‘As a restless teenager living in Taiwan, Shu Lea Cheang often found solace in her university’s French Culture department. “I always tried to avoid school,” she says with a wry laugh, speak- ing over the phone from her home in Paris. “But Taiwanese filmmaking at that time wasn’t so good. It was mainly soap opera-type films… so I would go [there] and watch Jean-Luc Godard.”

‘It’s near impossible to put the 65-year-old into a box. As an artist, she’s built, hacked and adapted technology to fit her own activist agenda, earning a cult reputation in the process. When it comes to filmmaking, she’s made everything from political documentaries to sci-fi pornography. Whatever she feels like doing, she does.

‘A creative child growing up in Tainan, a small fishing village nestled away on Taiwan’s west coast, Shu Lea – the only member of her family interested in the arts – felt like a black sheep. So at just 15 years old she decided to relocate to the country’s capital, Taipei, alone. “I didn’t particularly feel lonely or anything,” she recalls. All she knew was that she was search- ing for her “own path” – nothing was going to get in her way.

‘After studying filmmaking, she stepped onto the industry’s career ladder and spent years training to become an editor. But soon grow- ing restless, she upped and left for New York, arriving at the height of the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s. “I feel like those were my formative years,” she says, her voice lifting at the memory. “It was very inspiring – it seemed like we were always on the street! We were all living in the East Village in these great communities, but it was the Reagan era – so we were dealing with a lot of issues.”

‘Exhibiting at the Whitney Museum, she won acclaim for her conceptual approach. It announced her as an exciting new name on the New York art scene. For Shu Lea, who hadn’t really thought about a career in art up until that point, it was a suitably unorthodox beginning. “It’s quite unusual,” she says, still sounding bewildered at the reception she received. “I didn’t go through the gallery route and I wasn’t particularly struggling, I just had these installation ideas. Suddenly – I’m an artist!”

‘As further opportunities presented them- selves and her portfolio began to grow, her desire to make work about uncomfortable political issues only grew stronger. In 1990, she flew to Beijing with a camera after martial law was declared and documented the two weeks of turmoil leading up to the Tiananmen Square Massacre. Six years later, she used a radar system to track a US military base and expose its violations against local women, the environment and land. (One such example is a 1995 case, in which three servicemen kidnapped, duct-taped and bound the hands of a 12-year- old local girl. Two of the men admitted to raping her, the third claimed he only pretended to do so out of fear.) Although the work was initially approved, Shu Lea faced administrative backlash when trying to move it to Tokyo. “In the end it did get shown,” she recalls. “But there was a lot of negotiation with the government.”

‘Working across a wide range of media – video, performance, installations, cyber-interfaces – Shu Lea’s art has continued to explore race, imperialism and power. It’s a multidimensional approach that’s seen her regularly using technology to imagine post-identity worlds. Her 1998 work, ‘Brandon’, is exemplary. A web project exploring the real-life rape and murder of transgender man Brandon Teena in his home state of Nebraska, it was the first internet art piece commissioned and acquired by New York’s Guggenheim Museum.

‘She returned to similar technological themes with ‘3×3×6’, an installation which used facial recognition techniques to scramble visitors’ faces, making them cross-racial, cross-gendered and ultimately resistant to surveillance. “There’s this idea that queer people and technology don’t mix – we just do the make-up, right?” Shu Lea laughs out loud before returning to her point: “But we have a tool which we can use in a subversive way. I really want to advocate for people not to be intimidated. We have to use it, we have to hack it.”

‘Today, Shu Lea describes herself as a digital nomad. “I started to travel a lot – I became dedicated to not having a physical residence,” she says, matter-of-factly. This pragmatic approach sums up Shu Lea. She is disarmingly charismatic, self-aware and fiercely intelligent – comfortable with her own status as an art world outlier.

‘Her work is the kind that smashes boundaries rather than nudging politely. While such a commitment to resistance has cost her a mainstream audience, it’s one she remains undecided about courting. “The premiere of [‘cypherpunk’ science-fiction film] FLUIDØ had about 60 people walk out,” she recalls with a laugh. “Maybe it’s naïve on my part, but I’m only showing naked bodies, masturbation. The fact that we can’t even look at our own bodily functions… it’s a revelation.”
Despite this, she wants her work to be popular – but only a little. “When a stamp of approval is put on my work, it legitimates it and brings it to the public. But I know I have to somehow remain marginal, with my own edge.” This is a precarious line to walk, especially in today’s conservative political climate – but Shu Lea’s instincts have rarely failed her.’ — Jake Hall

 

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Stills

 

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Further

Shu Lea Cheang @ Wikipedia
Shu Lea Cheang @ Vimeo
SLC: CV & Links
SHU LEA CHEANG NAMED WINNER OF LG GUGGENHEIM AWARD
SLC @ IMDb
Shu Lea Cheang is making art that hacks the system
SLC @ Feral File
The New Sci-Fi Cinema of Shu Lea Cheang
SLC @ Video Data Bank
Resistance, Fish By Fish: Shu Lea Cheang
What is the question ? -* Shu Lea Cheang,…
SLC @ MUBI
Podcast: ART AND OBSOLESCENCE: Shu Lea Cheang
SLC @ Letterboxd
SHU LEA CHEANG: “Fictional installation toward Wifitopia”
SLC @ rhizome
Shu Lea Cheang’s Genre-Bending Affirmations

 

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Extras

Shu Lea Cheang – ‘Art, Queer Technologies and Social Interference’

Shu Lea Cheang: 3x3x6 / Taiwan in Venice 2019

Welcome to BioNet by Shu Lea Cheang — Launch Event

 

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Interview
from Spike Magazine

 

Patrick Kurth: You’ve called Fresh Kill a work of “eco-cyber-noia.” Can you describe the film under that rubric?

Shu Lea Cheang: For me, the film sums up my experience living in New York in the 80s. I was seeing how the garbage in Manhattan goes to Staten Island, to the Fresh Kills Landfill, and how in Taiwan, where I grew up, the government was dumping nuclear waste on Orchid Island, which is an offshore island where only aboriginal people live. And if you look at the whole global waste system, the developed countries were dumping toxic waste on the developing countries, mainly in Africa. Initially, I wanted to reverse this one-way circulation. I imagined this toxic fish would come back to America via a sushi restaurant.

Meanwhile, we were writing the script mainly in 1992, and I was surfing the Bulletin Board System (BBS), which was just becoming quite popular. People were using it to chat on different channels, a bit like any social media today. It was pre-internet, but you could feel that this border-crossing network communication was coming. In the film, Jiannbin [Abe Lin] hacks a red dial-up phone, and accidentally gets connected to the African Unity Network. I sensed the possibility of a global alliance, a networked resistance.

PK: There are two clear depictions of the Global South in the film. Orchid Island, which is grainy, tropical, a little sepia, is a dumping ground of nuclear waste. The African Unity Network is presented on TV in blue monotone and, at one point, communicates “STOP THE SHIPMENT.” How did you connect these two representations, one passive and the other agentic?

SLC: First of all, even in Orchid Island, indigenous people also demonstrated against the dumping – they rely on the water there to live! It was the same thing with Fresh Kills, which was so toxic when we were shooting there. Both places are real. In my imagination, the would-be hackers of the African Unity Network created a utopian version of resistance.

The quality difference in the film has to do with the media we used. In Taiwan, we shot in 16mm, whereas the African Unity Network was cut in with video materials. In New York, the main film was shot in 35mm to make a political statement, to say “I want to shoot in Hollywood’s medium” – it has the most density and texture.

PK: How did you formally bring the media activism of the 80s and 90s, which was responding to the mainstream depiction of HIV/AIDS or lack thereof, into a feature film?

SLC: I was quite involved with the street demonstrations in New York City in the 1980s. I feel like I passed the decade on the street, with a camcorder. It was the first time portable cameras became accessible, and the there were many video collectives founded. I was involved with Paper Tiger TV and Deep Dish TV, and there were also Not Channel Zero, Dyke TV, and ACT UP. We were eager to record our own documents of street movement.

The scene in Fresh Kill when the mother and daughter break into the television station refers to when three activists from ACT UP interrupted a CBS studio broadcast in 1991 yelling “Fight AIDS not Arabs!” There’s also zapping, or channel surfing, at a moment when broadcasting systems were boasting about having 100 channels on cable TV; you think you have all the choice, but you just keep mindlessly changing from one to the next. Along with cable TV, there was also public access TV, which, even if few people know about it in terms of art history or whatever, contributed to so many artists’ uses of the video medium. Even Richard Serra was using video, for a piece called Television Delivers People (1973). I made my own first video documentary, Trial for Tilted Arc (1989), from the public hearings about the takedown of Serra’s sculpture Tilted Arc (1981).

PK: Did you think there would be a natural affinity between new queer cinema and sci-fi?

SLC: “New queer cinema” was coined by B. Ruby Rich in 1992, first in the UK in Sight and Sound, then in the US in the Village Voice. Much later, she collected all these essays into a book, New Queer Cinema: The Director’s Cut (2003), and included her texts on my second feature, I.K.U. (2000), which was conceived as taking off from Blade Runner (1982). Actually, I was trying to engage Samuel Delaney to write the script with me, though in the end, it didn’t work out. So, I went to Tokyo, where science fiction is reality.

My films have always been diversely queer, in terms of race, gender and sexuality. Once, a distribution agent actually got upset with me. She said, “I can’t help you with your film because people just want a gay film or lesbian film, and this mixture of sexuality in your film is just not going anywhere.” I.K.U. is the same: It’s a crossover in terms of sex, not necessarily gay or lesbian. I was known for gender-hacking and genre-bending.

Only last year, when Project Native Informant suggested I could show my four feature films together, including FLUIDØ (2017) and U.K.I. (2023), did I begin seriously thinking I would call them sci-fi new queer cinema. I wasn’t intending to claim it as my genre, but now, I’m quite confident of the grouping, and it confirms that, over thirty years, besides making art, I have made four feature films.

PK: At different points in Fresh Kill, Miguel [Jose Zuniga] reads poems by Federico Garcia Lorca and from Dreamtigers (1960) by Jorge Luis Borges, and three family members – Claire [Erin McMurtry], Mimi [Laurie Carlos], and Honey [Nelini Stam] – share the name Mayakovsky. How did you want to situate poetry in relation to the other language in the film?

SLC: I did appropriate chats on various BBS channels, i.e. business transactions, buying and selling, into the script. Further, we scrambled the words people speak after eating the toxic fish – we mixed the dialogue backward and remixed.

The film script is credited to Jessica Hagedorn, who had just published her novel, Dogeaters (1990). Coming from a Filipino background, it challenged a racist perception of Filipinos. She didn’t create a script from nothing – I provided pretty much the whole structure and some of the dialogues. Most of the literary references came from her. She and I are were both involved with the downtown performance art scene, and we brought in many cameo appearances, i.e. Kate Valk, Ron Vawter of the Wooster group, Laurie Carlos, Robbie Mccauley, Karen Finley, Nicky Paraiso, Jimmy Durham, and Alva Rogers, among others.

PK: How was the response to Fresh Kill when it first came out? And do you hope the restored version will be received any differently?

SLC: Actually, the film was received okay! It premiered at Berlinale in 1994 and went on to quite a lot of film festivals. We had two 35mm prints circulating at that time, one in Europe, one in America. It was also released in the cinema, even if it was not the most popular film. I did get some good reviews, and eventually there were a lot of academic papers written about it. Last year, it was chosen by ARTnews as one of the 100 greatest artworks about New York City, and the Brooklyn Academy of Music showed it in 2022 as part of the “New York 90’s.” So I am in good company.

I just premiered the restored film at International Film Festival of Rotterdam to a really young crowd, and it was really positive. People tell me that they don’t feel it’s gotten old, that it’s still really in line with current issues, which is why I am taking it on a road trip across the US. I’m only looking for cinemas that can still project 35mm, either in museums or independent art houses. I know these old (medium) theaters still have community backing, where community gatherings, like town meeting, can be organized for post-screening dialogue about current issues, such as environmental racism.

PK: Are you going to travel with the film?

SLC: Of course! The 35millimeter print is in five reels. I think some people have this romanticism that I would take it on a road trip by myself, but I will travel with a driver who is also a filmmaker from Calarts, along with another young filmmaker from New Orleans. We are working on getting cinemas signed up for hosting the screenings, mapping out the routes. Perhaps I’m still quite naive, because I haven’t figured out how to rent a car, and I am just realizing that could be really expensive!

 

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13 of Shu Lea Cheang’s films & digital works

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UKI (2023)
‘UKI grapples with institutional oppression, gender politics, social inequality, and pollution, and proposes queer visions of the future — thematics Cheang has been exploring for forty years. The film tells the story of Reiko — a decommissioned humanoid replicant — in the year 2060. GENOM Corporation developed Reiko to collect orgasm data. Discarded and dumped in the toxic wasteland of E-Trashville, Reiko is rebuilt, rebooted, and transformed with the help of other mutants, replicants, and E-Trashville residents. In a parallel timeline, in a city plagued by a viral infection and social unrest, customers at a local diner sip coffee and discuss current events. GENOM Corporation and their ads are ubiquitous, promising a solution and cure in exchange for access to their DNA and biodata. Meanwhile, they harvest orgasm data to create new pharmaceuticals to control the population. Will Reiko be able to stop GENOM’s devious plan?’ — LAS

Trailer

UKI – Viral Performance LIVE CODE LIVE SPAM

 

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Wonders Wander (2017)
‘Wonders Wander is a location based mobi-web-serial with four fictional episodes set in Madrid. Departing from the city’s Malasaña Barrio, which became known as Maravillas (Wonders) during La Movida Madrileña countercultural movement in the 1980s, Wonders Wander takes the wonders out of Malasaña to explore the off-the-mainstream nouveau queer generation that includes refugees, migrants, functional diversity, transfeminista, transfeminism, open family, subversive motherhoods, sustainable living, and the rise of auto-defense practices for self-empowerment.’ — Video Data Base

Trailer

 

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Fluidø (2017)
‘Set in the post-AIDS future of 2060, where the Government is the first to declare the era AIDS FREE, mutated AIDS viruses give birth to ZERO GEN – humans that have genetically evolved in a very unique way. These gender fluid ZERO GENs are the bio-drug carriers whose white fluid is the hypernarcotic for the 21st century, taking over the markets of the 20th century white powder high. The ejaculate of these beings is intoxicating and the new form of sexual commodity in the future. The new drug, code named DELTA, diffuses through skin contact and creates an addictive high. A new war on drugs begins and the ZERO GEN are declared illegal. The Government dispatches drug-resistant replicants for round-up arrest missions. When one of these government android’s immunity breaks down and its pleasure centers are activated, the story becomes a tangled multi-thread plot and the ZERO GENs are caught among underground drug lords, glitched super agents, a scheming corporation and a corrupt government. Check yourself in as a fluid junkie for a super hyper viral ride.’ — Rapid Eye Movies

Trailer

Watch the film

 

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Baby Work (2012)
‘The installation designates the public visiting the gallery to collect and rearrange scattered keys and compose words into collective sonic expression. Active participants are the clone babies who are entrusted to store and retrieve ME-data.’ — Wikipedia

Excerpt

Excerpt

 

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Baby Love (2005)
‘The installation consists of 6 large size teacups and 6 clone babies. Each teacup is an auto-driving mobile unit with spinning wheels allowing direction maneuver and speed variation. Each baby is a situated mac-mini engine with wifi linked to the net depository of shuffles and remixes of popular love songs.’ — PdT

in action

 

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Baby Play (2001)
‘The installation employs a large scale table football field. Opposing rows of 22 ball players are replaced by human sized cloned locker babies. The tracking of ball movement retrieves ME-data (texts and sound) deposited in respective lockers.’ — zero1biennial

in action

 

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I.K.U. – This is not LOVE – This is SEX (2000)
‘Through the use of fantastic exaggeration, with colorfully flamboyant and lascivious women and unreal Akihabara-esque technology, experimental helmer Shu Lea Cheang provides a critique of Western stereotypes of East Asia, most notably being the dragon lady in this softcore feature.’ — MUBI

Watch the trailer

Excerpt

 

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Brandon (1998–99) (1998)
‘Brandon is inspired by the story of Brandon Teena, a 21-year-old transgender man who was raped and murdered in 1993. Shu Lea Cheang’s visually layered online artwork, recently restored by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, uses pop-up windows, chat rooms, and flashy nineties computer graphics to help users explore and understand Teena’s tragic death. The website references other cultural touchstones in the ongoing struggle for transgender rights and visibility, including the iconic drag documentary Paris Is Burning and the gender philosophy of Michel Foucault. These allusions connect Teena’s story to the broader histories and politics it helped transform.

‘Tip for interacting: Created before standardized conventions of web navigation were developed, this work is an early example of an artist envisioning how the internet could be. Made using an outmoded platform and technology, Brandon was recently restored to its intended functionality by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Users who are accustomed to the consistent styles across webpages today, however, may find this work challenging to navigate. Even if the page appears to lack prompts or links, click around. With more than 4,500 files, including a hidden archive of research materials, there are a lot of “Easter eggs” to uncover.’ — MCA/Chicago

the entirety

 

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Sex Bowl (1994)
‘The tape’s images are quick, suggestive, and sexy: fingers moving into bowling balls, shoe-smelling and toe-sucking, a dog wearing chain jewelry, fish being wrapped at the market, young naked couples having sex…. Edited like a music video, the image track is a constant flow of fetishes that lure us into the promiscuous pace of girls who keep lists of their sexual encounters.’ –– Chris Straayer

Watch an excerpt

 

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Fresh Kill (1994)
‘Is Fresh Kill a truly visionary work or has simply nothing changed in the last thirty years? The story of a young lesbian couple whose child suddenly vanishes after having accidentally been fed contaminated fish is even timelier now. They find the multinational corporation responsible for the pollution and set about exposing it using cyber-criminal tactics. Hacker vs. Big Tech has since turned into the new normal – it’s just that the cyber warriors still have a lot more winning to do for us poor folks.

‘The campy look of some interior sets like the sushi shop or the shopping carts-filled room still feels, for all its 90s aura, funky and to the point, as it splendidly clashes with unsavoury exteriors from the Fresh Kills Landfill in Staten Island, NY. Generally speaking, Cheang’s aesthetics of accelerated contrast still hits a nerve with as much spiked anger as it did back then. Cheang’s attacks on the neoliberal reality in Fresh Kill go into more depth than her films since, I.K.U. (2000) and UKI (2023) in particular. There is no future in which Fresh Kill would cease to be a proud piece of cinema!’ — Olaf Möller

Trailer

Excerpts

 

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Sex Fish (1993)
‘Water is the connecting element in this erotic mix of images of nature and explicit sex. It drips, flows and splashes. Fish swim through the video where human bodies indulge in sexual pleasure. Using the technical possibilities available at that time, Shu Lea Cheang brings together form and content in a rapturous, pornographic and poetic vignette.’ — FEST

Watch it here [06:17 – 12:24]

 

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Color Schemes (1990)
‘Color Schemes was exhibited in its installation form (with a self-service washing machine) at the Whitney Museum in 1990. Using the washing machine as a metaphor for the great American “melting pot” of ethnicity, the video presents individuals from a variety of ethnic backgrounds “representing” their ethnicity — in one sense by being on camera, and also by acting out or speaking about ethnic divisions. Cheang plays with this “overdetermiNation” of ethnicity, creating a multi-layered discourse on racism and assimilation that condemns the former and refuses to condone the latter.’ — Video Data Bank

Watch an excerpt

 

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How History Was Wounded: An Exclusive Report on Taiwanese Media (1990)
‘An exclusive report from Taiwan by collective member Shu Lea Cheang who investigates how Taiwanese news media covered the Tiananmen Square massacre. The tape compares the media clampdown in mainland China with the Taiwanese government’s suppression of political movements. The news coverage focused on sensationalizing and simplifying the student movement so that it became almost commercialized, as the real meaning behind the historic demonstrations were ignored. Taiwanese journalists served as “Political Prostitutes” for the Chinese government as the news was used to designate the political agenda. The call for democratic reform in the nation’s politics must also be reflected in the media in order to create a more democratic society. Directed and produced by Shu Lea Cheang and Jun Jieh Wang.’ — Paper Tiger TV

the entirety

 

 

*

p.s. RIP James Chance. ** Dominik, Hi!!! Cool, he’s really great. As the future husband of love, I can speak with insider knowledge about his generosity. Speaking of, love did stop the rain in the nick of time. How about that? Love is on a roll. All the while living in a tiny dump Appartement. He’s a saint! Let’s bring him down a notch and put him on his hands and knees with the task of somehow removing a big coffee stain on my living room carpet before my landlord comes over this afternoon, G. ** Jack Skelley, Jackie! Has anyone ever called you that? You don’t read as a Jackie. Time is an absolute weirdo at the moment. Never seen anything like it. Soon via verbiage. Yours, Denny! ** _Black_Acrylic, Wonderful, he’s great, and me too on the amphetamine stints with no poetry, at least of any value, left in their aftermath. Go France! Or, uh, anti-go Leeds! Scotland’s turn tonight, eh? I’ll hope for a happy headline from you tomorrow. ** Tosh Berman, I know, right? ** Lucas, Hi, Lucas. Nah, no pic from me. I did pull the old iPhone out and give snapping my consideration. Cologne! I was only in Cologne once, and all I can remember is that impressive, daunting church facade in that square where the Ludwig Museum is. Maybe that’s the church in your photo? Always happy to see a giant crane. Thank you. My day was okay, friends, a bit of work, some plans made, and the weather normalised if any weather these days can be called normal. Wonderful about your cousin’s good reaction. I trust and hope her sanity and warmth are just the tip of the opposite of the iceberg. Sweet. And surreal. Nice combo. May your today continue the upward spiral. ** Charalampos, Happy to make a successful introduction. ‘You are Free’ is great. That was the last great Cat Power album in my opinion. No other Ladytron song springs quite so strongly to mind. Major condolences on the heat. No, we’re talking about the possibility of a short film, but it’s still just conceptual and under debate. Nice title there, duh. ** Harper, Well, good, or good in the sense that the decision is made. You know it’ll all work out just fine if still mysteriously for now. And you’re writing! Best of luck acing the blood test today, whatever acing in that case involves. Oh, well, I guess it means perfect or near perfect health. Then that’s my wish. Like I think I said, I’m just amazed that you’re getting through the quitting smoking so well so far. Really, I could barely type a sentence for months when I quit. Just try to remember smoking is a completely overrated total drag of a habit. T’is. How did today treat you? ** Don Waters, You’d never read Berrigan? Very happy to help then. He did not exactly prioritise taking care of his body and heath, as his poems make clear. Other good short European novels … mm, let me think about that for a day. Many candidates. Oh, sure, on bands I can’t believe I bought the records of and attended the concerts of. I would say that was especially the case in the prog rock era. Emerson, Lake & Palmer and Yes and that whole bunch. They just sound like facile noodling to me now. What about you? What are your closeted musical skeletons? If Morrisroe was in the Goldin doc, it was probably just via a period snapshot or something, I can’t remember? Take care, you too. ** Darby 🤠, You’re a happy cowboy! I didn’t know about Meiwes’s online moniker. If someone gave me enough money to pay our film’s debts and let us finish it, I would wear that shirt for a day, but I would probably not leave home. Yes, I knew that about the stills. There’s a crappy German film based on that tryst that is not worth watching. In the film, Juergen is a whole lot less into it than reports say he actually was, but that’s showbiz for you. I didn’t realise you’re so close to Cat’s Cradle, but of course you are. Boris there would be fun, for sure. I’d say more painful and confusing than crazy, but I’m no doctor. My day was pretty normal and not really worth a recounting, I would say. Favorite doing things? Drink coffee at a cafe and talk, see art. I guess I find amazing people everywhere, even most of the people I see on the metro seem potentially amazing, I just very rarely have any interaction with them. Hope you got good sleep. ** Justin D, Hi! Miss Kittin is my friend/theater collaborator Gisele Vienne’s best friend. I used to be really obsessed with that song ‘Rock Show’ by Peaches. My day was kind of unremarkable, which was kind of a relief, actually, and I hope your lack of the remarkable was somehow a relief too. But today, let’s both go totally nuts! What do you say? ** Nicholas., You started your book. And it has such a good title. And, based on the excerpt, it seems very promising! You get a gold star today. ** Uday, Sure, I don’t think poetry has ever been more happening than it is now. But I do feel that about fiction and music and other stuff too. Maybe not films. I like Mirbeau. I haven’t actually thought about him in a long time. Hm, maybe I’ll change that. Like I don’t think I know his writings, for instance. ‘How people used to think …’ Interesting. I’m going to think about that. Nice. Thanks! ** audrey, Hi, audrey! Well, of course. We are still suffering from big problems with the financier, unfortunately. But we will find a way through that somehow. Why do you have to wait two years? You don’t have to answer that if you don’t want to, obviously. It just seems draconian to make you wait so long from afar. Piano, nice. I used to play piano too, but I’m too busy with my other stuff to think about going back. I love Rivette too, as you probably know. Awesome. I want to get back into playing video games so bad, but I’m scared about the inevitable time suckage. But I look at my dormant Switch with the saddest eyes. Great about the new online friends. I don’t even know what I’d be if I didn’t have this blog to make great news friends by, for instance. You sound really good. Do come and talk and hang out whenever or as often as you like, though no pressure. And have an amazing day whatever that amazingness involves. Much love, me. ** Okay. If you don’t already know the films and work of the singular Shu Lea Cheang, today’s your chance. See you tomorrow.

 

‘“Mess and Message,” the final three words of a poem in Ted Berrigan’s 1969 book, Many Happy Returns, describe perfectly and succinctly what makes his poetry compelling. The message of his poetry is the mess that is life. Appropriation figures in large and fascinating ways in this message. The very words “mess and message” are copied, as is the entire poem in which they appear, “Frank O’Hara’s Question from ‘Writers and Issues’ by John Ashbery”. Berrigan produced surprisingly numerous kinds of meaning by pilfering all sorts of pre-existing sentences, fragments, and whole passages of writing (literary and prosaic), not to mention visual imagery.

‘Berrigan understood that from time immemorial poets had imitated, if not downright copied, earlier poets in order to establish their literary genealogy. A helpful genealogy of appropriative writing—with the earliest example dating to the late nine- teenth century, and including Ted Berrigan—was recently drawn up by the poet and art critic Raphael Rubenstein, who aptly puts himself into the genealogy, just as Berrigan would have done. Berrigan participated in, while at the same time making a joke of, the self-creation of a lineage that is a requirement of inclusion within history—and is necessary to but will not guarantee fame, as Libbie Rifkin argues. His self-consciousness about both his own lineage, and the function of lineage in general, may well stem from his sense of being a literary “outsider.” An outsider, not in the sense that the avant-garde artist is an outsider to mainstream society, but an outsider in terms of social and academic pedigree.

‘While Berrigan felt his working-class background set him apart from his idols, appropriation afforded him a method of inserting himself into their lineage. In other words, appropriation was a means for creating a level playing field on which he could comfortably move.

‘In his piece “Interview with John Cage,” first published in the collaborative volume, Bean Spasms (1967), Berrigan transformed Warhol’s “everybody should like everybody” into “everybody should be alike”, producing an intriguing paradox. Copying words would seem to correspond to being alike, or with sameness. Yet Berrigan’s various kinds of copying, with their deliberate or accidental mis-copying and with their recontextualizations, show us that this sameness never occurs. This paradox fascinated Berrigan from early on; in one of many notes on “style” in his journals, dated December 27, 1962, he quoted at length from Gertrude Stein’s Composition as Explanation, including this passage on the apparent contradiction of likeness: “Romanticism is then when everything being alike everything is naturally simply different, and Romanticism.” Berrigan illustrates by example that the truth of who anybody is forces itself out no matter what. We are left with “mess and message” instead of with a neat machine-made copy.

‘This mess and message of Berrigan’s poetics of appropriation have made it difficult for some critics to know what to do with his writing. In her 1973 overview of contemporary poetry, critic Marjorie Perloff—a great supporter of the work of Ashbery and of O’Hara—complains that Berrigan’s poetry is “self-indulgent” and that it has the “superficial O’Hara trappings,” but that unlike O’Hara’s poetry, “nothing adds up”. Two decades later, another critic, Geoff Ward, repeated Perloff’s judgment, asserting that Berrigan’s writing is too dominated by O’Hara to contain a unique voice. One critic even put Berrigan and Padgett’s volume, Bean Spasms, on a list of publications that librarians need not bother to acquire. Slowly, though, the critical scales are beginning to tip in the other direction, and the recent publication of the Collected Poems has given some critics a better sense of the breadth and complexity of Berrigan’s work.

‘If in Berrigan’s poetry “nothing adds up,” as Perloff would have it, then perhaps we ought to say that in life itself, nothing adds up. Perhaps Berrigan’s messy contamination of life with art, and of art with life, has made Perloff and other critics uncomfortable. Or perhaps the honesty of this contamination is the source of their un- ease. The people who knew Berrigan well all have described the full-blown nature of the contamination. Ron Padgett has noted that for Berrigan, writing was “something you did when you read the sports page or ate a donut. It was something you did when you sat at your desk and thought about the gods. It was something you did with scissors and Elmer’s glue”. The poet Ed Sanders put it this way: “Berrigan was one of those wall-to-wall poets. He was the guy who made up the dictum that there are no weekends for poets”. It is the consistencies between, and fluidity of, art and life that characterize Berrigan’s poetics of appropriation and that give it the power of truth.’ — Reva Wolf

 

_____
Further

Ted Berrigan Homepage
Audio: Ted Berrigan’s readings @ PennSound
‘“Time And Time Again”: The Strategy of Simultaneity in Ted Berrigan’s “The Sonnets”‘
The Ted Berrigan Papers
‘Collage Education’ by Richard Hell
‘On The Selected Poems of Ted Berrigan’
Ted Berrigan’s ‘from THE BUSINESS OF WRITING POETRY’
‘Ted Berrigan. Plagiarism and / or the Found Poem. A Creative Writing Lesson.
Ted Berrigan @ goodreads
Book: ‘Nice to See You: Homage to Ted Berrigan’
Audio: Ted Berrigan at Bard College, 1982
‘You Were Like Skyscrapers Veering Away: My First Time with Ted Berrigan’s Sonnets’
Book: ‘Ted Berrigan: An Annotated Checklist’
‘The Selected Poems of Ted Berrigan’ reviewed @ The Believer
The Ted Berrigan Scholarship
Podcast: ‘Words: Program No. 14: Ted Berrigan and Ron Padgett’
‘Jim Carroll’ by Ted Berrigan
‘Notebook (Paul Cézanne, Ted Berrigan, &c.;)’
‘Ted Berrigan’s Birthday’
‘SONNET WORKSHOP’ by Ted Berrigan
Book: ‘Talking in Tranquility: Interviews with Ted Berrigan’
‘Ted Berrigan and Foreign Film’
Video: Kenneth Goldsmith reads Ted Berrigan’s “Train Ride” in front of Alex Katz’s Upside Down Ada
Buy ‘The Selected Poems of Ted Berrigan’

 

________
Additionally

Ted Berrigan reads Sonnet LXXVI

Ted Berrigan talkin shop & reading “Whitman in Black”

Anne Waldman and Ted Berrigan read their poem “Memorial Day,” ca 1973

A Reading to Celebrate: The Selected Poems of Ted Berrigan

 

______________
An Interview with John Cage by Ted Berrigan

 

TED BERRIGAN: What about Marshall McLuhan?

JOHN CAGE: Just this: the media is not a message. I would like to sound a word of warning to Mr. McLuhan: to speak is to lie. To lie is to collaborate.

BERRIGAN: How does that relate?

CAGE: Do you know the Zen story of the mother who had just lost her only son? She is sitting by the side of the road weeping and the monk comes along and asks her why she’s weeping and she says she has lost her only son and so he hits her on the head and says, “There, that’ll give you something to cry about.”

BERRIGAN: Yes, somebody should have kicked that monk in the ass!

CAGE: I agree. Somebody said that Brecht wanted everybody to think alike. I want everybody to think alike. But Brecht wanted to do it through Communism, in a way. Russia is doing it under government. It’s happening here all by itself without being under a strict government; so if it’s working without trying, why can’t it work without being Communist? Everybody looks and acts alike, and we’re getting more and more that way. I think everybody should be a machine. I think everybody should be alike.

BERRIGAN: Isn’t that like Pop Art?

CAGE: Yes, that’s what Pop Art is, liking things, which incidentally is a pretty boring idea.

BERRIGAN: Does the fact that it comes from a machine diminish its value to you?

CAGE: Certainly not! I think that any artistic product must stand or fall on what’s there. A chimpanzee can do an abstract painting, if it’s good, that’s great!

BERRIGAN: Mary McCarthy has characterized you as a sour Utopian. Is that accurate?

CAGE: I do definitely mean to be taken literally, yes. All of my work is directed against those who are bent, through stupidity or design, on blowing up the planet.

BERRIGAN: Well, that is very interesting, Mr. Cage, but I wanted to know what you think in the larger context, i.e., the Utopian.

CAGE: I don’t know exactly what you mean there . . . I think the prestige of poetry is very high in the public esteem right now, perhaps height is not the right yardstick, but it is perhaps higher than ever. If you can sell poetry, you can sell anything. No, I think it’s a wonderful time for poetry and I really fell that something is about to boil. And in answer to your question about whether poetry could resume something like the Elizabethan spread, I think it’s perfectly possible that this could happen in the next four or five years. All it needs is the right genius to come along and let fly. And old Masefield, I was pleased to see the other day celebrating his ninetieth birthday, I think, said that there are still lots of good tales to tell. I thought that was very nice, and it’s true, too.

BERRIGAN: Do you think, that is, are you satisfied with the way we are presently conducting the war in Viet Nam?

CAGE: I am highly dissatisfied with the way we are waging this nasty war.

BERRIGAN: Incidentally, your rooms are very beautiful.

CAGE: Nothing incidental about it at all. These are lovely houses; there are two for sale next door, a bargain, too, but they’re just shells. They’ve got to be all fixed up inside as this one was, too. They were just tearing them down when I got the Poetry Society over here to invite Hy Sobiloff, the only millionaire poet, to come down and read, and he was taken in hand and shown this house next door, the one that I grew up in, and what a pitiful state it was in. Pick-axes had already gone through the roof. And so he bought four of them and fixed this one up for our use as long as we live, rent free.

BERRIGAN: Not bad. Tell me, have you ever though of doing sound tracks for Hollywood movies?

CAGE: Why not? Any composer of genuine ability should work in Hollywood today. Get the Money! However, few screen composers possess homes in Bel-Air, illuminated swimming pools, wives in full-length mink coats, three servants, and that air of tired genius turned sour Utopian. Without that, today, you are nothing. Alas, money buys pathetically little in Hollywood beyond the pleasures of living in an unreal world, associating with a group of narrow people who think, talk, and drink, most of them bad people; and the doubtful pleasure of watching famous actors and actresses guzzle up the juice and stuff the old gut in some of the rudest restaurants in the world. Me, I have never given it a thought.

BERRIGAN: Tell me about Silence.

CAGE: Sure. You never know what publishers are up to. I had the damnedest time with Silence. My publishers, H***, R***, and W***, at first were very excited about doing it, and then they handed it over to a young editor who wanted to rewrite it entirely, and proceeded to do so; he made a complete hash of it. And I protested about this and the whole thing–the contract was about to be signed–and they withdrew it, because of this impasse. The Publisher, who is my friend, said, “Well, John, we never really took this seriously, did we? So why don’t we just forget it?” And I replied, “Damn it all, I did take it seriously; I want to get published.” Well, then they fired this young man who was rewriting me, and everything was peaceful. But there was still some static about irregularities of tone in Silence. So I said, “Well, I’ll just tone them down a little, tune the whole thing up, so to speak.” But I did nothing of the sort, of course! I simply changed the order. I sent it back re-arranged, and then they wanted me to do something else; finally I just took the whole thing somewhere else.

BERRIGAN: What was your father like?

CAGE: I don’t want to speak of him. My mother detested him.

BERRIGAN: What sort of person was your mother?

CAGE: Very religious. Very. But now she is crazy. She lay on top of me when I was tied to the bed. She writes me all the time begging me to return. Why do we have to speak of my mother?

BERRIGAN: Do you move in patterns?

CAGE: Yes. It isn’t so much repeating patterns, it’s repetition of similar attitudes that lead to further growth. Everything we do keeps growing, the skills are there, and are used in different ways each time. The main thing is to do faithfully those tasks assigned by oneself in order to further awareness of the body.

BERRIGAN: Do you believe that all good art is unengaging?

CAGE: Yes I do.

BERRIGAN: Then what about beauty?

CAGE: Many dirty hands have fondled beauty, made it their banner; I’d like to chop off those hands, because I do believe in that banner . . . the difference is that art is beauty, which the Beatniks naturally lack!

BERRIGAN: The Beatniks, notably Ed Sanders, are being harassed by the police lately. Do you approve?

CAGE: On the contrary. The problem is that the police are unloved. The police in New York are all paranoid . . . they were so hateful for so long that everybody got to hate them, and that just accumulated and built up. The only answer to viciousness is kindness. The trouble is that the younger kids just haven’t realized that you’ve got to make love to the police in order to solve the police problem.

BERRIGAN: But how do you force love on the police?

CAGE: Make love to the police. We need highly trained squads of lovemakers to go everywhere and make love.

BERRIGAN: But there are so many police, it is a practical problem.

CAGE: Yes, I know, it will certainly take time, but what a lovely project.

BERRIGAN: Do you think it is better to be brutal than to be indifferent?

CAGE: Yes. It is better to be brutal than indifferent. Some artists prefer the stream of consciousness. Not me. I’d rather beat people up.

BERRIGAN: Say something about Happenings. You are credited with being the spiritual daddy of the Happening.

CAGE: Happenings are boring. When I hear the word “Happening” I spew wildly into my lunch!

BERRIGAN: But Allan Kaprow calls you “the only living Happening.”

CAGE: Allan Kaprow can go eat a Hershey-bar!

BERRIGAN: Hmmm. Well put. Now, to take a different tack, let me ask you: what about sex?

CAGE: Sex is a biologic weapon, insofar as I can see it. I feel that sex, like every other human manifestation, has been degraded for anti-human purposes. I had a dream recently in which I returned to the family home and found a different father and mother in the bed, though they were still somehow my father and mother. What I would like, in the way of theatre, is that somehow a method would be devised, a new form, that would allow each member of the audience at a play to watch his own parents, young again, make love. Fuck, that is, not court.

BERRIGAN: That certainly would be different, wouldn’t it? What other theatrical vent interests you?

CAGE: Death. The Time Birth Death gimmick. I went recently to see “Dr. No” at Forty-Second Street. It’s a fantastic movie, so cool. I walked outside and somebody threw a cherry bomb right in front of me, in this big crowd. And there was blood, I saw blood on people and all over. I felt like I was bleeding all over. I saw in the paper that week that more and more people are throwing them. Artists, too. It’s just part of the scene–hurting people.

BERRIGAN: How does Love come into all this?

CAGE: It doesn’t. It comes later. Love is memory. In the immediate present we don’t love; life is too much with us. We lust, wilt, snort, swallow, gobble, hustle, nuzzle, etc. Later, memory flashes images swathed in nostalgia and yearning. We call that Love. Ha! Better to call it Madness.

BERRIGAN: Is everything erotic to you?

CAGE: Not lately. No, I’m just kidding. Of course everything is erotic to me; if it isn’t erotic, it isn’t interesting.

BERRIGAN: Is life serious?

CAGE: Perhaps. How should I know? In any case, one must not be serious. Not only is it absurd, but a serious person cannot have sex.

BERRIGAN: Very interesting! But, why not?

CAGE: If you have to ask, you’ll never know.

* The above interview is completely a product of its author. John Cage served neither as collaborator nor as interviewee.

 

________
Handwritten

 

___
Book

Alice Notley, Anselm & Edmund Berrigan, eds. The Selected Poems of Ted Berrigan
University of California Press

‘Following the highly acclaimed Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan, poets Alice Notley, Anselm Berrigan, and Edmund Berrigan have collaborated again on this new selection of poems by one of the most influential and admired poets of his generation. Reflecting a new editorial approach, this volume demonstrates the breadth of Ted Berrigan’s poetic accomplishments by presenting his most celebrated, interesting, and important work. This major second-wave New York School poet is often identified with his early poems, especially The Sonnets, but this selection encompasses his full poetic output, including the later sequences Easter Monday and A Certain Slant of Sunlight, as well as many of his uncollected poems. The Selected Poems of Ted Berrigan provides a new perspective for those already familiar with his remarkable wit and invention, and introduces new readers to what John Ashbery called the “crazy energy” of this iconoclastic, funny, brilliant, and highly innovative writer.’ — UoCP

 

______
Excerpts

Last Poem

Before I began life this time
I took a crash course in Counter-Intelligence
Once here I signed in, see name below, and added
Some words remembered from an earlier time,
‘The intention of the organism is to survive.’
My earliest, & happiest, memories pre-date WWII,
They involve a glass slipper & a helpless blue rose
In a slender blue single-rose vase: Mine
Was a story without a plot. The days of my years
Folded into one another, an easy fit, in which
I made money & spent it, learned to dance & forgot, gave
Blood, regained my poise, & verbalized myself a place
In Society. 101 St. Mark’s Place, apt. 12A, NYC 10009
New York. Friends appeared & disappeared, or wigged out,
Or stayed; inspiring strangers sadly died; everyone
I ever knew aged tremendously, except me. I remained
Somewhere between 2 and 9 years old. But frequent
Reification of my own experiences delivered to me
Several new vocabularies, I loved that almost most of all.
I once had the honor of meeting Beckett & I dug him.
The pills kept me going, until now. Love, & work,
Were my great happinesses, that other people die the source
Of my great, terrible, & inarticulate one grief. In my time
I grew tall & huge of frame, obviously possessed
Of a disconnected head, I had a perfect heart. The end
Came quickly & completely without pain, one quiet night as I
Was sitting, writing, next to you in bed, words chosen randomly
From a tired brain, it, like them, suitable, & fitting.
Let none regret my end who called me friend.

 

Personal Poem #9

It’s 8:54 a.m. in Brooklyn it’s the 26th of July
and it’s probably 8:54 in Manhattan but I’m
in Brooklyn I’m eating English muffins and drinking
Pepsi and I’m thinking of how Brooklyn is
New York City too how odd I usually think of it
as something all its own like Bellows Falls like
Little Chute like Uijongbu
I never thought
on the Williamsburg Bridge I’d come so much to Brooklyn
just to see lawyers and cops who don’t even carry guns
taking my wife away and bringing her back
No
and I never thought Dick would be back at Gude’s
beard shaved off long hair cut and Carol reading
her books when we were playing cribbage and watching
the sun come up over the Navy Yard a-
cross the river I think I was thinking
when I was ahead I’d be somewhere like Perry Street
erudite dazzling slim and badly-loved
contemplating my new book of poetry
to be printed in simple type on old brown paper
feminine marvelous and tough

 

A Certain Slant of Sunlight

In Africa the wine is cheap, and it is
on St. Mark’s Place too, beneath a white moon.
I’ll go there tomorrow, dark bulk hooded
against what is hurled down at me in my no hat
which is weather: the tall pretty girl in the print dress
under the fur collar of her cloth coat will be standing
by the wire fence where the wild flowers grow not too tall
her eyes will be deep brown and her hair styled 1941 American
will be too; but
I’ll be shattered by then
But now I’m not and can also picture white clouds
impossibly high in blue sky over small boy heartbroken
to be dressed in black knickers, black coat, white shirt,
buster-brown collar, flowing black bow-tie
her hand lightly fallen on his shoulder, faded sunlight falling
across the picture, mother & son, 33 & 7, First Communion Day, 1941–
I’ll go out for a drink with one of my demons tonight
they are dry in Colorado 1980 spring snow.

 

10 Things I Do Every Day

wake up
smoke pot
see the cat
love my wife
think of Frank

eat lunch
make noises
sing songs
go out
dig the streets

go home for dinner
read the Post
make pee-pee
two kids
grin

read books
see my friends
get pissed-off
have a Pepsi
disappear

 

Red Shift

Here I am at 8:08 p.m. indefinable ample rhythmic frame
The air is biting, February, fierce arabesques
on the way to tree in winter streetscape
I drink some American poison liquid air which bubbles
and smoke to have character and to lean
In. The streets look for Allen, Frank, or me, Allen
is a movie, Frank disappearing in the air, it’s
Heavy with that lightness, heavy on me, I heave
through it, them, as
The Calvados is being sipped on Long island now
twenty years almost ago, and the man smoking
Is looking at the smilingly attentive woman, & telling.
Who would have thought that I’d be here, nothing
wrapped up, nothing buried, everything
Love, children, hundreds of them, money, marriage-
ethics, a politics of grace,
Up in the air, swirling, burning even or still, now
more than ever before?
Not that practically a boy, serious in corduroy car coat
eyes penetrating the winter twilight at 6th
& Bowery in 1961. Not that pretty girl, nineteen, who was
going to have to go, careening into middle-age so,
To burn, & to burn more fiercely than even she could imagine
so to go. Not that painter who from very first meeting
I would never & never will leave alone until we both vanish
into the thin air we signed up for & so demanded
To breathe & who will never leave me, not for sex, nor politics
nor even for stupid permanent estrangement which is
Only our human lot & means nothing. No, not him.
There’s a song, ‘California Dreaming’, but no, I won’t do that
I am 43. When will I die? I will never die, I will live
To be 110, & I will never go away, & you will never escape from me
who am always & only a ghost, despite this frame, Spirit
Who lives only to nag.
I’m only pronouns, & I am all of them, & I didn’t ask for this
You did
I came into your life to change it & it did so & now nothing
will ever change
That, and that’s that.
Alone & crowded, unhappy fate, nevertheless
I slip softly into the air
The world’s furious song flows through my costume.

 

Buddha On The Bounty
for Merrill Gilfillan

‘A little loving can solve a lot of things’
She locates two spatial equivalents in
The same time continuum. ‘You are lovely. I
am lame.’ ‘Now it’s me.’ ‘If a man is in
Solitude, the world is translated, my world
& wings sprout from the shoulders of ‘The Slave”
Yeah. I like the fiery butterfly puzzles
Of this pilgrimage toward clarities
Of great mud intelligence & feeling.
‘The Elephant is the wisest of all animals
The only one who remembers his former lives
& he remains motionless for long periods of time
Meditating thereon.’ I’m not here, now,
& it is good, absence.

 

Frank O’Hara

Winter in the country, Southampton, pale horse
as the soot rises, then settles, over the pictures
The birds that were singing this morning have shut up
I thought I saw a couple kissing, but Larry said no
It’s a strange bird. He should know. & I think now
“Grandmother divided by monkey equals outer space.” Ron
put me in that picture. In another picture, a good-
looking poet is thinking it over, nevertheless, he will
never speak of that it. But, his face is open, his eyes
are clear, and, leaning lightly on an elbow, fist below
his ear, he will never be less than perfectly frank,
listening, completely interested in whatever there may
be to hear. Attentive to me alone here. Between friends,
nothing would seem stranger to me than true intimacy.
What seems genuine, truly real, is thinking of you, how
that makes me feel. You are dead. And you’ll never
write again about the country, that’s true.
But the people in the sky really love
to have dinner & to take a walk with you.

 

Sonnet #13

Mountains of twine and
Teeth braced against it
Before gray walls. Feet walk
Released by night (which is not to imply
Death) under the murk spell
Racing down the blue lugubrious rainway
To the promise of emptiness
In air we get our feet wet . . . a big rock
Caresses cloud bellies
He finds he cannot fake
Wed to wakefulness, night which is not death
Fuscous with murderous dampness
But helpless, as blue roses are helpless.
Rivers of annoyance undermine the arrangements.

 

Today’s News

My body heavy with poverty (starch)
It uses up my sexual energy
constantly &
I feel constantly crowded
On the other hand, One Day in the Afternoon of The World
Pervaded my life with a
heavy grace
today
I’ll never smile again
Bad Teeth
But I’m dancing with tears in my eyes
(I can’t help myself!) Tom
when he loves Alice’s sonnets,
takes four, I’d love
to be more attentive to her, more
here.
The situation having become intolerable
the only alternatives are:
Murder & Suicide.
They are too dumb! So, one
becomes a goof. Raindrops
start falling on my roof. I say
Hooray! Then I say, I’m going out

At the drugstore I say, Gimmie some pills!
Charge ’em! They say
Sure. I say See you later.
Read the paper. Talk to Alice. She laughs to hear
Hokusai had 947 changes of address
In his life. Ha-ha. Plus everything
else in the world
going on here.

 

Things To Do On Speed

mind clicks into gear
& fingers clatter over the keyboard
as intricate insights stream
out of your head;
this goes on for ten hours:
then, take a break: clean
all desk drawers, arrange all
pens & pencils in precise parallel patterns;
stack all books with exactitude in one pile
to coincide perfectly with the right angle
of the desk’s corner.
Whistle thru ten more hours of arcane insights:
drink a quart of ice-cold pepsi:
clean the ice-box:
pass out for ten solid hours
interesting dreams.

2.

Finish papers, wax floors, lose weight, write songs, sing songs, have
conference, sculpt, wake up & think more clearly. Clear up asthma.
treat your obesity, avoid mild depression, decongest, cure your
narcolepsy,
treat your hyper-kinetic brain-damaged children. Open the Pandora’s Box
of amphetamine abuse.

3.

Stretch the emotional sine curve; follow euphoric peaks with descents
into troughs
that are unbearable wells of despair & depression. Become a ravaged
scarecrow. Cock your emaciated body in
twisted postures
scratch your torn & pock-marked skin,
keep talking, endlessly.

4.

Jump off a roof on the lower East Side
or
Write a 453 page unintelligible book

5.

Dismantle 12 radios
string beads interminably
empty your purse
sit curled in a chair
& draw intricate designs
in the corner of an envelope

6.

‘I felt it rush almost instantly into
my head like a short circuit. My body
began to pulsate, & grew tiny antennae
all quivering in anticipation. I began
to receive telepathic communication from
the people around me. I felt elated.’

7.

get pissed off.
Feel your tongue begin to shred,
lips to crack, the inside of the mouth
become eaten out. Itch all over. See
your fingernails flake off, hair & teeth
fall out.
Buy a Rolls Royce
Become chief of the Mafia
Consider anti-matter.

8.

Notice that tiny bugs are crawling all over your whole body
around, between and over your many new pimples.
Cut away pieces of bad flesh.
Discuss mother’s promiscuity
Sense the presence of danger at the movies
Reveal
get tough
turn queer

9.

In the Winter, switch to heroin, so you won’t catch pneumonia.
In the Spring, go back to speed.

 

 

*

p.s. Hey. ** jay, Morning to you! I think the scribbled on frames are part of the work. I’ve never seem them where the frames were cropped out at least. Oh, sure, the gloop bombings have glassed everything artwise over here. Or everything famous. I can imagine Bacon digging that, you’re right, Huh. Of course if submitting interests you at all, or if there’s any way you want to contribute to blog, not that you don’t greatly contribute as it is, I’m down. Thanks, pal. ** Dominik, Hi!!! Ace! No way, he found this shades! I was almost sure they were goners. Love can be so handy. Haha, well, imagine how old I feel doing a blog in 2024? Does that mean I can marry love? Because that seems like it would be a marriage made in heaven. Love having the simple task of making it stop raining violently before I have to walk out the door and then lengthily through the streets in just over an hour, G. ** Lucas, Hey, L! But you know, really blurry and unfocused can be pretty cool. There are artists out there who’ve become millionaires+ with deliberately ‘bad’ photos. Granted they’re usually blown up to a monumental scale. They do seem indistinguishable: those forests, but I think it’s your refined aesthetic eye that unifies them. I swear I’m going to find something to photograph for you today. If it stops violently raining at least. Thanks about the mess. The film itself will survive no matter what, that’s the one heartening part of all of this. I’m doing the tune-out method too. Yes, I love early Cat Power a lot. Both ‘Nude as the News’ and ‘Cross Bones Style’ are among my all time favorite songs. They’re a great escape. Nice. I’m aiming for a good week for sure. My intuition tells me yours will surprise you with its treats. ** _Black_Acrylic, It’s true. I think every art school has at least one Mark Morrisroe-alike student if not dozens. ** Steve, Well, mainly it costs a lot less to make a short film so raising funds should be a lot, lot easier. I think after the six+ years of difficulty making ‘Room Temperature’ it would be nice to do something easier before we jump back into the feature film struggles. France has arcane regulations about everything, short films included, so yes. Prayers about that heat. My very soul is sweating in commiseration. I’ve read about that Verraco EP, but I haven’t heard it. Sounds like a ‘hey, why not’. Thanks. ** Harper, Hi, Harper. Oh, good, the ending, but, yes, the hardness. Better on balance at least? I’ve had Greer Lankton’s work in posts in the past, but I haven’t done a whole post about her. Great idea. She’s perfect for my galerie. I like her work very much, of course. I used to see it in galleries back in the East Village Art Scene days. I have a number of friends from Chicago who knew her. She’s wonderful. I’m happy her work is still alive. So many of her peers’ works have been totally forgotten. Err, that casserole, I mean, 80% odds of a human component, wouldn’t you say? ** Uday, I think the escorts and slaves deserve thoughtful responses, so that’s very thoughtful of you. High five on the Morrisroe love. Hm, I don’t think my opinions in old articles and essays and stuff have changed, and I guess I would say the tone and approach I would write those pieces in now would be somewhat different. Less punk maybe. ** audrey, Well, hi, Audrey! So good to see you! I was just thinking about you and wondering how you are not even two days ago. I’m glad the post got to you. Oh, I’ve been mostly trying to get film finished at least this year. And writing a little. Not a ton, really. What about you? What have you been doing and what are you doing, if you don’t mind saying? Big love right back to you! ** Justin D, My pleasure. Today is okay so far. I’m in a rush because I have to go out really soon, so I’ll check out the Ladytron track later. I will just say there was a period when I literally could not seem to stop playing ‘Destroy Everything You Touch’ over and over and over. Hugs from cats and dogs-style rainy Paris. ** Cletus, So happy you liked it. I’ll read your poems later because I’m scrambling to finish and make an appointment, but … Everyone Here’s Cletus. Listen up: ‘(S)ome poems I wrote inspired by the Bob Flanagan post were picked up by Expat’s website. ..I hope anyone who stumbles across this comment enjoys them. Here’s the link. Big congrats to you and Expat. ** Bill, Thanks Bill. It sucks majorly, but we’ll figure out a way through it. I first saw his work at Pat Hearn’s too, but in the late 80s? That collab is in the Collected Bob poems book, but very nice to have the thing itself. ** Oscar 🌀, Hey. There was even a French version of ‘Dennis the Menace’ called ‘Denis le Malice’. There’s an alternate spelling right there. That’s interesting because I saw this guy driving a really suave car yesterday, and I asked him what kind of car it was, and he said it was an Os. And then he coughed, but it sounded like ‘hi’. I did have fun at the concert. Oh gosh, I’m unfortunately one of those tall people who feels really guilty at concerts. ‘Like Cattle Towards Glow’ was conceived of as a long film but made up of five scenes, each with different characters and stories, and all focused around sex/desire in a disappointing way. Oh, go to the zine making workshop! That sounds very exciting. I highly encourage you! ** Okay. Ted Berrigan is a great poet, and if don’t know his work, starting with the book I’ve spotlit today is probably a good idea. See you tomorrow.