Tag Archives: seattle

to get to the other side…

I’m off to korea in a few days… for Lim Inza’s seoul marginal theater festival 2008. I’ll be there for two weeks and not as a performer. Simply as an observer.

This will be the first time i have ever traveled alone; its kind of a frightening prospect. I’m taking a couple of cameras, video and film, and a small field recorder with me. It’ll be interesting to only have my own head to bounce things from.

Now I’m kind of scared. Not by my trip. My trip is necessitated by that which I’m nervous of, namely, this smooth transition of power. Or perhaps I should call it a smooth transition in narrative.

We have a new guy in the seat of highest public office in my country. I’m sure you know who I’m alluding to. The night they announced that he’d been granted the reigns people poured out into the streets in so many cities. dancing and cheering. Drinking and blowing things up. That’s us. That’s what we do. We’re Americans. It’s good.

For the last few days since that event so many people, including my banal self, have expressed the same sentiment. Seeing people smile again in such great numbers was beautiful, striking and humbling and infectious.

It even got to me. Now, I love a good street party, but as my friend 9 was saying only tonight over glasses, healthy glasses, of whiskey, “It was so weird to be surrounded by all those smiling happy people. I’d gotten used to only feeling that kind of bonding at protests and riots,” and I had to agree with her.

The last time i can remember that kind of bacchanalian emo-overflux I was with the marching band in New York to say ‘eff-u’ to the republicans four years ago. We swallowed a deserted area in the city with two other marching bands and we all went to jail. For days. And it sucked.

I have always believed that the endpoint of any successful revolt, revolution or uprising should be the party. Not just the drunken mêlée, but the real party. You know, all that peace and justice and respect stuff leading to a land and a lifetime of joy and fulfillment. Where the pain you feel isn’t from a truncheon upside your nay saying head or finding out who got shot in the eye with a rubber bullet or the back with a steel jacketed one. The reason we should be making all these demands is to find some happiness in the day-to-day. All the time. World without end; amen and forever.

So the gathering in the streets on election night. Some woman grabbed my hand and yelled, “yes we did!” and it was intense, man. So very spiritual and overwhelming. Sitting in a car for a moment with my friend Sruti and she said, “When I found out that he’d won it felt like I should be making out with someone…” god. It’s so weird to hear people say all the things that are perpetually playing in your own heart.

For forever I felt that I was alone in thinking these things. Such hubris. And maybe that’s why I’ve fallen from such great heights so many times. It’s just a shock to hear it spoken by so many people out loud your own post-philosophical mantras.

But it’s wonderful and it makes me realize why I keep my art-mouth shut so much now a days: because it’s becoming clear to everyone how this shit should be going down.

Here’s my concern. A philosophy professor I was hanging out with in the spring of this year told me that he’d already prepared a zine with Obama’s face on it. The title of the pamphlet is, “the face of the new enemy.” It doesn’t matter how much you love the man or his principles or his story. It’s true.

Obama’s just taken on the mantle, the crown. This is the office that truly waves the velvet glove. nothing changes that. The office is metonymic, a synecdoche, for all the brutal policies that issue forth from our country to the rest of the world. Remember that. He’s your man, but he’s also a policy himself now. He is an image and a representation. Old school critical thinking on my part , Sure… true though.

I will give him his first 100 days and then some because in spite of his being terribly conservative by my reckoning I want to see him promote the slow move of this juggernaut back to something a little less ugly and frightening.

I wanted to be gone from this country for a while after the election; cast my vote and bail, say, on the night of the fourth be on a plane to Korea. Not come back until after the furor over the fuhrer was spent. I didn’t think I could handle the gloating of the ‘bamites over those other people, but it hasn’t been so bad.

I forget sometimes that I’m surrounded, by choice, by groups of people who are aware that this changes very little. Yes we have a wonderful new story to write thanks to all this marvelous hope that’s floating around, but we also have a lot to do still. It’s so good to know that the people I run with aren’t allowing a small thing like an election to interfere with their plans for social restructuring.

I think it doesn’t really matter to some of us who wins that boring race. There’s always so much to be done. People want to talk about how the left shouldn’t put all it’s energy into running this candidate and defeating that one as if there is such a thing as the ‘left.’ The left as it was once understood no longer exists. When Clinton (either) is referred to as a liberal it’s time to put the term away. [Update… forgive this; I was much younger then. -Pol]

The left is no longer monolithic and it never was. The left is constructed of so many small and autonomous groups doing what they feel is necessitated by circumstance and the circumstances have barely changed. They will remain more or less the same set of suspect circumstances up and through January the 20th when they ride the motorcade through the streets of DC.

Does anyone remember what happened four years ago when George junior had his second little moment in the limelight? People came to DC in droves to protest. To riot. To ruin the day for the old fool and his cronies. Folks went nuts. Banners and loud speakers and eggs. None of it really made the news.

I met these two ladies from Chicago the day after the election who’d just flown in to Seattle. They told me about the street party there. About throwing up on the plane ride. My kind of people. They told me that they had already bought tickets to DC for the inauguration. They want to do that whole dancing on public land with a drink in your hand thing again. I can’t blame them; I suspect they will not be alone. I would not be surprised if a lot of people go to DC just to party the Bush away. I hope Rice and Powell cry as they pack their bags singing, ‘Free at last/Free at last/Lord god almighty/I’m free at last”

Not that you should ever trust those motherfuckers again.

while you were out…

hi.

i’d like to present to you a short letter i found from my past that i believe neatly sums up my feelings about most everything that has ever happened on the earth. perhaps even before that, too. and thus after. perhaps so far after that heat death is forgotten. don’t know about heat death? i refuse to provide a link to help with that one. but here is this little letter. it contains a philosophy and a telos and an ethics and even some fissionable yellow cake. please enjoy. and thank you for reading. soon i will post about my new queer-friendly film exploits. ciao!

“so how are things out there? it’s been pretty quiet around here. lars is painting all the time and i’m just asleep about 18 to 27 hours a day.

i went to fallujah last week and blew some shit up, took out some allied forces. it was cool, but i think i caught a cold out there. it gets pretty cold at night in the desert. i also hurt my ankle again changing a light bulb for the imam. he is old and doesn’t like to stand on chairs. obviously you see where this is going. some acolytes rushed into the room wanting a clarification on some minor point of shiira and knocked me off the chair.

bombs gone wild

in spite of my limp i think i might go to israel next week. they really want some help over there taking out that wall. i might just go scope it out instead of doing the old boom boom. my ankle, you know? it’s hard to escape the scene when you are on meds.

did you hear that my sister’s old college debate team boyfriend, Assad, is being implicated in the UN’s inquiry into the death of some guy from like Lebanon? i mean i remember that he wasn’t always the nicest guy and that’s why my sister dumped him, but an assassin? these german prosecutors really like to make everything ought to be so much worse than it ever actually turns out to be. remember that hostage crisis in 72 at the munich olympics? “hostage crisis.” hardly anybody killed and they got to keep the airplane and the games continued. they act as if it’s some big deal when some kids get pissed and then go do some crazy stuff. kids are kids all over the world. i don’t see them hiring steven spielberg to make a movie about their baader-meinhoff gang or that woody allen. he’s a disgusting old perv.

lars and i cleaned your room. i accidentally spilled a lot of powdered plastique in it the other day when these federal agents showed up looking for your brother. i told them he was at the track or maybe in new orleans or florida doing refugee assistance work. i had just enough time to kick the fertilizer barrels thru your door as that traitor cortez walked them into our house. he claimed he met them at the cha cha lounge. i don’t know. those women appeared to be nice girls at first and one of them was a very good kisser. but as soon she got my pants down out came the badge.

conflict market

i thought it was some kind of game at first. you know how canny those white women can be! but she was the real thing and now she has pictures of me and lars and jeff and cortez all doing the pyramid with uwajimaya bags on our heads. i think lars liked it as he dribbled a milky white substance for about an hour after they left with their insurance policy. well, they did apply a car battery’s worth of electricity to his penis. but i really do think that he liked it.

okay. i have to go now. a shower and a small trim to my beard so that i can be presentable at work. we might be hiring some more former mujaheddin for the barrista positions. the french and italian secret service really do a great job of teaching those guys how to pull a really tight shot.

pol akbar-rosenthal”

hard lady

Review: in/public: esse aficionado

yesterday i had the pleasure of leaving work early to escape into the streets. it’s beautiful here in seattle right now and the last thing i want to do is be cooped up in anything. it’s terrible that trapped feeling.

i saw a theater performance last night by implied violence. there was a cage to one side of the performance space made of chicken wire. appropriately, they had a lot of baby chickens in it. my friend lindsey kept murmuring about wanting to take one home and bent down to pet them. i don’t pet chickens. i think they smell bad and i have been attacked by roosters one too many times to have any desire to play with them. and i have seen them do spectacular things, but i still don’t want to touch one.

so i wandered down to pioneer square. it’s an older part of seattle’s downtown where once all the migrant and poor white labor lived and worked. you could go to a dance hall and buy yourself a lady from the phillipines for the night. number girls they called them because they wore little numbers on themselves as identification. choose a number. take a number. it’s a numbers racket. number girls.

it was also where the whore houses were if you hadn’t guessed. i guess all those guys chopping down trees and refining them needed some kind of comfort. they were living in shanty towns on the edge of the city. hooverville is what it was called, the shanty. i don’t know why (editor’s note: president hoover was the president at this time, the great depression, and was blamed for the economic malaise, thus the populace named these rag and stick villages after him. metonymy in action or polysemy?) . i suppose i’ve heard before, but i just don’t remember. all the stories of that place, old pioneer square, sound miserable. nothing to romanticize here, folks; keep moving. keep moving. no wonder that this is one of the places from which the american labor movement rose.

but yesterday was a brighter day. yesterday, on 1st avenue between yesler and western avenues at a little after 5 pm, i saw a group of dancers walk down the street and stake a claim to a section of sidewalk. they were wearing very lovely dark hued costumes reminiscent of ballerina wear. small black shoes and hose. little bubbles of fabrics forming down from their waists. bare headed like frivolous nuns and never really smiling, they formed a single file line down the street. buttressed by two not so matronly matrons dressed as ushers, i think, bookends, maybe, to the dancers.

the dancers also had on these curious mesh aprons. really small ones. if you looked close enough you could see a couple of small speakers inside them. i didn’t notice any wires going to soundboxes so maybe they were using a radio broadcaster to get their sounds. i’ve done shows like that before and it’s a pretty exciting way to sonify a piece.

when you perform in the streets in america it’s really quite different than dancing or playing music in other countries. people react with an attitude that almost borders on hostility. they will make nasty comments. they yell stupid things that don’t really amuse their friends, but helps to diffuse the weird tension that americans have about street performers who aren’t clowns, breakdancers, folk musicians and those guys who use buckets for drums. it wasn’t so bad for the 5 ladies in esse aficionado and i suppose it’s because they looked so dazzling in those outfits and they never did smile. not smiles like you think of smiling, anyway. the tall woman in the middle kept looking as if she was going to grace us with some kind of bounty of joy, but she resisted and the mirth just seemed to play about her lips and eyes.

i should probably say something about their dancing. the 5 of them were in a line going down the sidewalk. motions were synchronized and generally began with one dancer at either end or the principle choreographer, who was the second person in after the matron closest to me, starting some gesture. an arm would go up here or a leg and then you could see it move through all of them. but it would take on a slightly different form depending on the body or personality of the mover.

and that is pretty wonderful. i have only seen one other piece by this group, but i liked it so much i went twice. this piece, late saturday afternoon: portrait, is an extension of that one, early sunday morning, and something i can say about it is that the choreographer, maki morinoue, has brought some movement of the birds to her work that i find enchanting. so watching these movements move serially from one body to the next, even though it’s something you see in a lot of performances, is not tiring or boring or cliched. it just feels very dream-like and almost but not quite sensual. or maybe that’s just me.

i have always loved bringing art that normally is done in theaters out into the public. it’s so fun to watch how people react. a lot of performers get turned off because it can be emotionally hazardous what with all those random folks making the occasional disparaging and loud remarks or doing mock versions of what you are up to, but for the people who are hungry for this sort of thing it’s pure joy when we stumble across it.

i should also say something about the musical element. as i mentioned before, the dancers were wearing these mesh aprons with very small speakers inside. the sounds of bells and gongs would come from them sometimes. other times it was children laughing. this seemed to really resonate with the crowds who gathered and the crowds who passed. looking at the sandwich board the matrons had set down as the group occupied their piece of the sidewalk i saw that the music was composed by morinoue. this is the choreographer’s last name, but i am not sure if she is being humble by identifying herself in this way or if this is a special name that connotes something else or something more. but it doesn’t really matter because the final notion i have is that the sounds played were well chosen and their sequencing was a choreography in itself.

esse aficionado.

Best (to) Face Forward

I’m trying to hold a formidable countenance in the face of a blow from a completely unexpected corner.

earlier today my studio was broken into.
the thieves were bold; they absconded in broad daylight with my last half year of work.
on a crowded street and no one saw them.

i was at work at my new job in the pike place market.
it was kind of sad to be at work while pride was happening in the streets above me,
but i saw it as an opportunity to continue strategising my further entry into the art world.

the phone rang a little after 1 and it was my old cohort, ___.

pol, j just got to the studio and  he’s freaking out.
someone’s broken into the space and all his art supplies are gone.
the violated space

oh no. oh no. this can’t be real.
i was convinced that it had to be a mistake.
but it wasn’t. it isn’t.
on the phone with my fellow studio dwellers i had someone survey my space for my laptop.
gone.

i didn’t feel sick. i felt relieved.
i had backed up everything only days ago to an external harddrive.
i could lose one box secure in the knowledge that another would save me.

the computer is just a palette knife.
i didn’t want to lose the painting.
i consoled myself thinking of how smart i was to have backed up all my new photo essays and videos, my latest writings.
i’d lost a lot of digital media in the past and i had bought the drive to specifically avoid that scenario ever again. i even kept the drive in an obscure location away from the laptop to prevent someone from grabbing them both.

i couldn’t guess that my own personal thieves would be so meticulous as to destroy my rooms in their search for valuable cargo.

arriving at the space, i went straight to recover the drive.
i’d take it to a friend’s to leave for safe keeping until we could further secure the place.
but i opened the door to my rooms and realized that wasn’t going to happen.
the motherfuckers had tossed my things every which way.
my violated space 2

my books were dumped on the floor. except for my noboyushi araki volumes; they were gone.
favorite sweat shirt: gone.
two laptops: gone.
new audio inbox for making digital noise: gone.

but the only thing that mattered was that the back up drive should be there.
and you can already see the arc of this tale so you know where this this is going.

today i lost something i can never replace.
two different photo essays on strange objects of everydayness from korea, japan and the states.
4 different sets of nudes i had planned to publish over the next year as a series of handmade books.
my first forays into video art. about 7 near completed pieces.
and a lot of writing. a lot of writing.

i just felt sort of null.
as if a part of me was gone forever.

i got dumped earlier this year by the person who might have been the culmination of every desire i have.
and that nauseous sensation of despair i felt that night is approximately similar to what i am feeling now.
and it makes sense: all my approaches to my own work come from my confrontations with love and sex.
so now i am impotent and heartworn.
and some one has breeched my area.

well, thank god for booze.
i am drinking the first of what might be many beers and soon i will go to a secret convocation of seattle poets to gaze through a telescope at heavenly wonders.
and apparently we will be requested to read a lot of verse of a cosmologically significant nature.

sounds good.
my whole life just dropped into the sky.
i could use a fluid tongue.

perhaps the only way that this can be viewed without risking personal destruction is as a meditation on moving on. not that that is an easy choice. i could just as happily drink myself into oblivion over it. but i think i’ll have to find a more positive approach to survival.

you know, i wish i could i drop some crazy photos into this post that have next to nothing to do with the text, but the lousy creeps also took my camera cable.

ah, pathos. and i am not even angry at the thieves. just hurt. really quite hurt.