the enormous face

I’ve been busking around the Puget Sound for the past several weeks, to a generally positive result (one eviction after a too-sexually explicit show, a few cop calls, several accusations of “pervert,” an overall outpouring of support, especially among other performers) but the most common response I’ve been getting is confusion around genre, category, and intention. Surely these are items I work actively to blur, but for those in want of guidance or interested in offering suggestion (and I’d love to hear whatever names you proffer for the work), here’s a carrot to gnaw.

Puppet_Shows

In Pike Place Market a couple weeks back, an outraged vendor brandishing his membership card in the American Puppetry Association approached me the other day declaring “this is NOT a puppet show!” How Elegant! How Intelligent! Last night my cousin and I had a disagreement as to whether a spectator (or can we consider vocal audience members as active narrators? I hope so…) we had overheard was saying that what he was watching served to elevate Seattle to “Real City” (e.g. New York?) status, or set it apart as a Surreal Dream-Land. Could be both, though I’d be ashamed to be considered a catalyst for either.

I thought it was telling today that in heating up a bowl of vegetable soup, I misplaced the Spanish word “Jabon,” which is “Soap” in Spanish as the signifier for “Soup,” ransferring a phonetic similarity onto nonsimilar spanish (non)cognates.

[Too Late:] Done skirted back to the northwest for a split, a three-day hitch from Ohio cross the incessant homogeny of american stripmall landscape, had to eat a dog, grappled Romanian princesses, drug a one-legged baby from the roadside. Nebraska found a squeaky yellow animal pursed beside it’s screams readed to Spivak’s Grammatologies and Foucault’s Pendulum, Iowa 80, the biggest truck stop in the world (these days the worlds biggest inherit after the mammoths collapse). Boys hearta tacked inna hovel, he got drunk on pickle juice in Germany.

The Question of the Hymen.

Fernando Pessoa’s Book of Disquiet & I’m jonesin’ to get deep in Twilight/Trueblood together with that gurl….Film really up & away – Mimacs, Tristram Shandy a Cock and Bull Story, Rusalka, etc etc; I’ll plug a sidebar for these mothas soon, hawh? Collate….Envisioning the homes of our future, its goats-demon dog-skunks, hanging hallucinogenic gardens, precious escolar burgandies wordy inside the freedom-cake collective….wouldn’t an ecoterrorist superhero comic series cut the cake?

Bainbridge’s asylum eluded us this time by a swim but we shat in all the holes at the golf course, On Ugliness, Bruegel, Missy Elliot, and  sang. So remember the CATASTROPHE from the sun? We’ll all die/where should we reunite? More Updates. P.S. does anyone know what this song is, here’s the intro?

My Senior art show art Oberlin was called the Nomad Rhizome, and consists in a series of ideological and physical decentralizations, carts or statues, musical instruments, puppets, and performances meandering from place to place around the campus and town.

A new section on the main site will be the hub for processing the maps and date that come from the show.  Click Here for that. Please do make maps and leave comments about you encounters or lack of encounters (absence and presence etc etc) with the Locomotive Meanderers.

Fundamentally, I’m interested in Ways Of Looking, in considering meaning as a cork board, from which items can be both taken and appended. There is of course by nature no central thesis for the show, but some in terms of a sounding board, I’m more than happy to offer a list of concepts:

Creation as Comparison, Anarcho-Primitivism (w/ the technology problem), Linguistics, Metaphysicalisation of the Physical, Race and the Yonic, Stations of the Cross, The Nomadic Imperative, Genesis out of the Discarded, Translation/Interpretation, Combination of Genre/Synaesthesia/Interdisciplinary Sonics as metaphorical thought, Physical and Ideological Mapping, The Derivative, Nihilist [non]Narratives, Valorization of Difference and Normativity, Discursive Otherness: Exotic, Shock Value, Attention Prostitution, Machines that Deconstruct (or De-Story?) Themselves, Return/Advance to Small Gods, Permissivity of the Performative Space, Taming the Vicious to Sooth, An Afterlife of Now, Automatic Contexts and De-Contextuals, Inherent Indispensable Contradiction…

More will, I’m sure, be coming. Whether you were “present” or “absent” for the events of the past week, I would be honored to join any kind of map you might make into the dynamic project of synthesizing an ongoing face for this project. Email, Snails, Telephone, Comment Here, whatever works.

Here is the original Artist Statement and Map: :The Nomad Rhizome

I’m working on a translation of this Dada poem for the upcoming translation symposium. Here are the plans as they stand. If I can get footage of the live translation, I will. Yesterday I dragged a lot of stuff around for a couple hours.

Original Texts by Dadaists and Scholars

I am committed to envisioning and utilizing translation theory towards the progressive generation of innovative forms and itineraries, in considering the “lost in translation” as generative rather than reductive, realizing concepts of foreignization and transgression to combat unifying perspective of otherness and evading the monocularity of authorship. Nevertheless, especially because it is a translation of a translation (that is to say, very crudely that my source-text exists as an already translated animal), and I have no knowledge of German, have contacted Jean Boase-Beier, and hope that fruit is born from our exchange.

In the initial steps of my translation, I dissected the micro-poem, drawing each described image and cataloging each action, and then using those fragments to construct the whole bodies of three puppets (a crocodile hairdresser, a walking-stick, and a super-marshmallow), guided by the title of the poem, out of the constitutive pieces of images, and then enacting the actions described from the perspective of the puppets. All of this below a painted sign for the “Dadadadadadada Vocab Lexicon: public theater company” – my corporate self. Since the translation was ‘originally’ composed by three authors, I have translated it into three languages and three modalities: English, Spanish, and Russian – Performance, Powerpoint, and (non-)Line. I included actual text in the translation both to evoke a multilingual paradigm of interdisciplinary expression and to hark back to the first form of this story. The words or phrases whose connotation I could not unravel through research (e.g. lagladdest, 4 eugens)  I translated into Cyrillic-scripted spanish – doubly evasive and foreign – to hold up as stutters in the progression of the show. I decided to draw on the subplot near the end of the original as a double allegory – both a Marxist critique of chauvinistic or normative family structures and of patriarchal religion.

Considering translation as a language in itself, and a zone for personal artistic expression in a dialog and cultural filter that, like a voice distorter, presents a self in similar content but differing form, I did not hesitate to invoke my personal demons and dogmas.

To enact the retranslation as a generative locale, I came to the adjustments of Slobodan Miloševic’s blue box, and the Super-Marshmallow character (one of the trinity) from millosvitschs and suppermarshells. I have further placed misleading, fictitious footnotes throughout the piece, and am presenting it neither as a litany of associative nihilistic lists nor as a political manifesto. At the macroscopic, this work must be permanently but meaninglessly allusive, 3 or 4 pronged, preserve a false poetic meter, an assault against traditional orders and logics.