begin to say [deleted] [insert] [received Sun 3/15/09 4:10 PM] i realized that in a way it is idiotic when i write of the fetishization of the letter that many have. as i have letters in so many of my works. it’s just that in mine they are more at the peripheries of meanings. moving into “just sounds” yet image-sounds more like perhaps synaesthesia. or as the painter Gulley Jimson says in the horse’s mouth by Joyce Cary. he’s telling a friend how to look at a painting. feel it with your eyes. [insert "Day on Fire" # 067] a kind of colored music in the mind a good deal of the time i discover it is just soime completely arbitrary [insert "Day on Fire" # 022] prejudice of the moment [deleted] [insert] [receive/imagesd Sun 3/08/09 2:52 PM] in a letter to Hawthorne on having completed Moby Dick, Melville writes that as his fingers and hand move to write one letter following another and stop to dip the pen in ink, with each letter the hand that writes is no longer the one that wrote the letter before it [insert] [received Mon 3/16/09 8:13 PM] in a sense, the farther one is journeying from the sense that language “exposes itself” as a photo is said to be exposed, the more one journeys into a kind of blindness which is expressed in much American Modern Visual Poetry [insert "Day on Fire" # 027] anayluze it beyond simply my intutiiton / though i turst intution very much as an artist becuase intutitevly andinstisinctively one my recongize things as being dangerous or oppressive usually or--censoriious, Sate powers in the sense Delueze wd tlak abt or just from an Anarchist pointof view / anarkeyology point of view / but i really have to go back to degree zero here to reply even provisionally [deleted] [insert] [received Sun 3/08/09 2:52 PM] “line.” a line of poetry / writing, a line of music, alone drawn in the sand a line in a drawing. a line of persons waiting a battle line a dead line ahead line a line of coke, line of meth line of heroin a line lifeline there are no straight lines in nature there are not straight lines. they’re all lines of dope. speaking his lines they appeared as lines of musical notation heard from the drawing of lines in the air. in any event. a line. (sounds like the German word for “alone.”) so a lone line stood gazing into the sun glare of high noon waiting for the gunfighter to appear. a line may be the manifestation of the energy of an act. (will send these in another mailing as attachements to see how this works) [insert "Day on Fire" # 052] to me alotof rimbaud has this effect / this in a way argues agsint of course the idea of words being fixed in time becuase each time one reads them they are the same yet different-- / theonctext of the time peirods is diferent and also of the times in one’s own life [insert] [received Mon 3/16/09 8:13 PM] i’ve been clinically dead four times, and another time longer ago an NDE. near death experience. i knew i wouldn’t die but the doctors said, told my parents, that i would it c be the difference also betweenmorning and afternoon / i think my problem with the word sometimes is the fetishization of it and the fesithiszation of “the book”--which can be turnedinto making of the“word and “book” thingsmore substanial than the ground benath one’s ffet / so that the conquest and ddestruction of the ground is easilyaccomplished [deleted] i think thag is what inpart troubles me with language poetry and lotof the other so called avant american writing is the disconnect between words and the ground--it means that there is avbstoulely a form of sophistry in which it is said that by altering words and their owrders oneis chaning cap[itlsist structures / and at the same time without having refernce and al the rest of it-- / how can one be doing this / becuasein turth the sturctureof snetnce, ggrammar, is not at l to do with capitlism as any linguistics person can tell one-- / so one has words [deleted] how can thi gs without meaning / do anything at all to combat things which not only have meaning but come hevaily armed [insert] [received Thu 3/19/09 12:21 PM] a “leap of the imagination” is different from a “line of thought” in the sense of arriving at the same place by differing means. and that the quantum leap of an Emily [insert] [“I have but to cross the room to be in the Spice Islands”] as with Malevich’s idea of intuition, is faster than that carried out by other, mechanical means thisis why i thnink amaericn alnguage and avant etc poetry with the material word are so accpetable / in a bizarre way the weight of the material word is a kindof “hangover” of the “word of God”--and “Book of God”-- / and since these things are “not of this world”--yet of it in sense that they can chnage it / well one can see onemight be able to have their cake and eat it too / to seem “redical / while do nothing at all / and teaching studnets to be rerdiacl in sentences / while not being so on campuses / that is the kind of word i am troubled by / and the fixity of the word--yo se i have alot of work to do!! / to figure it out and artiuclate it / the word of the LAW-- / as FIXED--and ABSTRACT-- / that is--today-- “news” and “media” which is taken as true [deleted] broadacast loud and far becomes the truth / so thatwhen porduces facts which prove the oppoiste one is called aliar / i am beining to think itis not ata l the fixity of the word but what is hapning to it now--that words mean both their own meaning and their opposite at the same time as in orwell’s newspeak-- / the reason for this being that in order for the americans to really acept and beleive in their reality they have to deny the contradcitons of it / for example / we have a Black President who supports Apartheid State of Israel / an Apartheid South African activists agsint their Aparthied State say is evn worse than was in former State of South Africa / to reconcile these contradcitons a society has to start making in the lnaguge ways of creating denials, accomdations, lies, and newspeak, double tlak / like / radical language which doesnt opposein anyway the lanaguage it says it does [insert] [received Thu 3/19/09 12:21 PM] when Smithson writes that a pebble’s moving an inch over millennia is interesting to him, it is part of this idea of the artist’s thinking in a different kind of speed. so that a tiny movement through a long period of tiny becomes very interesting in the same way that a quantum leap of travel across a small room is but to me bascially mirrors it / what i find with languageinthe envirnment is the weatheringo fit the weraing downof plaques and signs their being eaten away by rust and fire winds battering them with dust and the demoliton crews / and the slow creep of plant life up their hlepful letterings acting as ladders for their climbings-- / a paradox might be for eaxmple that letters and signs began say --in nature--and lateron, this is suppred in order for words to become abstractions ans deny naturein favor of the absrtact word-- / which then canbe detached from reference to the natural world-- / and act as though it does not exist / then word games can indeed claim they are chaning things among themselves / though in a way it is like cheating aat solitaire / the peadorx of finding signs in nature that become letters or origins of signs in calligraphic languages might be this / there are signs found in stones andldnsacpes / which are ambiguous / one cannot determine if they are man made or made by nature / without some testing being done [insert] [received Thu 3/19/09 12:21 PM] they are not separated as usually thought for example in juxtaposing WC Williams in Spring and All writing that “only the imagination is real” and then later in Paterson writing “no ideas but in things, Mr.” i think these are very interrelated rather than separate. a straight line may be thought of in all its connotations as a “sign” of being human thus some things which seem to be sophsiticated human made notations turn out to be the chemicl reactions [insert "Day on Fire" # 029] of various minerals in rocks and the run offs of of other minerls in waters that flowed over them / then again other things which look so “natural” turn out to bein fact human made-- / so--one asks-- / is it that humans are “imitating” nature in creating writing-- / or--is it that writing enbales one to find “writing in the landscape”-- / becasue there are thingsin the landscape n points to and says--hey!! look at that!! doesnt itlook exactly like such and such!! / one may examine the idea of nonreference and non meaning that some poets urge--as a way of saying--look--itis not fiexed to anything!! / as way to say also--see i am notin any way responable--for anything-- / itis a way to be “radical” yet not “accountable”--hence the work one the page yet not as actions-- / which fits in ver well with the direction of the usa towards fascism over thelast 30 years / reading shakespeare and villon--one sees on the page and hears with the ear--how unfixed thelanguage is--one stil understands what is being written / said--yet many words are alterd in spelling and sense and some have disappeared--from usage--or have a differemnt maning today-- / and in a way--we have lost the actaul sounding of them even though the splleing reminas-- / actualy i dont mean to write anyof these thingsnow as these realy arent replies atall! [deleted] but i have reaalized for while ihave to realy let go of alotof things i have thought and go back to the zero al over agiand your questions [deleted] among the sameold objects / and some is actaullywhat slowly trying to see in different ways / and a few things solid enough that one continues working with them / really [deleted] [insert] [received Sun 3/15/09 4:10 PM] and also there is the investigation into what constitutes the differences between the seeing “creating” and imposing what is seen on the scene and what is epxosed the scene itself to be seen by eyes that do not see nature as “a blank and empty ruin.” but as lanaguge speaking and writing to one [insert "Day on Fire" # 017] i’ll jot down inmy notebook so i can carry abt with me on the bus and at work in the office like tonight [insert] [received Mon 3/16/09 8:13 PM] this form of writing ironically i think is far more of a Visual nature than a lot of what Modern Visual Poetry “sees.” that is, the Visual is limited to the page, and the kinds of typefaces fonts sizes, colors available via first the typewriter then the copy machine and now the computer it snowed aealrier and then these loely blues with pales white clouds that are very susceptible to every shifting in thelight--so they are cotinual chaning subtly in color / i saw thismorning pretymuch the spike lee film of mireacle of st anna’s / as myapt mate sells dvd and cds-- / its really good-- / another thing with wrtiing that intersts me alot is the unwritten wirtten wirting like rober / smthsons artists glance creating work thatisnot an object simeply a galnce / a way of seeing--ake art / so a way of writing that is not emobied in wirting [deleted]
On Thu, Jan 29, 2009 at 3:44 PM, * < * @hotmail.com > wrote: [deleted]
Re: New American Press and MAYDAY
From: David Chirot ( * @gmail.com)
Sent: Thu 1/29/09 7:02 PM
To: * ( * @hotmail.com)
5 attachments
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[deleted] [insert] [received Wed 3/18/09 9:53 AM] the more one is invloved with the virtual and its screens and the ways in which chooses things to exist and vanish, be deleted, by the lick of a key i dont regard words orletters as necessary for visual poetry / a crack inthe sidewlak ifone is folwoing i as aform of poem and soudning it out-- / well--there re no ltters there but certai visual soundpoetry@ / bob cobbing and i used to walkd down sidewlaks doing this and also sounding out shaowds oftrees as the move in the brezes on the side walks andtehir cracks / anything can be a nottation, as core / and one can do this by touch also [deleted]
On Wed, Jan 14, 2009 at 6:47 PM, * < * @hotmail.com > wrote: [deleted] torture in relation to poetry, what differentiates the three visual poetries (what they are, mean to you) [deleted] don’t mean to ask you to repeat yourself but, well, shit, lets hear it again [deleted]
Re: New American Press and MAYDAY
From: David Chirot ( * @gmail.com)
Sent: Thu 1/29/09 12:34 PM
To: * ( * @hotmail.com)
1 attachment
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[deleted] many thanks but keep in mind sometimes my moods might influence what i say at the moment-- / usually if they are and i notice it i cut al that i’ve written out-- [deleted] [insert] [received Mon 3/16/09 11:14 PM] the farther the visual recedes from view so to speak, in that the field of vison is more and more constituted by the space of the screen, as before it was of the page, since the screen and with the use of Photoshop etc one is in charge as it were of “creating reality” as Karl Rove would say, the interest in the actuality of the visual visible world vanishes i think that in the histories of visual poetry the tendency has been to lean much heavier on the words-poetry side than in the direction of the visual / to me painting has always been light years ahead [deleted] [insert] [received Sun 3/15/09 1:44 PM] as i don’t not “see myself” but instead am finding with the materials what is emerging from our collaborating and dialoguing conversing and hanging out as it were [insert "Death from this Window" #s 034, 038, 040] and articulating in languages unknown with each other before our encounter. or going over again meeting an old familiar even a lover with some sites for sure (brion gysin told wm burroughs that writing lagged fifty years behind painting-- / now painting and writing tend to lag both of them [deleted] [insert] [received Sun 3/15/09 4:10 PM] almost like the cliched almost image of Michelangelo with the two fingers about to touch visual poetry one learns far more from painters think than poets-- / that is, i do [deleted] [insert] [received Thu 3/19/09 12:21 PM] into ever more series of memories and images which are involuntary have no training [deleted] [insert] [received Sun 3/15/09 1:44 PM] as this is all about touch so i work on training my eyes to feel the grains of things and understand via the eye what textures surfaces raisings or indentations of letters numbers form is for rubBEing (“will make an impression!” literally and figuratively) in painting and drawing and statements by artists one is working on learning to see [insert] [received Sun 3/15/09 4:10 PM] i work to train my hands to see via touch and so first by chance work a lot at night outdoors in the dim light of a street lamp or of the moon when it is really big and i am some place or when it is small even and one is aware of its light since al my work is done with found objects letterings clay dirt wood metal plastic tar mud dust blood stage blood makeup you name it-- / what i am working with is learning to see and hear with the materials as they touch me and i touch them-- / Robert Smithson called this the art of looking [deleted] [insert] [received Sun 3/15/09 4:10 PM] i work in the complete dark anything simply by “casting glance” so to speak [insert] [received Sat 3/7/09 11:24 AM] or as the Chinese Taoist Chuang Tzu would say. “the utility of the uselessness.” meaning the empty part of an object that can turn it into a “cup” or “bowl.” the empty space that makes what surrounds it become suddenly of use. from this “useless empty space.” or the tree so ugly no one wants to use its wood. so that it grows to a very ripe age indeed. and in the end is very much prized for its ancient “noble” “vintage” “wood” and he is right--seeing takes place in time--and what it observes [deleted] [insert] [received Sat 3/7/09 11:24 AM] finding is when one really has no idea literally of what may turn up, and then finding the found object in its busted up condition some use for it most “visual” poetry, viz po and concrete is not at al oriented in this way--it is much more about “fixing the image-words” “in place” for “all time”-- / and thus is very static-- / the static produces the opposite of the good kind of static (noise signals)-- / it gives instead on to a vision that is one of entropy-- / if one walks and looks or say is locked up in a few rooms or a cell for periods of time--then one begins to see not how closed one is, but how what is there before one is continually opening-- / this takes place by becoming aware of the flows of time seen in the dust motes in alight coming through the drawn venetian blinds of late winter’s afternoon--and mixing with these whorls of smoke from slowly burning cigarettes-- / if one begins to look with the sense of time being what one is seeing-- / then one finds that which is hidden in plain [deleted] [insert] [received Sat 3/7/09 11:24 AM] so Picasso will be more prone perhaps than others to see a bull’s head emerge from a trashed bicycle not letters al crisp and clean and anal y retentive-- / but instead those letterings in the land and cityscapes which are operated on by time, weather, rust dirt wind rain snows oil slicks slat smashing and bashings of all sorts--and cracks, corrosions, the decimation of image and letter by the encroaching lichen and moss crawling alone the thing strips of dirt lodged into the cracks in an old plaque or a piece of thrown refrigerator with raised letters on it giving its brand name [insert "Death from this Window" # 052] the falling part as it moves through time is actually a form of creation that is not moving “forward” but backwards--and so arriving ever nearer the present--and then eclipsing it-- / that is, as Cocteau said of film [deleted] [insert] [received Thu 3/12/09 5:31 pm] i think to “make the most of” whatever there is, which includes using leftovers to create new dishes, or saving old dresses to take down or re-do for the next person in the family to wear, saving buttons, bits of string, old pants, shirts, etc. or to pass down from generation to generation making alterations along the way and as they fall part from one descending and disintegrating “order” they begin to find themselves turning into never before seen nor heard forms and arrangements, colors--into ever flowing lives-- / out of chaos these forms [deleted] [insert] [received Sun 3/15/09 1:44 PM] it made everywhere in the world be just an endless supply of materials which at the same time are ideas and imaginings faith embodied [deleted] it is continually found-- / it emerges, exposés it self and also exposes and makes emerge one’s own being in time [deleted] [insert] [received Thu 3/12/09 5:31 pm] doors and windows from abandoned houses, old bricks stashed after demolitions and ready to be thrown out. old hand made nails. anything we could use to fix the ancient falling down house Modern Visual Poetry, which is usually dated as being Mallarme’s Un Coup de des-- / the focus ha been on the spaces on the page and the ways the lines or letters are laid out--to give the sense of time a visuality on the page-- / the visual here is still the servant really of the letters and words and their meanings and arrangements / the time that’s taking place is that which takes place in the measures of poetry, not of seeing- / which is to say much nearer to a musical time than the visual and textural-- / there are various versions of the development of “visual poetry” which are constructed to produce an increasingly narrow and controlled idea of “viz po” ultimately-- / these version tend to leave out a great deal [insert "Death from this Window" #s 042, 043] i think the best book about the movements in concrete into those of a new kind of visual poetry sty based much on semiotics and linguistics as they open into the visual and from there into time based visuality--is / Philadelpho Menezes’ A Trajectory of Brazilian Visual Poetry / “POETICS and VISUALITY-- / currently in the US a great deal of focus seems to be on the work of a branch of the de Campos family, which in Brazil was historically supported greatly by the repressive regimes, at the expense of a much grater variety of work of far more interest, which is a great deal of what Menezes writes about-- / another historian of concrete and visual poetry as inflected by performance pieces sound poetry and a political message--is that of clemente Padin, a good friend and beloved mentor-- / Padin is [deleted] so he doesn’t fall into the kinds of systematization that one might find in a Marxist or a formalist-- / in the strict senses-- / unfortunately for the most part found only in special collections are a series of various anthology-histories that bob Cobbing put together, the largest one with peter Mayer-- / bob was the first person to start working with a copying machines as a “writing / visual / sound” machine-- / he was not simply a “copier artist” but far more than that--a visual sonic artist who investigated the emergences’ of forms from out of the seemingly blurred and blotched images without letters and images one might say without images themselves as they begin via the copier to become all kinds of other things which are both continued within themselves already and also arrive within them from an outside [insert "Death from this Window" # 049] which is the eye and hand of the artist [insert] [received Thu 3/19/09 12:21 PM] the examination of the minutest details in nature or in a room up close can expand these spaces into immensities. as watching a pebble move through millennia. or watching dust motes for hours in the shifting rays of sunlight coming through Vienna blinds in a dirty smoke filled room in a place where one is put for 90 days “feeding” the continuously changing images / sound scores-- / with copier art like bob what i like are al the accidents mistakes blotches blurs which begin to emerge as something other entirely than the original starting image / what i do with rubBEings for example is probably the most ancient and childlike form of coy art--as are also the clay impression spray paint works and those made by transfers using very powerful chemicals [insert] [received Thu 3/19/09 12:21 PM] or Hawthorne who spent some years as he said later “watching the beam of sunlight move across the rug on the floor.” it is using the very small to find within it the very immense and far distant by a combination of attentive observation through time and as “a stretch of the imagination” and note “a stretcher” used to be a slang term for “telling a tall tale” as it “stretched the credulity of the listener” i wd do far more of these except one has to be careful to work in open spaces so that limits the times of year one may work here in Wisconsin unless one could as i used to before it was torn down--work in the open door ways (gone doorways) of a series of old falling apart garages --it was just enough out of the wind that one cd keep the paper intact and also enough open that the powerful odors wd not affect one-- / and a just enough sheltered to be able to work even when well below zero
On Mon, Jan 12, 2009 at 12:40 PM, * < * @hotmail.com > wrote: [deleted]
On Sun, Jan 11, 2009 at 5:43 PM, * < * @hotmail.com > wrote: Ok, so, not knowing where to begin, I’ll just begin, and ask, is there a difference between “concrete” and “visual” poetry and “vizpo?” If so what is it? Also I’ve noticed your interest (please forgive, and correct, any misreading) in the likenesses of “torture” and “poetry.” What’s that all about? And how does it jibe with the kind of work you choose to do, visuality vs. phrase and sentence (or somesuch)? It’s obviously a choice. Certain of your prose show you can slip easily, or easily enough, in and out of either mode.
Re: New American Press and MAYDAY
From: David Chirot ( * @gmail.com)
Sent: Wed 1/14/09 6:56 PM
To: * ( * @htomail.com)
2 attachments
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[deleted] [insert] [received Mon 3/16/09 8:13 PM] what one calls Visual Poetry really varies a great deal from one artist / poet to another. the modern forms of Visual Poetry are usually dated from the appeanrce of Malarme’s “Un Coup de des.” this poem is made possible by new developments in printing presses, which evolved steadily as they became more and more capable of producing ever greater numbers of copies for mass circulations. in order to gain attention for one journal or newspaper over another, there’s a competition among fonts, typographies, the size and layout of headlines, subheaders and the columns of print within the articles, alongside the ever widening methods used in the advertising and announcements of events in the paper. the newspaper itself becomes a form of Visual Poetry ahead of what emerges with Italian Futurism and dada’s approaches to the scattering of letters on a page, the shiftings and abandonings of syntax, punctuation, word order, the use of onomatopoeic letterings, in Italian Futurism, and in Dada, the uses of newspaper imagery and typographies against what these are connected with in terms of the bourgeois and capitalist values of the military / state / corporate “complexes” which had created the “shit storm” [insert "Necessity is the Motherfucker of Invention"]
On Sat, Jan 10, 2009 at 5:37 PM, * < * @hotmail.com > wrote: [deleted]
Re: New American Press and MAYDAY
From: David Chirot ( * @gmail.com)
Sent: Sun 1/11/09 12:49 PM
To: * ( * @hotmail.com)
[deleted] [insert][received Thu 3/12/09 5:31 pm] one summer a construction site [insert "Death from this Window" # 001] had lots of open bags of concrete mix, with attendant dust and dirt that the wind would blow and mix with the mix so to speak and make a kind of stew of particles. which i could scatter by hand on the paper and then spray paint over. if the particles are too large they just blow off and may or not leave a tracing of their passage. sometimes i will remember to use glue to help keep the particles somewhat stably anchored. though some always move around or off the surface. for these i use something i found at a dollar store / candy and soda etc place. which also sells lots of different hair supplies and nail supplies for Black people. they have some little toy sets, too, and one was for “sand painting” for children, with little plastic vials of colored sands of plastic. you get i think it is eight different colors, a tin glue stick which turned out to be “glueless” i.e clueless in its own way. so i used these for fun since there is too much ice and snow out to get any good grit from the streets. i also mixed in for these those plastic containers with a squeeze top you can remove that have black, red, blue, yellow powder dust in them for use in marking for surveyors, etc. they are really cheap and last a long time. i also started collecting rust to use. dragging home or working outside filing and using wire brush to remove rust from old pipes, machine pieces etc. and keep it in a Little jar. kind of laborious and “low yield” considered how rough a job sometimes it is but get a kick out of “mining for rust.” and “collecting rust” as a cousin to “collecting dust.” i also use burning to accentuate effects. burning in the paper with cigarettes for example, you can control the burn to create black jagged edgings. sometimes i use a lighter. you can rub paper with rusty objects also and i have used tar dirt mud different kinds of small seeds dust grass wood chips or rubbing with wood that has a patina as does grass and dandelions are good too. dead insects found on the street good and dried out, brittle so that they crumble into little particles. bits and strips of bark. metal filings. coffee grinds. basically anything that comes to hand or i find in the street or see blowing by. cigarette ashes. flakes of old dried out paperback books that are falling apart. old ink ribbons from typewriters you can rub on to paper like using ink pads. the list is endless. plus often for colors or various thicknesses etc and effects [deleted] nail polish, lip stick, eye liner brushes, paint for model cars and airplanes etc. house paints. spray for autos of all kinds. kids’ paint sets, poster paints for kindergarteners. hair tinting or coloring. gritty hair effecting products. particles of cleaning materials like comet etc. and for rubBEing effects one can use things like those motorized tooth brushes. battery operated. i have one i found that is racing car with the brush protruding and you turn it on and the brush makes motor revving sound and moves back and forth but you can use anything. sponges, rust scrubbing off brushes, wiring (though where i live no chore boy or they might think you are using it to smoke crack!) (some stores now won’t sell any chore boy as their way to show they are not going to get associated with dope users and usage. and some of the all night gas stations and corner stores now won’t carry those fake flowers that come in a long glass tube to hold them. as the tubes get cut down and used for crack pipes.) “necessity is the motherfucker of invention” i call it as since my budget is so tiny and sometimes was zero. you have to make use of anything that might seem remotely to have a potential to create effects with. basically it is a very ancient human activity.
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