C.J. Martin's Blog, page 57
April 16, 2013
Ash Smith for Paul Klinger
for paul klinger — on the occasion of his being born
Lagarto . the outer skin . in the sunlight a mottled red . like wrapped in a casket of embers . pitched in the mind’s eye a light like mesmerization . cascade of birds in the background foreground . waterwound so just the eyes seem to appear from the larger pool . “These strange states probably originated as a defense.” and the slang slipped into “non-playing devotee of swing music” . whose cousins sleep with birds on their teeth . who crack a crystal ash in the night of our watching . who comes in the mossheat to find . “4. Lightly stroke the lizard’s belly.” who usurp us by a more ancient body . “See your rivers stirring with musk alligators / And sea cows with mirage eyes.” (Léopold Sédar Senghor) . see the body of the creature outlasts our last ink . see teeth sea teeth teamed in swamp states brighter . thus in a net to hold the rain . split fence splayed shorline of the water . thus the tall jaw closed in tighter . or conversely, all arose together .
kimberlyalidio:
What’s Goin’ On? by The Generic Ensemble...
What’s Goin’ On? by The Generic Ensemble Company in conjunction with LuckyChaos Theater
The Generic Ensemble Company in conjunction with LuckyChaos Theatre will present an in-progress ensemble-devised performance of What’s Goin’ On? directed by kt shorb.
What’s Goin’ On? is a an ensemble-based, original performance reinterpreting Bertolt Brecht’s classic play, The Good Person of Szechwan, exploring binary notions of Good/Evil, Male/Female, Wealth/Poverty, Coercion/Consent and Artifice/Authenticity. Simultaneously critiquing Brecht’s treatment of gender, sexuality and orientalism in Szechwan while also drawing inspiration from it, this show examines the question: What does it mean to be virtuous in our current historical moment, when societal pressures and inequality continue to marginalize our bodies and lives?
Created from scratch by the performance ensemble, What’s Goin’ On’? employs new text created by ensemble members layered with activist aesthetics, choreographed movement, indeterminate games, quotidian rituals made extraordinary, and simultaneous conflicting actions to present a dense and complex collage. Drawing material relevant to ensemble members’ daily lives, What’s Goin’ On’? reflects the individual identities and personalities of each collaborator, while also reflecting The Generic Ensemble Company’s continued commitment to make the invisible visible through bold, socially relevant, body-centered theatre that showcases mostly-queer identified, mostly-people of color who are mostly women-identified.
This piece is an in-progress performance featuring: Morgan Collado, Kimberly Curette, Kirsche Dickson, Ashley Hicks, Anna McConnell, James McMaster, Julie Moore, Julian Padilla, Saray de Jesus Rosales, Wendy Vastine, Leng Wong, and kt shorb with support from Kimberly Alidio, Margaux Binder, Paige Binder, and Laura Khalil.
Tickets are sliding scale $5-15.
What’s Goin’ On? is funded and supported in part by the City of Austin through the Cultural Arts Division.
The Generic Ensemble Company
Founded in August 2009, The Generic Ensemble Company (GenEnCo) makes the invisible visible through bold, socially relevant, body-centered theatre. We are a team of artists devising and producing innovative adaptations and new work. We view marginalized bodies, experiences, and subject positions as central to the form and content of creating our work. We train together in Suzuki, Viewpoints and Theatre of the Oppressed to develop rigorous company cohesion, physical presences, and political solidarity. GenEnCo has assembled a critically-acclaimed body of work, showcasing primarily queer-identified women of color on stage. Our first production, Stuck on Gee-Dot, was a site-specific performance inspired by Beckett’s Waiting for Godot consisting of a three-woman cast. It received critical acclaim and was cited as a “Memorable Ensemble” for 2009-2010 in Austin Live Theatre’s Applause Awards. Red Salmon Arts presented GenEnCo in collaborative improvisational performance alongside the Three Jazz Collective as part of their “Conjure” series. GenEnCo was then invited by the Roundtop Poetry festival to devise a tribute to Lucille Clifton as part of the closing ceremonies. GenEnCo is a recipient of the City of Austin Cultural Contracts. GenEnCo was awarded a grant from the Open Meadows Foundation and a Q Rental Subsidy Grant from the Creative Fund for our evening-length original play, The Experiment (2012). http://www.genericensemblecompany.blogspot.com/
LuckyChaos Theater Projects
LuckyChaos Theater Projects produce works by or about Asian Americans as well as other under-represented communities. We hope to increase dialogue about these experiences through the performance arts. Our projects are stories from a different point of view and range from published works to original works including submissions from the community. We explore all mediums including scripted, experimental, improv and movement. With regular monthly programming every 1st and 2nd weekends of the month at Salvage Vanguard Theater (Studio) Fri/Sat 8pm and 1st Sat 10pm. ”Create Art. Create Identity. Create Possibilities. Play On!” www.luckychaos.com
4/15/13
This morning the vulture watched us for hours from the top of the parking garage — into the big glass windows our sad fabric cubes open onto. Becky said he was somehow comforting — regal, alive, sleek emblem what we didn’t know turning his slow head against the lot of still cars and the faster, moving cars pouring down I-10. What’s the difference between a buzzard and a vulture? vulture (n.)late 14c., from Anglo-French vultur, Old French voultour, from Latin vultur, earlier voltur, perhaps related to vellere “to pluck, to tear.” Figurative sense is recorded from 1580s. buzzard (n.) c.1300, from Old French buisart “buzzard, harrier, inferior hawk,” from buson, buison, from Latin buteonem (nominative buteo) a kind of hawk, perhaps with -art suffix for one that carries on some action or possesses some quality, with derogatory connotation (see -ard).
This morning the first article I read was whispered to an interpreter and lawyer and smuggled out, because that person who smuggled it out could live, because that person could leave. Guantanamo. The hunger strike. 11 years. Strapped to a chair and force fed through a tube. Forced catheterized. Samir Naji al Hasan Moqbel says “When I was at home in Yemen, in 2000, a childhood friend told me that in Afghanistan I could do better than the $50 a month I earned in a factory, and support my family.” There’s something I understand in that — the need to survive. How one tries to make a life ones own life.
Some days I worry about the long commute I have to make, even though it’s not that bad. I leave in the dark. The body absorbs the tension of traffic, oil — esp. women’s bodies, says another article. “We were pitched forward into the future.” writes Lauren Dixon on facebook. She’s talking about running, the bomb in Boston. “It changes how we run, the steps we take, the miles we cover, because we know that at our most liberated, those steps can still be stolen from us and those we care about….It is the only thing I’ve ever, ever had where I’ve been completely free.” She’s writing after the bomb collides into the body of the Boston runners / and presumably the audience of bystanders cheering on loved ones. What does safety mean? To be safe. To make one safe. Samir Naji al Hasan Moqbel. To be Americanized.To be free.
When we lived in the Rio Grande Valley, one of the first soldiers captured and killed on March 23, 2003 in Nasiriyah in the Invasion of Iraq was from Alton. Edgar Hernandez, “a clumsy guy with an infectious sense of humor who enjoyed jogging and playing basketball with his friends” from Alton — population 12, 341. But when the president came on T.V. to offer condolences, he said Hernandez was from Mission, Tx, which is the closest, bigger town. Misprision. Which I always thought was fittingly sad. Misplaced target. Misplaced town. Misplaced safety. 21st century and your horrible fall out.
We were pitched forward into the future. The last time I saw Lauren Dixon, I was walking out from my thesis defense. I saw her on the top floor of the parking garage and she had a great haircut. I went to my oral defense the day after Max’s dad — before Max was even ever the tiniest idea yet — had emergency surgery. Don’t ask, but I went in a blur. Big blue sky — sunlight in my eyes. When I got back to the hospital, the nurse — who wasn’t that great — had inserted the feeding tube wrong, so that Max’s dad’s eye was swollen and beginning to turn purple. Still. Compliant. Not resisting. That’s how fragile the face is — how easy to fuck up. Or save.
Safetly. Safety. Safety. Other things I wanted to say. How also today 30 were killed in a wedding party in Afghanistan when a U.S. bomb fell upon them as they were celebrating. How sometimes it’s just too much. How you could be hit at any moment in the name of some form of freedom — just trying to be free “…because we know that at our most liberated, those steps can still be stolen from us and those we care about.”
When I pick up Max from daycare, he wants to run into the big field that runs downhill from the daycare’s house to the frontage road. He wants to pick the white, pointed, nearly dental wild onion flowers. And the dandelions (from the french, tooth of the lion: dente-de-lion). Because he’s only 2, sometimes he doesn’t pick low enough. He grabs just a handful of the petals this time and says “a bug ate this one.” In our neighborhood there are 4 types of trees growing in empty lots one can eat from: loquat, fig, pomegranate, pecan. I don’t know why, but I tell Max we could plant a tree here and then whoever needed to could be free to come walk up and eat as much as they wanted. I mean outside. Big blue sky. Sun in our eyes.
April 14, 2013
Ash Smith on Norma Cole (Part II)-- toward a poetics of female body building
Part II_heavy lifting_ gender, appropriation, crossing lines
quick notes toward a poetics of female body building
* The 10 sections of Norma Cole’s “HEAVY LIFTING: POEMS LIFTED LINE BY LINE” is comprised of lines taken from Motion: American Sports Poems, ed. Noah Blaustein. University of Iowa Press, 2001). We live in a culture of sports — also market of spectatorship in which the biggest money goes to the boys with the big muscle. Are even poems supposed to compete? Lean singular voice heaving award winning message? Is the number of female poets in your magazine low — is it b/c they’re not strong enough? “She doesn’t / want the bunchy look / of male lifters” Cole takes the epigraph of the poem from Diane Ackerman — a poem about a line many female weightlifters mind — btwn lifting and not lifting so much that their hips are no longer a “bouquet.” But it’s the moment of difference Cole focuses in on — this poem lifts & lifts like a girl.
* “The closer I am moving toward foreignness, into strangeness, toward understanding foreignness and strangeness, the more I am losing my own language. The small loss of language occurs when I journey to and into my own body. Is my body a foreign land to me?” This is Kathy Aker on Canetti and weightlifting, encroaching Celan.
* Sports are a male territory inasmuch as men are paid the most for it and have an historic hold on the most visible aspects of the profession. In this way sports are like writing.
* What is it that is so beautiful to me in Cole’s poem? Something I feel. here is an excerpt from the first page:
I need to train
I said to Joe Frazier
Here I am
I remember Sundays when the man I call my father made me
We play basketball
We play basketball
The dark scissors of his legs
Sometimes I feel like I will never stop
Please refrain from ogling your neighbor’s penis
Stretch your hamstrings, think of how you are lifting
I’ll be the first
If muscles are the currency of dreams
There is a propulsion in the writing — in the way the poem moves — refuses to settle in a single space. A poem about the pleasure of sports — developing. Tho it is also a poem about sex and gender — Joe Frazier, the father’s law, the locker room of penises. Among these things a subject seems to nearly appear Here I am — to want a space — to stay in the game. This collage of voices, this spectatorship turned on itself also offers a means of disidentification “Didn’t think of the clasp / God help me, liberal mothers / What’s it like? You take it from me / happy to have these fish!” By cribbing a mesh of subjectivities, Cole makes the singular space of the weightlifter a multiplied one — one outside typified categories — neither the father who “makes” one, nor the liberal mother — Cole’s lifting is a rejection of the economy of coupling — stable roles — dominance. As Acker points out in bodybuilding “muscles grow only if they are, not exercised or used, but actually broken down.” What Cole performs then is a poetic breakdown of muscle — a rejection of the idealized singular body, as well as the singular genius of the poem as idealized. By unlocking the subject from coupling — from even the singular reader-speaker position — the lifter no longer lifts for the look of the other — to stand in the position of lean, desirable, cut, winning — but lifts for strength — a collectivity of voices — and in that space holds it up / open.
April 13, 2013
Ash Smith on Norma Cole's _Do The Monkey_ and toward a poetics of female bodybuilding
Part I: Some quick notes toward a poetics of female bodybuilding — gender, appropriation, crossing lines
Full Text of Cole’s Do The Monkey
* In Celan’s Meridian speech he quotes a scene from Buchner of two girls sitting on a shore, one putting up the hair of the other. “Sometimes one would like to be a medusa’s head,” so the quote goes “to seize the natural as natural by means of art” adds Celan. “This means going beyond what is human, stepping into a realm which is turned toward the human, but uncanny — the realm where the monkey, automatons, and with them … oh, art, too, seem to be at home.”
* What I want to talk about right now is female bodybuilding in relation to poetry, in it’s broadest terms, and what’s at stake in the lifted text, appropriation, gender, the spectatorship or art v. the spectatorship of sport. I’m pressed for time — so I want to begin w/ some notes on Norma Cole. My hope is to gesture toward a larger study. Bear with me.
* In discussing Celan’s Meridian speech, Derrida focuses in on Lucile’s cry “Long Live the King!” “…so close to the bloody scaffold, and after he had recalled the “great works of art” … Lucille, who is blind to art, screams “Long live the King!” Celan calls this a counter-word (Gegenwort): After all the words spoken on the platform (the scaffold [cs ist chis Buitgeriist: literally, Blood-Scaffold]) — what a word [welch ein Wort!] It is a counter-word, a word that snaps the ‘wire’, a word that no longer bows to ‘history’s loiters and parade-horses,’ it is an act of freedom. It is a step.”
* The immateriality of language made terrestrial and manifest Celan marks as a meridian.
* Cole’s book opens with lines on a literal line — heavy black underline — the bar made manifest — meridian. what physicality language crosses line-to-line, line to reader. lifts
* “before the mind catches up / the body’s been and gone” is Cole’s epigraph to both the first poem and lifted from a later poem “The Body is Soft” — or else later incorporated. mortal / material connection of the text — poem as both an indeterminate zone and one tied to life, time, signature. “Verily, kiddo, I walk / among monkeys as among / the foreskins and limbs / of monkeys—”
* The title of the book comes from a poem “IN MEMORIUM JACQUES DERRIDA” — the sign, as Laura Moriarty points out, the double of the monkey in French (signe). signature . Of the figures Celan notes as residents of the uncanny, Derrida focuses the least on the figure of the monkey in “Majesty of the Present”. But, of course the presence of animals became one of Derrida’s last great focuses. It’s in this sense that Cole loops the presence of the uncanny, indeterminate, creaturely, death as the limit the poem looks back at the body — where it’s “been.”
* Eh okay — Now I’m out of time, so I’ll have to try get to the heart of this tomorrow. — but what I want to argue is *not* that Cole approaches either creatureliness or bodybuilding qua poetry from a primal position — but from a further, indeterminate — uncanny — space. It is from this space — and thru the expansion of appropriation, that Cole turns spectatorship back on itself — enacting a deformation of the idealized poem as well as the idealized body / female body. By lifting the text against the limits of language, certain emotive registers come thru hefted — said — unattached to the expectations of their position.
[image error]
April 12, 2013
April 11, 2013
4/11/13
“The first thing I ever loved in my life was a pigeon. I don’t know why…I feel ridiculous trying to explain it,” — Mike Tyson
I never saw the show about Mike Tyson and the pigeons, but google image searching it now, the pictures are weirdly tender and sublime and somehow heartbreaking to me. That season Max was a baby and I forget what it is you do with babies, but it takes forever. Like a form of glue + need. Or that all the energy I would ever have to write great literature or poetry was being directed into a constant stream of songmaking / singing — and that the songs were really quite good for babies but led to moments of a serious philosophical need — like a bubble rising toward sunlight — to understand the difference btwn a song one creates to sing to a baby and great literature. I guess there’s not an answer. “I nurse, wait for sun, click refresh / I rub my daughter’s knee” writes Susan Briante. That describes a lot. Almost all of it. In an interview in Details, Mike Tyson says the first fight he was ever in was because someone had pulled the head off of one of his pigeons. I’ve never touched a pigeon’s face. But in The Passenger Pigeons of Philidelhia, Col. Henry W. Shoemaker makes a claim for the origin of the stool pigeon as a live decoy tied to a stool with eyes sewn shut: “By raising the bird and dropping it suddenly it Avas made to flutter as it was going down; and the flying birds, seeing it, would begin to circle around, coming nearer and nearer, until they finally lit on the bed around the stool pigeon. Then the net would be sprung. At once there would be a mass of fluttering, struggling pigeons, with heads protruding through the meshes. The fowler and his assistants would rush to the massacre, which was the crushing of the head of each individual bird between the thumb and forefinger.” That’s how delicate their heads must be. And the part that always haunted me in this excerpt about how the pigeons come to the other out of love — to be close — and how the tied pigeon, even knowing the nature of the injury could do nothing to stop them. Whether the pigeon in that moment is filled with the desire to call out in warning or feels that he will be genuinely rescued now, we can’t know. Perhaps both simultaneously. The knot.What I remember most about Mike Tyson from my childhood is that he beat up Robin Givens — Robin Givens on Operah, Robin Givens on Prime Time, Robin Givens on ET — then his conviction for rape in 1996 — and the understanding that certain kinds of violence become inscribed on certain kinds of bodies is real — not an instinct, but a programming overlay. Tyson’s mother was a single parent and a sexworker. In another interview he says “My strongest women figure, I saw her get humiliated constantly, so if I see my strongest women figure in my life become humiliated constantly that’s what I’m going to do to women in general, right?” I don’t know what the answer is, but just the stupidness of masculinity, the stupidness of money. That’s why the tenderness with the pigeons seems so weird to me — his lips on their tiny fragile ears outside gender — outside physical copulation and it’s injuries — how at one point he suggests his voice is like a pigeon and not a man’s.
Michelle Detorie says that season was also the season of a show about Heidi Fleiss and her parrots, speaking of sexwork, the 90s, etc. grit celebrity culture emanating from New York as a form of survival — which I didn’t see either — and on the tail of a show about Cat Dancers. I think of the one episode I did see that season of Roseanne’s show as a farmer where she screams for her son-in-law to release a wild pig he wants to kill. Some people believe that film is an inherently more creaturely medium — that the camera is helpless to focus on everything — that it can’t let in only the human narrative. The environment intervenes. Is writing like that? No, someone would say, it’s only in language. And of course animals can’t read, though they have little interest in movies either. All technology is framing. and letting in. and not being able to not to. Though perhaps certain mediums tend toward certain animals. This morning google searching pigeons, I thought perhaps how the bald eagle is to the U.S., the pigeon is to the internet — except the pigeon is everywhere — urban — history as a messenger. Cher Ami, as Jessica Smith pointed out & as Sarah Campbell said, there’s no way to explain how they know where they are, how they always know the way back. At one point 40 to 60% of the bird population in the United States was passenger pigeons. And now they are extinct. Passenger Pigeons would migrate in huge flocks from the northern states into the deep south — sometimes bringing down whole tree limbs with the weight of their collective bodies. They needed so many trees. But the rock doves of New York were bred by humans for so long, it’s thought their instincts to migrate “weakened” — to the point they no longer leave. Constant avian bodies inside the city — ghost in the machine — that can move how people can’t. Perhaps that was one reason a pigeon was Tyson’s first love. But even that relationship was impure — or ultimately even had to be couched in some form of competition to survive. Tyson’s pigeons were racing pigeons. They were trained to outdo each other. In another place he describes going back to streets where he grew up and that the streets had been subject to revitalization, gentrification, by rich white residents. This is a real strange scenario, says Tyson, and I just wanted to cry. I’m like, “Who am I? Where’s my heritage?”
opened by customs: 4/9/13
Then to migrate to a moon more subtle . The wild pigeons on leaving us repair to some undiscovered satellite accompanying the earth at a near distance . (cotton mather). gloss night . tinted abandon . grandmother raised by monkeys grateful for her feet . here some of the streets on fire ….
April 9, 2013
C.J. Martin's Blog
- C.J. Martin's profile
- 11 followers
