At the party I got stuck in the corner with the dorks.
I tried speaking some hybrid of canceled TV and the new next thing without coming off like a syndicated columnist.
This initiated a spirited game of grabass.
We showed “those motherfuckers” (and our dead parents) what’s up.
Not that I didn’t envy the absent geeks and their tediously subversive gadgets after I ran out of booze.
The dorks were appropriating lampshades. Soon we’ll have coats made of a thousand tiny cameras so you can be reflective and invisible and just go home.

Text by Dan Hoy
Found image

Dan Hoy lives in Brooklyn and is coeditor of SOFT TARGETS. Recent work has appeared in Absent, Cannibal, Effing, H_NGM_N, MiPoesias, and elsewhere. His movie reviews and videos are available on his website.

Until now.

HERE, download “Scan This Book!” by Kevin Kelley in New York Times Magazine (May 14th, 2006)

The essay is divided into 9 rather appetizing sections.

1. Scanning the Library of Libraries
2. What Happens When Books Connect
3. Books: The Liquid Version
4. The Triumph of the Copy
5. The Moral Imperative to Scan
6. The Case Against Google
7. When Business Models Collide
8. Search Changes Everything

Kevin Kelly is the “senior maverick” at Wired magazine and author of “Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems and the Economic World” and other books. He last wrote for the magazine about digital music.

Above: woodcut from Swift’s Battle of the Books.

I haven’t read the new Brett Easton Ellis book Imperial Bedrooms yet so this isn’t a review, but he’s been in London doing press for it this week. Inspired me to pick up the latest Interview magazine and read the Christopher Bollen feature about him. The main thing that stuck out for me was this quote:

“I really think New York is over, man. L.A. is the future. It’s much more cutting edge than New York, I’m sorry. Yeah, it has an immense doucheness to it. It does. But also, the cool parts are so much cooler than New York right now. I think New York’s really old-school. I can’t explain it. That’s just where I’m at. And also, I don’t believe that whole idea that if you can make it in New York, you can make it anywhere. If you survive L.A. and get over that initial hurdle, then you can make it anywhere.”

I’ve never stayed in either for longer than a month but I think it’s a pretty penetrating view and I wonder how many people share it.

Source: http://www.kellscraft.com/junglebook/junglebook06.html

THE KING’S ANKUS

KAA, the big Rock Python, had changed his skin for perhaps the two-hundredth time since his birth; and Mowgli, who never forgot that he owed his life to Kaa for a night’s work at Cold Lairs, which you may perhaps remember, went to congratulate him. Skin-changing always makes a snake moody and depressed till the new skin begins to shine and look beautiful. Kaa never made fun of Mowgli any more, but accepted him, as the other Jungle People did, for the Master of the Jungle, and brought him all the news that a python of his size would naturally hear. What Kaa did not know about the Middle Jungle, as they call it, — the life that runs close to the earth or under it, the boulder, burrow, and the tree-bole life, — might have been written upon the smallest of his scales.

That afternoon Mowgli was sitting in the circle of Kaa’s great coils, fingering the flaked and broken old skin that lay all looped and twisted among the rocks just as Kaa had left it. Kaa had very courteously packed himself under Mowgli’s broad, bare shoulders, so that the boy was really resting in a living arm-chair.

“Even to the scales of the eyes it is perfect,” said Mowgli, under his breath, playing with the old skin. “Strange to see the covering of one’s own head at one’s own feet!”

“Aye, but I lack feet,” said Kaa; “and since this is the custom of all my people, I do not find it strange. Does thy skin never feel old and harsh?”

“Then go I and wash, Flathead; but, it is true, in the great heats I have wished I could slough my skin without pain, and run skinless.”

“I wash, and also I take off my skin. How looks the new coat?”

Mowgli ran his hand down the diagonal checkerings of the immense back. “The Turtle is harder-backed, but not so gay,” he said judgmatically. “The Frog, my name-bearer, is more gay, but not so hard. It is very beautiful to see — like the mottling in the mouth of a lily.”

“It needs water. A new skin never comes to full colour before the first bath. Let us go bathe.”

“I will carry thee,” said Mowgli; and he stooped down, laughing, to lift the middle section of Kaa’s great body, just where the barrel was thickest. A man might just as well have tried to heave up a two-foot water-main; and Kaa lay still, puffing with quiet amusement. Then the regular evening game began — the boy in the flush of his great strength, and the Python in his sumptuous new skin, standing up one against the other for a wrestling-match — a trial of eye and strength. Of course, Kaa could have crushed a dozen Mowglis if he had let himself go; but he played carefully, and never loosed one tenth of his power. Ever since Mowgli was strong enough to endure a little rough handling, Kaa had taught him this game, and it suppled his limbs as nothing else could. Sometimes Mowgli would stand lapped almost to his throat in Kaa’s shifting coils, striving to get one arm free and catch him by the throat. Then Kaa would give way limply, and Mowgli, with both quick-moving feet, would try to cramp the purchase of that huge tail as it flung backward feeling for a rock or a stump. They would rock to and fro, head to head, each waiting for his chance, till the beautiful, statue-like group melted in a whirl of black-and-yellow coils and struggling legs and arms, to rise up again and again. “Now! now! now!” said Kaa, making feints with his head that even Mowgli’s quick hand could not turn aside. “Look! I touch thee here, Little Brother! Here, and here! Are thy hands numb? Here again!”

The game always ended in one way — with a straight, driving blow of the head that knocked the boy over and over. Mowgli could never learn the guard for that lightning lunge, and, as Kaa said, there was not the least use in trying.

“Good hunting!” Kaa grunted at last; and Mowgli, as usual, was shot away half a dozen yards, gasping and laughing. He rose with his fingers full of grass, and followed Kaa to the wise snake’s pet bathing-place — a deep, pitchy-black pool surrounded with rocks, and made interesting by sunken tree-stumps. The boy slipped in, Jungle-fashion, without a sound, and dived across; rose, too, without a sound, and turned on his back, his arms behind his head, watching the moon rising above the rocks, and breaking up her reflection in the water with his toes. Kaa’s diamond-shaped head cut the pool like a razor, and came out to rest on Mowgli’s shoulder. They lay still, soaking luxuriously in the cool water.

“It is very good,” said Mowgli at last, sleepily. “Now, in the Man-Pack, at this hour, as I remember, they laid them down upon hard pieces of wood in the inside of a mud-trap, and, having carefully shut out all the clean winds, drew foul cloth over their heavy heads, and made evil songs through their noses. It is better in the Jungle.”

A hurrying cobra slipped down over a rock and drank, gave them “Good hunting!” and went away.

“Sssh!” said Kaa, as though he had suddenly remembered something. “So the Jungle gives thee all that thou hast ever desired, Little Brother?”

“Not all,” said Mowgli, laughing; “else there would be a new and strong Shere Khan to kill once a moon. Now, I could kill with my own hands, asking no help of buffaloes. And also I have wished the sun to shine in the middle of the Rains, and the Rains to cover the sun in the deep of summer; and also I have never gone empty but I wished that I had killed a goat; and also I have never killed a goat but I wished it had been buck; nor buck but I wished it had been nilghai. But thus do we feel, all of us.”

“Thou hast no other desire?” the big snake demanded.

“What more can I wish? I have the Jungle, and the favour of the Jungle! Is there more anywhere between sunrise and sunset?”

“Now, the Cobra said —” Kaa began.

“What cobra? He that went away just now said nothing. He was hunting.”

“It was another.”

“Hast thou many dealings with the Poison People? I give them their own path. They carry death in the fore-tooth, and that is not good — for they are so small. But what hood is this thou hast spoken with?”

Kaa rolled slowly in the water like a steamer in a beam sea. “Three or four moons since,” said he, “I hunted in Cold Lairs, which place thou hast not forgotten. And the thing I hunted fled shrieking past the tanks and to that house whose side I once broke for thy sake, and ran into the ground.”

“But the people of Cold Lairs do not live in burrows.” Mowgli knew that Kaa was talking of the Monkey People.

“This thing was not living, but seeking to live,” Kaa replied, with a quiver of his tongue. “He ran into a burrow that led very far. I followed, and having killed, I slept. When I waked I went forward.”

“Under the earth?”

“Even so, coming at last upon a White Hood [a white cobra], who spoke of things beyond my knowledge, and showed me many things I had never before seen.”

“New game? Was it good hunting?” Mowgli turned quickly on his side.

“It was no game, and would have broken all my teeth; but the White Hood said that a man — he spoke as one that knew the breed — that a man would give the breath under his ribs for only the sight of those things.”

“We will look,” said Mowgli. “I now remember that I was once a man.”

“Slowly — slowly. It was haste killed the Yellow Snake that ate the sun. We two spoke together under the earth, and I spoke of thee, naming thee as a man. Said the White Hood (and he is indeed as old as the Jungle): ‘It is long since I have seen a man. Let him come, and he shall see all these things, for the least of which very many men would die.”

“That must be new game. And yet the Poison People do not tell us when game is afoot. They are an unfriendly folk.”

“It is not game. It is — it is — I cannot say what it is.”

“We will go there. I have never seen a White Hood, and I wish to see the other things. Did he kill them?”

“They are all dead things. He says he is the keeper of them all.”

“Ah! As a wolf stands above meat he has taken to his own lair. Let us go.”

Mowgli swam to bank, rolled on the grass to dry himself, and the two set off for Cold Lairs, the deserted city of which you may have heard. Mowgli was not the least afraid of the Monkey People in those days, but the Monkey People had the liveliest horror of Mowgli. Their tribes, however, were raiding in the Jungle, and so Cold Lairs stood empty and silent in the moonlight. Kaa led up to the ruins of the queen’s pavilion that stood on the terrace, slipped over the rubbish, and dived down the half-choked staircase that went underground from the center of the pavilion. Mowgli gave the snake-call, — “We be of one blood, ye and I,” — and followed on his hands and knees. They crawled a long distance down a sloping passage that turned and twisted several times, and at last came to where the root of some great tree, growing thirty feet overhead, had forced out a solid stone in the wall. They crept through the gap, and found themselves in a large vault, whose domed roof had been also broken away by tree-roots so that a few streaks of light dropped down into the darkness.

“A safe lair,” said Mowgli, rising to his firm feet, “but over far to visit daily. And now what do we see?”

“Am I nothing?” said a voice in the middle of the vault; and Mowgli saw something white move till, little by little, there stood up the hugest cobra he had ever set eyes on — a creature nearly eight feet long, and bleached by being in darkness to an old ivory-white. Even the spectacle-marks of his spread hood had faded to faint yellow. His eyes were as red as rubies, and altogether he was most wonderful.

Read the rest.

Jean Toche, I Accuse, March 26 – April 9, 1968, Gallerie Le Zodiaque, Brussels, 20 pages, offset, staple bound.

A rare catalog from an early solo exhibition by Jean Toche of Guerrilla Art Action Group (GAAG). This booklet documents Toche’s little-known aggressive light environments. The catalog, which is also a kind of artists’ book, features text in English and French.
Click HERE to download the PDF file.

Ginger&Piss is Kunstverein’s in-house magazine – a cross between an academic journal and a darts club newsletter. Ginger&Piss (the name a misquotation of Lawrence Weiner) is published twice yearly, with the first edition appearing in a short run. Each issue contains a maximum of five or six contributions of varying length, appropriate to the individual subject matter.

Loud is the subject of the first issue and it is a broad – probably far too broad – theme (if a theme at all). In fact Quiet might have been more appropriate. But perhaps a clear, ‘honest’ voice is better suggested by volume than whispering.

Krist Gruijthuijsen & Maxine Kopsa

Kunstverein’s website, for more information: http://kunstverein.nl

Photography by Yata Pessino.

If plagiarism’s ceiling
fan in her diluted body
leaves a salted outline,
wet and grainy then

These boots come
from the little girl who,
folding a kite, grows toward
a weed, a tiny root growing
seed in tyrannical hues of this
checkout line’s butterfly wife.

No wait, these slippers come
from a part of her that eats
from the shimmering cloud’s
white spoon where
she milks horses who rush
the cusp of sleep

Literally, these steel toes come
from making love in a parachute
basket she convinces herself
of the danger in expiration
dates as our harmonica doubles

Cremate and billow with cream
turning song beneath
the rug’s nakedness,
cocooning future corpses
we pull closer and lie upon

Image by Rasha Kahil

The citizens speak only in recordings

The skyline is of cell phones

And stories of dazzling digits climb

To blinking messages for aircraft overhead….

In its libraries history ripples down workstation screens

You can read it reflected in the polished marble floors

The letters float over swirls and loops of caramel veins

For a moment near dawn time reverses

Families begin to touch each other in desktop photographs

Children wander from the frame

You see a gray field and a leg

But once the system has been backed up

Martial law resumes:

A dust cloud rolls through the streets

At the top of a flagpole a rope is clanging

Soon accounts are filling, shares change hands

And transaction logs archive on terminals

Left to right like an antic figure fleeing down a flight

Of stairs continually flattening then duplicating

So the bottom is never reached

And margins are achieved not by greed but by devotion

High up in its offices raindrops cling to the window like fingertips

It is a leaf, falling, more red than remembered and shaped by these stories of celebrities and failed politicians, spiraling slowly this turning, an axis tilted and gravity pulls these bodies into elliptical paths, at least we used to think so, back when science still claimed to be progress. now we are forced to reconsider as, how are bodies in motion aware of one another and why does light redshift or bend, this gravitational pull of celestial bodies can now be measured by circulation numbers and box-office draw. he brought his own red carpet with him, miles and miles of it, and precise measurements were taken for the dressmaker, what we used to think of as glamour has been replaced by fame and both have become cheap and tawdry. not that any of this is a new idea, he says, waving his cigarette around for effect and dropping ash on the floor, we drink a blush wine, a sweet rosé and he tells us about the man he met in Cancún, don’t tell your grandmother she has no idea. I’m left trying to piece together a unifying theory of the universe from satin scraps and red lipstick, unable to explain how the flow of energy and momentum can affect the curvature of spacetime.
(…)
This is true and the opposite is also true, a moment frozen, a hero also frozen, and the screen splits, jaggedness and a ragged edge, a jade girl now jaded. the only solution is to leave it behind, unwilling to believe the lesson that while it is possible love will prevail, it may require brain damage, but if it is true that the fractured body has no agency, is it also true that a body with no agency is fractured? a breakthrough of sorts, through the rain and a break in the rain, no pain, he says pornography is two people in a romantic relationship on film, thinking pink, waiting for red.

[this interlude is for having sex]

I am not the fan of complicated words that other writers are, fire and water, bricks, an ocean view, as I dreamed strange dreams of my sister, time travel, an aqueduct, a mansion out of time. she says it’s because Mercury is in retrograde, these feelings of inferiority too complex to sort, water hitting the window pane, wind breaking through the treetops, I don’t know how this process works, or if the process works, or even if working is the point. still it rains.

Image by Maxime Ballesteros
Text by Loretta Clodfelter

Extrait 3 L'Enfer d'Henri-Georges Clouzot
envoyé par toutlecine. – Les dernières bandes annonces en ligne.

words © John Cotter
image © Henri-Georges Clouzot

(click here for sound)

above: Etienne Chambaud
Stock Figures, Figures de Réserve, Figure di riserva (studio view)
Color photograph, tracing paper and tape
70 x 95 cm, 2010
Courtesy Labor, Mexico City

THE SIRENS’ STAGE / LE STADE DES SIRENES / LO STATO DELLE SIRENE
An exhibition in three parts by Etienne Chambaud in collaboration with critic Vincent Normand.

The David Roberts Art Foundation in London, Kadist Art Foundation in Paris and Nomas Foundation in Rome are pleased to present The Sirens’ Stage/Le Stade des Sirènes/Lo stato delle sirene, a fragmented exhibition by Etienne Chambaud in the framework of Vincent Normand’s project Permanent Exhibition, Temporary Collections. The three translations of the exhibition, interpreted in a different language almost simultaneously at each foundation, are based on mechanisms of writing and transcription. Translation should be considered both the medium and the shared language of the whole project.

The project takes its title from the mythological sirens’ song, which invents itself in the ear of its addressee. Here The Sirens’ Stage/Le Stade des Sirènes/Lo stato delle sirene is conceived as a group of “written objects”: absent but described, motionless but translated, unique but repeated, mute but transcribed.

The Sirens’ Stage/Le Stade des Sirènes/Lo stato delle sirene is made up of an installation of Figures, a group of named, empty plinths (The Reef), which acts as a space from which are emitted layers of speech and text. Actors will occasionally interact with this space, reading, memorising and rehearsing fragments of script and dialogue. Sometimes The Reef will remain silent. A group of framed Instruction Pieces hung on the wall will outline a series of gestures and acts. These will change over the course of the exhibition. A writer (The Copyist), present at all times, will transcribe the evolution of the exhibition day after day. The foundations’ collections will be included through a series of photographs of their storages, in which all crates will be named (Stock Figures). A written contract, drawn up by a lawyer, will outline the conditions for the exchange and the conservation of copies of sculptures exchanged between the three foundations’ collections (The Exchange (The Horse, the Cobblestone, Above the Weather)).

The exhibition is a collection of narrative fragments, playing with accumulations and disappearances, survivals and hauntings. From inscription to oral tradition, polyphony to cacophony, The Sirens’ Stage/Le Stade des Sirènes/Lo stato delle sirene explores its own remains and is constructed on its own echoes, misunderstandings, partial interpretations and incomplete memories. The exhibition is conceived as a series of fossils organising their own archeology.

Opening receptions, exhibition dates and more information:

David Roberts Art Foundation, London:
opening on 18.03.2010 from 7pm / 19.03.2010 – 24.04.2010
http://www.davidrobertsartfoundation.com

Kadist Art Foundation, Paris:
opening on 02.04.2010 / 03.04.2010 – 02.05.2010
http://www.kadist.org

Nomas Foundation, Rome:
opening on 15.04.2010 / 16.04.2010 – 14.05.2010
http://www.nomasfoundation.com

Concerning this a man once said: Why such reluctance? If you only followed the parables you yourselves would become parables and with that rid yourself of all your daily cares.

Another said: I bet that is also a parable.

The first said: You have won.

The second said: But unfortunately only in parable.

The first said: No, in reality: in parable you have lost.

Photography by Darren Almond

Arts Catalyst • Benjamin Bergmann • Denis Darzacq • Edith Dekyndt • Chris Doyle • William Forsythe • Julia Fullerton-Batten • Thom Kubli • Tomás Saraceno • Jane & Louise Wilson • Xu Zhen

Dancing on the Ceiling will bring together artworks that use the metaphor of floating or weightlessness as an expression of the relationship of the individual to social, political or personal contexts. In addition, several of the pieces relate to lightness as akin to an agility of mind, freed of entrenched perspectives.

Curated by Kathleen Forde, Curator of Time-Based Arts, the exhibition will be accompanied by an exhibition catalog including essays by Italo Calvino as well as interviews with commissioned artists Chris Doyle and Thom Kubli.

The exhibition is also contextualized by a series of related performances, talks, films, and events; see the schedule for complete information.

Robert Longo, “Men in the Cities”, 1980s

NB: Don’t miss Aaron Schuster’s essay on levitation, love, and space sex in SB5!