Bestiary

music can take you where you want to be. for instance, people who work m-f jobs want more than anything to be on vacation, or on a weekend. vacation music is the hypnotic dirge of pop sentimentalism (souvenirs of the greener grass). on the other hand, music can take you to a place of more specific desire, like into a room with a lover during your last time together before one of you leaves for a long absence. music can also take you into "nature", like to a crickety pond in the dead of a late summer night: the sounds of the world breathing and whispering all around you.

all of these are dreamer's substitutes. they are hyperreal proxies; the perfect lover one had before life intervened; the wonderful vacation that we wish had gone on forever, the completely "other" people you met, and the beautiful scapes that you had only begun to appreciate in your soul; the walden pond that we long for as the temple of nature. the grass is always greener because sacredness has for the most part been forgotten. this is why nietzsche was impressed enough with religion to oppose it violently; in religion, at least the sacredness of existence is being recognized and there is an attempted solicitation of the soul. i don't say "sacredness of life" because this sounds like an anti-abortion buzzword, and existence is a little more terrifying and doesn't have the suspect auto-affirmational character of "life" - "oh, that's life!", or, "life sux, but you move on". Existence is the myriad of unsettling questions that get asked after some reckoning of the aphorism, "you only live once".
imaginal music, on the other hand, comes from the soul - a kind of soul music. the imagination is the instrument of the soul. what we imagine is the expression of our condition; our inherent singularity. the habits of our personal existence are the ways we move through it; it being our minds, moods, otherness, hobbies, "jobs", toys, artforms, homes, nature, markets, social rituals. if we are interested in the self-understanding of our personal experiential/existential genealogies in the nietzschean sense - the sometimes seemingly arbitrary and ambivalent ways that life and existence reveal new paths - then we are interested in the soul that unabashedly asks ethical questions and wills interpretations. "communing with one's inner child" as an "adult" is the phantasy of travelling through any in/possible realm - the laboratory of maximal natural desire that is conscious of life's limits and lines of flight.
maybe self-genealogy is the word for this experimental history? that is, a historical formation/representation that is not diachronic, or formed like a line through history (a product of History and a contribution to it), but a line of flight, like an experiment on the self, by the self; something that is so open minded, honest, self-sovereign and humble that it gets spoken by itself, like a soliloquoy; something less formalized and more holistically open to self-modification (more "present") due to a sensitivity to a deeper open structure (deep hermeneutics?) - structure as the rules of formation that more or less determine the pathways something follows through its world and the ways that something can be affected/transformed by and affect/tranform the paths that one finds oneself on - whether one truly wills to speak a common language while impressing on others one's singularity, or if one is fundamentally faking it, or just lazy. In other words, the content of one's vision is modulated by the spirit's competency in otherness.
According to Landmann, "Man frees himself from a flood of stimuli by letting it flow into a network of canals consisting of cultural structures he has built, according to Gehlen, who again is thinking in terms of dependency where in reality mutual interconditioning in the case. Since he has no natural points of reference by which to categorize the world, he posits artificial ones himself; only with their help does he succeed in processing the abundance of impressions, which would paralyze him by their strangeness and leave him confused; and thus he makes things 'manageable'." But whereas "animal knows naturally what it can and must know. . . For man, however, knowledge attains an 'ethical' dimension."
For Robert Rich, the shaman under analysis, his world is made manageable by producing the strangeness, instead of being paralyzed by it; much the same way someone watches horror films to confront their own dark side. The virtual world of our ethical creation is the transversal realization of politics in art. "Our culture helps determine for us what we think is important and what we think is trivial, what is large and what is small. Yet as I reflect upon the things that make life meaningful, they often appear at the periphery. Life happens between the cracks, in the soft-hued colors of the mundane, the accidental: a casual smile, the cycle of seasons, the view from a window, growing a garden, the smells and fabrics of home.

Increasingly, as time passes, I value the everyday moments in life more than the grand statement. As an artist I try to reflect the beauty and depth of those small things that we stop seeing. I want to create experiences that heighten our attention through rarification, to subtract until I can expose the essence of something. I don't know how well this translates in terms of music, so I try to carry this goal through to the other activities in life, by trying to be kind to the people around me and to the environment I live in, or through whatever small action I might be capable of. I don't excel at the grand gesture, so I try to accomplish things through small actions.

It's all part of finding meaning in an increasingly noisy world."

the game is the metaphor for open structure in reformulating otherness. the game entails "rules, challenge and interactivity". the game of the game is therefore to challenge oneself to invent new rules for reconfiguring interactivity of the World (of othernesses). Skateboarding, for instance, is a game's game when the player is challenged to reevaluate the objects of the physical terrain to elicit an unforseen function with the skateboard. the terrain is then repopulated with new modes of seeing based on these functions and the flows/paths it creates.
when this kind of exploration/expression is on the dancefloor however, the other dancers are the terrain (though maybe we should pay more attention to how/what dancefloors are made of). therefore the dancefloor is more like a game. the lack of an objective audience changes the scheme of moves one makes. this performance, if one isn't constrained to dance with only a lover, communicates something to the whole dancefloor, which is a proxy for the World. dancing is therefore fundamentally a statement of spiritual orientation, or lack thereof. to perform well for the world in a dance is to please the benevolent gods of life/love; to pump blood into the World organism, and sometimes to get a dose in return.
the dancefloor becomes a vision quest inasmuch as the presentor is a proper shaman. shamans turn the world into a wilderness, bringing with it the intimidation and excitement of the unknown. the world is transformed from the inside; the mind is deterritorialized and we begin to wander into the depths of un/consciousness. stubborn animals that we are, it's hard enough to get us away from our sedentary sites, let alone submit to a total experience such as the dancefloor with our complete attention at hand. but this might be another way of lamenting the scarcity of shamans, since to appreciate one is to be one. but fundamentally, we can worship better if we trust our preachers; a lack of trust in mentors might be a symptom of social disease.
a successful omnistory (the experimental reenactment of a genea-logic) is a proper playing of related layers that convincingly articulates an experiential scape of a possible evolutionary progression. bestiary's scape is a primordial plateau of a parallel dimension. Rich carries us with him as he travels through these states. it feels like we are particles swallowed up by beasts of turbulent terrains, while on other layers it seems like we are caught in a gaseous currents in a transversal planet's atmospheric striations; all this having a surprisingly kosmiche rhythm. never once throughout Bestiary did I feel incredulous; Rich's quilt is knit tight and gracefully.
But is Bestiary a convincing experiential scape? the proof is in the pudding. i can't personally testify to the realness of Rich's travels, but Bestiary is thick with subtlety. his competency in synthesis and production is profound in his holistic expression of these imaginal plateaus. Rich's humanism is the sadness, mystery, and wonder of his music. after all, the soul is emotional, and it belongs to the omnistory of the universe - the story of our self-understanding, whatever unexpected twists it undergoes in our confusion about "what to do". Rich offers the results of his deep hermetic research and explorations in Bestiary and almost unwittingly asks us to stop, and check our direction: "how free is your mind?"

A Call for Salons

Young intellectuals, myself included, sometimes act apologetic, having only one thing to say for themselves: “Yeah, I did some grad school.” There's no real reason to be sorry, but the shame remains, nevertheless. Embarassment, in this case, straddles the fault line, each foot cast across a widening gap between two diverging tendencies: academia and obsolecence.

In the ivory towers, I had many a quick professor, truly; but in spite of their excited, quick tongues and carefully honed distinctions, they so often seemed bored with digging into their painstakingly established positions, each argument they made having taken years to get in print, yet only for their colleagues, conference pals, and their most loyal students; then flipping this autonomous idea right back onto their identity as a sound-byte position (“I'm for a return of presence in the text!”) that they've had to repeat again and again to make an account of themselves for others. The damage of delay is stillborn ideas with a pronounced lack of urgency; trends hover over the intervals of submissions deadlines and many years tardy monograph reviews.

And then on the other side, then I have other friends, fierce freelancers who have resisted sitting in any radical armchairs, but are now caught drowning in the economic undertow that has relegated criticism to the level of volunteership. At this point of professional degredation, their pain is not to be romanticised. We should be deeply worried for them, and ourselves, whose souls they feed with their obstinate bravery on their sinking ships.

So, what is one to do, this?

In spite of the internet's incredible vastness, it certainly isn't a fair climate for intellectuals of either sort, for another reason: complicity. The internet circumnavigates the lack of a clear center of intellectual conflict, and yes I do enjoy my fetishized websites that patronize the obscure subgenres of renegade French academics, but seriously now; the desire for an exciting arena of debate does not just go away because dead people declared that it's dead. The problem of intellectual life is not simply that you have to chose one or the other, tenured iconoclasm or unemployed internship-age, but that both can come to resemble one another in how both, by ignoring one another, end up running into each other from opposite directions. Professors defend their jargon in comparison with the specialized language of electricians, and new cultural magazines hype themselves up with java-animation style deconstructed typology as if the eighties are back—the academic eighties, that is. Which one sets the trends for the other? At this point, it's very confusing; the academics seeming trendy, the trends seeming academic. Even worse, look at the excess of it all: there are just as many superfluous “peer reviewed” biannuals as there are super-expensive glossies that you cannot even figure out for which niche they are even intended! And how many fools are excited to work for these quarterly “reviews?”

I do all of this too, so I must ask something else with sincerity and bafflement: why the hell would any over-educated person ever be such a fool as to intern for no pay, doing shitty, pointless work that wastes more time for management that it solves with free labor, for some new organization simply because the product they support has no real relation to their labor but is yet something kinda cool one could talk about to others? Can we please, generationally speaking, just stop doing this representational pony trick? We have been some of the most willingly exploitable middle-class idiots ever to adopt radical chic. It's really so irrelevant to be that subservient with this much privelege. If you work for a non-profit cultural institution, I dare you to abolish your internship positions and quit taking blowjobs in lieu of real interviews or doing your own job googling what you need to find out.

Ok blogs, look at this thing I'm moaning on, sure, late-night cynicism, yes yes. But there's hope—yes, let's get together, move on...

Imagine: Matisse, Picasso, and others would often gather at the house of Stein and Toklas to get together to write or draw something. Sure they had more space in their living rooms than the humble studio or over-packed warehouse loft affords, but there's something that remains appealing about this turn of the century fantasy. It is, after all, another century we're starting right now, even if we haven't figured out how to call this decade with a couple years left.

As I write this to my intended audience, I click over a tab to see who's there with me, right now, online, also viewing multiple tabs, maybe blogging the same topic. The truth is, I see many of you together most often on g-chat. Imagine if everyone on your g-chat list or, if you have some other web hosting for your e-mail address, then imagine if everyone you received ones and zeros from daily—imagine if ALL of them got together regularly to have a salon rather than sitting at their desks alone.

That's right: not a party or a happening. Neither a bookclub nor a potluck. No cocktails either—a veritable salon. I know that this word, especially if you say it out loud in your head, starts to taste like a new organic sugar-substitute, overly-sweetened nostalgia, but how else are we going to avoid the scylla of artificial sweeteners (scare quotes, needless irony, endless citations) and the charybdis of high fructose corn syrup (personal confession, memoirs, simple “returns,” etc.)?

I think the idea of a salon is worth harping on to referee between selling out and fading in. Just think, if you weren't there to meet new people, to network, trade cards or name drop. No. You knew them already, and knew them well; you just got together and seriously worked on your stuff. What if everyone remained silent, except for smoke and food breaks, or when finally someone had something they deemed worthy to share, for scrutiny or joy? And what if it was all put together, not as a new, hyper-individuated vanity niche, but the competing mode of address, Obama-fired up to say that there are things that we all need to be hearing right now?

Let's take it practically now. How about a salon once a month, so twelve times a year? Or even once a season, like right when they turn, now unhinged from the predicted dates with all of this crazy weather...If the calenders don't mark the changes, then artists and intellectuals should do so instead!

Salons could replace all of those holidays we no longer care about, those families we no longer get along with, or ones we see but once or twice a year, spread across the vast continent, oceans even... Salons would not be a surrogate family, but a reunion of independents, minus the bragging rights and comparatosis.

We see each other at performance venues and in galleries, always cast with atmospheres so densely gassed with fresh paint fumes, corporate beer and rum sponsors, the institutional aura of prestigious affectations, mission statements, artist statements, board of director lists; all of which encourages us to pretend that we are really alienated, gives us the excuse to be sarcastic, when we simply just meet up too much in the most boring of places, making the most boring of faces. But we are not really that alienated! Come on people...what would a salon do for you, and what would you do for it?

Responses, please. There are a lot of fantastic people in this generation, and it would really break my heart if we didn't manage to schematize something grand for the downturn of the empire...

Irremediably Provisional T.1

latenightdelusionalfirstdraftcolddirect translation.

better translation coming soon. better...

... It's common knowledge that a sceneplay is a script hypothesis, to be considered systematically redefinable, modifiable according to such changes as emerge trial is sat, that in any given moment can (and must) be revised, redirected, given that for however much attention one may be able to pay it is impossible to foresee second after second all of the combinations of actors and techniques that will produce the effect on stage*. And even if that was possible, the result would be hardened and rigid like a dead body**. With the sceneplay then the following paradox becomes manifest: it is necessary to have one already at the beginning of the rehearsals (one that shows itself to be flexible and and capable of taking in the casual manifestations that one verifies in rehearsal) and together/also hold it as irremediably provisorial. As if to say that one expects that ones fate*** that may always turn out to be another. But one cannot do with any less; without it, not a single step may be made...

*seen as a chemical reaction

**dead as in not-alive, non-life; performance = (pro)creation, that is, the creative act, genesis

***fate like one read in the lines of the hand or in tarot cards. Yes, like in tarot cards.

Irremediably Provisional

Translation coming soon...

(also coming soon: GLACIAL IMPROVISATION)

AP -- Ric2Felix, p.51

... Si sa che la sceneggiatura è un ipotesi di copione, da considerare sistematicamente ridefinibile, modificabile a seconda di quanto emerge durante le sedute di provaò che in qualunque momento può (e deve) essere rivista, reindirizzata, dato che per quanta atenzione ci si possa porre è impossibile preveder secondo dopo secondo tutte le combinazioni di attori e techniche che in scena produrranno l'effetto*. E anche se ciò fosse possibile, il risultato sarebbe indurito e rigido come un corpo morto**. Con la sceneggiatura si manifesta dunque il seguente paradosso: è neccessario averne una già all'inizio delle prove (una che si dimostri flessibile e in grado di accogliere le manifestazioni casuali che si verificano in prova) e insieme tenerla per irrimediabilmente provvisoria. Come dire che ci si aspetta sempre la fortuna*** che venga smentita. Ma non se ne può fare a meno; senza, non si può fare neppure un passo. ...

*visto come reazione chimica

** morto come non-vivo, non-vita; 

spettacolo = (pro)creazione, cioè l'atto creativo, il genesi

*** fortuna come una letta nelle linee della mano o nei tarocchi. 

Sì, come nei tarocchi.