Zürich night
Photo courtesy of Nic Shepherd
Some 15 minutes after having been abandoned at the Perla Mode by an American living in Zürich, I found him again at another opening at a small exhibition space called Les Complices. He made some comment about how I was typically Canadian because of the desire I expressed (which admittedly had structured my last 5 years) to keep going out rather than back to North America. I had not assigned value to my statement, and in my view it could indeed be taken as a lack of control and capriciousness. The space, which had a DJ playing, was a queer art space. I was not sure if my jocular, drunk brotherness was appreciated, and I was in the mood to joke. Out front one of the drunk women, who turned out to be a Canadian from Montreal, tried to convince her acquaintances to go out to a non-gay place to dance. She appeared to be quite drunk, and unless I was mistaken, the other two were not very fond of her. She had pimples. The other two returned to their friends inside and I was left, so she asked me and I thought, why not, I’d like to go dancing. We walked arm in arm down the street to a place right on Langstrasse. She joked with the bouncer who tried to remain stern, they were obviously familiar with each other, and it made me feel that this was a small town. Inside it was hip hop night, and various large men rocked back and forth in the red velvet surroundings. She knew someone (although they claimed they hadn’t known each other before) and they began talking. She asked me to buy her a drink, but I really had no money on me. This other girl seemed to be looking for someone to go home with. They asked me if I wanted to fuck, said that it was what everyone in the room wants. I joked that I was a virgin and the girl believed me, appeared to take pity on me, which made me uncomfortable – when I retracted the statement she asked me what kind of lover I was. I motioned to some of the large men standing near the turntables “maybe they want to fuck.” She considered this and went to see about it. When the lesbian’s back was also turned I used the opportunity to slip out the front door with my backpack on. I walked home along the vacant street car lines. I kept thinking of the girl’s sad expression when she said she came to the bar quite regularly, but no one had interest in fucking her. It made me kind of sad too.
[courtesy of Michael Eddy, October 2009]
Posted by o | reply »to find and not find the centre of things, all things aside
above: putting up the exhibition (photo by 高灵 Gao Ling); below: walking back after finishing the installation ｜ 上海 shanghai，2009年9月
i am sorry. time is everything.
cannot go there, too much or too little, traveling, hanging there, a collection, hanging on. i seem to have an affinity for stories of people getting lost, perhaps a bit too direct a reference yet were i to introduce myself to you as that one who liked to find this little thing in the street it perhaps would remain too ridiculously nebulous.
direct.
direction.
we would have been looking in the wrong direction to go astray, to find the beside. aside, as in put in reserve, for future use, the collection of objects for which we may find value or function at another time. we never know what will become useful in the end, or the lessons come too late, i feel the top of her head and wonder what positions i layed in as a child, what positions i moved in sleep, next to you or dreaming without you. we cannot always think so functionally, in love and in war. i don’t strategize very well. but we may very well have a hunch.
a hunch is an open space of time, a forethought without expectation, like a collection of random things for which we may find use later. i suppose it could be important to figure out how to make use of them, but perhaps their being together could be enough. find meaning beyond use value, a cabinet of curiousities, our collection of oddities.
that’s the thing i’ve been missing lately. to take time for my collection of oddities, to try to go back to a certain kind of objectivity without expecting too much. i have a hunch. perhaps i was looking in the wrong direction and now find myself lost, a story that i liked to hear, her voice in two languages on loop. it’s my own aside that is now addressed to you, without letting the other characters hear, a story shared without knowing if anyone is listening. you, dear audience member or director, the lights are shining so bright…i cannot see if you are out there.
Posted by 丫 | reply »in praise of shadows
icarus
“Did I really speak? Have I ever really spoken?”
Posted by 丫 | reply »please meet here and now
An Appointment
Alexanderplatz, Tuesday, 27 January 2009, 18.00
[photo by 高灵 Gao Ling]
This is your latest minute notice to our meeting and appointment. Please come to Alexanderplatz station, the platform of the U8 line, between Le Crobag bakery and the Presse + Buch shoppe. Apologies for having been so late all the time lately, does 18.00 sound like a weak quantification of all the things i haven’t caught up to yet?
Please meet me, even if we don’t know one other. No one knows each other here, so let’s just try to remember that fact of all that we know we don’t know, that feeling that you next to me may have noticed it, too.
Mostly we’re ignorant. But I wanted to meet you anyway, an appointment in and of itself as a time and place predetermined. A context embedded into itself, choking, documented. Itself, itself, itself.
And a broad, come with—-first-time everything…
——–
An Appointment is part of the continuing PUBLIC research project by Elaine W. Ho and Fotini Lazaridou-Hatzigoga. Organized as a daily series of experiments, interventions and discourses, PUBLIC aims to examine the potentiality of latency and open spaces made possible in the relations between individuals and publics. Other activities are posted here. Some are open invitations to all, others are unannounced insertions in different locations throughout Berlin. 22 January – 1 February 2009.
two thousand and nine, we try more, we try better
we step out of the house [10] just before midnight, funny [9] noise as we run down the [8] stairs, wanting to be there [7] just in time for the [6] new year, many people on the [5] street, what time, what year [4] is it now in japan, in greece [3], in china, [2] the fireworks set off [1], here we go again, the champagne bottle [2] pops open, and the neighbour with [3] his daughter find it funny to throw the little fireworks [4] at us and laugh as we get scared, sigh, optimism [5] wears off easily and we retreat upstairs [6] again, one more sip of champagne [7], wishing for better neighbours in this [8] new year.. and.. and.. and.. everything.. [9] for all of you, faraway and close..
abstract and blurry but right here in front of you
Posted by f | reply »they call it the modern sky
the inside and the outside and the secret of the fear of the fear
“It is true, part of us has disappeared, but reality itself remains. The fact that, today, we can say that the geography of the outside has changed, that the outside no longer exists, that we are all enclosed within, means that, at the same time, the outside is everywhere. But we should have to be able to divide the division to recover what is left.
It is a trap we accept and that maintains the fiction of ‘this totality’ which paralyzes us as much as it amputates a part of us. And thus we are not, not even sentimentally, without strength and courage in our zeal to maintain a worrying normality which we have not really chosen.
(…) this is the reason why what we can still recover no longer concerns ourselves but our remains; I believe this is the only hope we have for simply making use of our lives. For we can no longer separate ourselves from what is incrusted within us. We can no longer lose ourselves, because we are already almost no longer here. However, we can try to abandon ourselves there where we are shattered in a thousand pieces and perhaps recover our outside. and i am not in a position to say whether, in this case, the form does not come anymore than it leaves.” (alejandra riera, enquiry into the/our outside)
(reading through old notebooks, looking for things to hold on to, lines becoming blurry, the summer dissolving in front of our eyes..)
Posted by f | reply »reflections, some nights before the incident
we drive into the night. not a soul. hardly a light. darkness and four lanes. and the vast abyss. enormous factories. chimneys. machines. conveyor belts. abandoned. left in silence. a grand rail station, concrete, steel and the dark. gas stations as pits of sand. dogs, astray. then, the chaos. the mess you forget sometimes confined in the capital and its delegates. truck upon truck upon truck. load upon load upon load. and coal. like black soil. rows of trucks parked along the highway like a derailed train. waiting. for a call. a sign. north (the privileged) or east (the lacking). cardboard boxes six meters high, heads up on the highway. excuse me, i think i’ve lost my way. mapless, pointless, endless. east ring south ring west ring. east it is. day time now. two lanes. sea. goods. conformist transport for alternative transport. but how long will it last? how long will we last? he enters, sits, and it fills the room. “so uncalled for”. electric fingers. “knocking down the banks of guilt”. electric toes. loss and losses. they become a part of you. they are a part of you. hold on and learn or let go and learn. or repeat your ways to infinity. nothing ever changes but we live in a place that is ever changing. the television set. handshake upon handshake upon handshake. so and so and his wife. so and so and his wife. the park shows an “ethical culture show”. where do we stand with ourselves. so many things left unsaid. left undone. forgotten. did we really meet someone that so reminded us of him. too many people have come and gone. not sure where dream and memory and story meet. it was the characters name in the latest chapter, but ‘v’ replaces ‘w’. what answer are you looking for. you keep pushing the question. it’s in the way you arrange your life. the way you do. the way you are wrong. the way you are right. just watch and you’ll see. we can’t say but we can do. or better yet, we can be. it’s one big, humongous run. another puff. he goes away for business. her baby is finally born. it was a girl, no? never had friends from that far away place so i’ll give you my number. a monolithic sculpture at the centre of the square. that image returns, as it does every now and then. a cap, a green coat, a dark night, frost, and the light, and the light and the stare, a memory like a photograph, lacking the evidence. here, now, tube lights, all white, in motion. the centre of one square kilometer. and la-din-wu. latin dancing. 11-year olds. boys and girls. a bleached-haired teacher. a long way we have come from the spring that came again. no, we can’t allow foreigners. no we don’t have any rooms left. no. no. no the rules have changed. yes, oh, she too? no. at 4 am a yes. a man in pyjamas. faded glory. lions at the gate. emptiness. the secret floor. the 28th floor. the 8th room. 158 yuan. waking up to the foundations. the new. the next. things have changed. six months. 
things have changed or are the things only surfaces.
what makes my vacation vacation
on the verge
