third spaces
realistically speaking
You spoke of the beginnings of a new metaphor with which we should look at our present condition, like living in Beijing, realistically. Our metaphors come from bicycle encounters and the emotional outcroppings of the everyday. at the time i could only see flesh as a gliding, swerving in and around vehicles, going without cutting corners. We laughed about the flows.
The flesh as meat——not as skin, as I had previously so imagined——is a space of tightness, of form and intimacy and movement as a squeezing of space. Skin as a gliding over and around, all options open except that one moves merely as a compatriot of gravity, touching, just going. Where do we look, realistically, while on our bicycles, in encounter? Nobody cares. Movement is a question of whomever may 让 first, usually predicated upon size. But let us enlarge our frame of view. To examine our reality here is a fleshy matter, full of scars and circumstance. Situationism could be given, rather, a form of agency. Adjacency. Victorious life proposes a next-to. If we were to give up subjectivity and objectivity, can movement presume, ex-stasis? Flow is always a making up of what came before, along the lines of a scar, reaction and healing. Let us make up for imperial autocracy, let us make up for capitalist pigs, let us make up for the sick yellow man! And so we are stuck in a striving or a being, reactionary.
But Vitanza’s scar is a middle place between flesh and skin, along surfaces and imbedded within. Realistically, we find ourselves covering over, working through, both as a form of being and of representation, as spectators and actors, as lifeforms headed inevitably towards death. Is such certainty a place of flesh or of skin? We fall asleep with the TV, we learn to love and hate our lovers. This affect is of flesh and skin, multidirectional, surfaces and interiors all at once.
Scar as both a place and temporality, a contextification. It is the grounding memory of affect, a node upon the flow of the body, or movement ex-stasis. Flashbacks of life in times of death should tear our bodies from such ecstasies; these are the groundings we can never break away from, realistically.
I slipped and hurt myself today, on or off cycles, wet pavement. In the midst of mutual shock, she snapped at me. I’m sorry, I said.
…in the sign of the scar—where foreground and background collapse—negotiating between life and death, skin and scar, public and private, I will hallucinate on a series of cultural objects that would provide us with exemplary ways of “living on” in the scar of the sign as Dasein. But as I do that, note that I do that semiotically across the images being unfolded over there. Da Sein. But. Of Sign. The episode of “Scar Tissue.” I am trying to situate myselves, through a series of interruptions, corruptions, eruptions, between over there and here. Becoming be-tween. Ec-static. Perhaps after a while you, too, will situate yourselves in between there and here.
–Victor Vitanza, “Design as Dasein”: Scar, … to be accompanied by video
Posted by 丫 | more »at risk, facticity.
C = the condition of not knowing (gap) the possibility of being wrong
Posted by 丫 | reply »treatise on the university of disaster
I had no idea what he was talking about, really. Reverberations pass away easily, behind the ears, at pressure points, when cooking. Roles are performed in adequate fashion, resulting in countering feelings of inadequacy, words flow, nothing is communicated. The treatise is about performance, perhaps. Insinuation of a guise, this is not real, whichever how you really feel. No, really. Keeping it real.
Had no idea what i was talking about really. Sometimes the emotions would arise, and one would find oneself unable to act appropriately, a subjective propriety, a nicety. Trying not to look too hard at his pimples. The palimpsest of his pimples, because even thirty-somethings get them, oh yes, renewal, we can feel like teenagers again and again and over again.
Your postmaturity, maybe. Treatises that we haven’t written yet, half-thoughts, names dropped, another drifting off on the bus again. No, there. When the girl with the ponytail steps on my foot in the bus, I notice her, her captivated audience of fellow passengers, a spectacle in action. She is playing paper-rock-scissors with a boy shorter than her, perhaps that is what it makes it more obvious that he is cheating the game, as his eyes steal glances upwards on every count, towards her poised hand, ready to draw. If he is quick he can change his draw at the last moment, just after he’s seen her paper or rock or scissor coming down like an absurd call of judgement. His is fickle and cunning at the same time. Paper wraps around rock. But each time the breath before the draw is prolonged just a bit longer; she knows his game. He knows she knows his game. And the game shifts a little bit, bus ride bumpy, to a different battle of suspense: who will cheat on the other first. the classic grid of one to another strategy, don’t call it war, it’s just the way things are. remember that lecture that we went to where you didn’t understand? Punnett for non-pundits, I’m on the bus and I could observe this moment for hours. fault or fancy? their fists are suspended in mid-air, holding on a bit longer than forever. this is a treatise on the university of disaster.
Posted by 丫 | more »kind of, sometimes
to the old lady working at the internet cafe, whom i could slam a hundred times in aftermath but only saw my childish smile in backwards retreat, we could make an example of you in our courteous, civilised new metropolis, as per a certain someone said i was often wont to do, some sort of ethnographic approach to what lack of humanity there may be in world of screens and headphones, of blank faces and pounding hearts, why in the world should i wish to make an example of you, sickly woman with cracked face who sits in the dark by day, your rule this world perhaps and i am mere observer, a hasty brushing off sends me away, without being able to engage in the very services that you offer. or the mistake that we make in this situation is that working for the money (the system that creates low wage working conditions, the worker that desires to fill this position for lack of better opportunity, because it is easy, because it is simply what is there) eliminates the very ‘you’ of this equation, for You, Other, are simply no longer there. This is not an issue of being looked down upon or prejudiced, it is the disappearance of another all together. Combined with the last 61 years of our lack of self, we come back in full force with an overbearing subjectivity that oppresses all not-self as well. it leads us to a form of exchange without humanity whatsoever, but what sort of presumption was that, anyway.
i cringed when he mentioned that words had been missing of late, but the lack of literature could have been a parallel to a similar decline of the sense of being. i am present, perhaps, in some way, a childish half-smile, but it’s only half-shock, a blinding before anger sets in, what was that about to solidify, hard-set equations, exchange is never all that, i kind of hate you sometimes, kind of, sometimes.
Posted by 丫 | reply »inventory, for aikun volume 2
from a contribution to aikun zine number 2, by 王汉丽 Regina Ho. Recording by her daughter 丫, April 2010.
Posted by 丫 | reply »samples, what to say
re: mmmmm
——– Original Message ——–
Subject: Re: mmmmm
Date: Fri, 5 Feb 2010 00:39:23 +0100
From: Lommée Thomas <http://intrastructures.net/>
To: ho @ iwishicoulddescribeittoyoubetter.net
Shlaraffenland is German for … boogie-wonderland!
It’s that place where you can stay in bed all day long and watch DVDs, where lemon cheese cakes are packed in semi-translucent paper, where people drive bikes with big baskets full of kids, where the streets smell like fresh croissants between 7 and 9 am, where people just say what they always wanted to say, where coffee comes with a little chocolate, where people still dress up for parties, where old ladies talk with a lot of gestures, where smoking is still accepted, where you can eat from the walls (but only on special occasions), where newspapers are crispy and heroic, where WiFi is gone (but then not maybe … donno), where people built boats on their roofs and pigeons bring messages, where the moments you’ve been waiting for all your life really happen … at least most of them.
Just google it, you might find it ..
Posted by 丫 | more »metapresence
when i returned to Beijing after approximately one month away, i played the game, as always, of walking around the neighbourhood to see which places have disappeared in my absence, which new businesses or grand ambitions have moved in to replace the failing or derelict, a sort of remapping one’s estrangement within the city. i walked from xiaojingchang hutong to the northern end of andingmen nei, and with hands in pockets passed by a candy bar vendor (new), a book-laden cart full of pirated publications on technology/software (old), and a cardboard box stand topped with rows of socks (old). i walked into the andingmen hotel, where i end up sleeping for several nights, a new tourist in a now familiar city. there was a small exhibition and series of events happening in two of the rooms of the hotel, and it became a quiet but social place to welcome myself back into a place of growing certainty; this was a place delicately juxtaposed with all the awkwardness and adamance that one can have about one’s sense of place in the world. it was called “also space“. during these few days, there was a certain amount of presence, self-consciously experienced and toyed with, a space and socius to make one acutely aware of all the small details of showing and not knowing.
each morning i would wake from the hardish hotel bed in room 221, happy for warmth but tired for tiredness, enter the bathroom and begin to rearrange the selection of hotel offerings, as are commonly found in many temporary lodgings: two plastic wrapped soaps——packaged again in a printed cardboard box——three toothbrushes, two plastic combs with the hotel name in gold-coloured print. I took away one of the toothbrushes and replaced it with a toothbrush in similar packaging from another hotel. I added a plastic wrapped disposable razor labeled, “one to one”, not knowing which hotel i may have taken it from. another time and another space. a sewing kit from yet another hotel, travel-sized toothpaste from germany, travel-sized moisturizing lotion from hong kong. over the course of these few days, some of the items disappeared or were refilled by the service personnel, the blue towels were replenished with white ones. i thought about the possibility of being absolutely present in a place which one can deem home and not home at the same time. when the maid did not make the bed, i did it for her. but i left one of my hairs on the pillowcase along with a dried mandarin peel, and i wondered if any of our guests would notice and ask, “is this an artwork, too?” it’s a funny game to play, to observe everything in an unexpected place as possibly “art”. perhaps not so different from a game of trying to notice all the places that have disappeared or been born in one’s absence.
there was a certain consciousness of presence that i attempted to maintain in these days, living in a hotel in my “home” city. i commuted back and forth to my flat to change clothing, deliberately sprayed on too much perfume. i tried to pay attention to artworks, but fell asleep; a conversation would float past and i would suddenly remember something else that i was supposed to do. and only after a few treks between xiaojingchang and the northern end of andingmen nei did i notice the disappearance of the 24 hour Quick convenience store (old) and insertion of Bee’s cafe (new). Workers move on and on. Presence is a just-fading, a recognition of small distractions.
If we had not noticed the miniscule details of change, development and/or the passing of time around us, would we have missed a minor referencing of the present, a consciousness of our own time away from now, self-reference, a meta-presencing? Present that cannot exist, like a young architect asking questions in the form of statements about scale, he discovers his talk is not there——μετά as “after” or “beyond”, as “with”, “adjacent” and “self”.
Posted by 丫 | more »ideas about karaoke
recorded at Lee Kit’s “Someone singing and calling your name”, december 2009
Posted by 丫 | reply »mrs. jeanne dielman, objecthood, health and routine sadness
leaning towards, leaning on, attachments.
靠！to be close to.
Posted by 丫 | reply »