Category: FB notes

plans/memories: a FB memory from 5 april 2019 returns:

Gesa HelmsWednesday morning I say what it is that I will be doing:

– a series of performance pieces/ drawings

– a couple of workshop/event things and 

– some documentation of the above.

That is it. The spatial praxis/ production of space/ site-thing will be part of it as building out and up from the encounters that constitute each. It will be utopian in its concrete practice. Nothing more, nothing less (I would love to call it Beziehungsweise Revolution/ relationally: revolution, but that title is already taken, unfortunately).The documentation will be either in book or in moving image form.Each segment/ section will address or: can address a particular question/ enquiry.I am uncertain if the talks will be part of it or generally merely context. I think that is part of the wider question of what constitutes the site/ the work, i.e., really: if we talk an expanded field of drawing, do we need to have a sense of what is not part of it? what is absent? outside? and, why would that be useful. In that sense, I will have a consideration of distance/closeness in this too, and at that point it loops back into the overall thematic of drawing/contact.The first four events in drawing/contact are intimate and in hindsight, retrospect. I am testing how these relate to the theme and what they do medium/discipline-wise. I am trying not to be too wilful with them, to let them hover for as long as they need to. In some ways, these take inspiration from the events around the line, and reworking the line for the workshop in July into a photo essay and presentation will be great. The drawing/contact encounters are different though as they transgress media/ reach. They are possibly less concerned with secrets and veracity but more curious about the contact, the stuff enacted, where and when it reaches, etc.In this, then, the line, the Gap, and the wider corridor thematic are aufgehoben in the best dialectical sense: they are concluded and superseded into a qualitatively new question (I remember how for each time that aufheben needed translation I was stuck, as stuck as I am now as there is no equivalent in English).

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diary (d) #1

i tend to write my way through and out. there are two formats for this. one, tested, tried, is the response to ‘What’s on your mind, Gesa’, on a computer screen, occasionally a phone. i need to go and check twice what that box says exactly in the process of copying it to here. i am sure the invitation changed over the years too. and still: it is the box that foregrounds a slightly darkened background that focusses my minds and thoughts. once i press post. i read again, i edit, i read again and so it continues. over the day or the one after i add further comments.

two, i open the large moleskine cahier, black cover, mostly, blank pages and click on the top of the 2b mechanical pencil and start with the date of the day and then it continues. the longwriting across the page, the indentations, occasionally an underline, arrows (>>) are favoured. earlier, i sometimes retraced the letters of a word or two to highlight it. i turn the page and marvel and new and older tracings and marks.

oh, and then there is my camera roll.

there is always my camera roll. it sometimes accompanies one.

 

here, i am stumped. i test over the weeks a numbers of routes, routines, patterns and processes and discover much in the process.

how do they relate to all that i collected until mid-March?

how can i conclude something as current when it already feels outdated?

how can i address my desire to leave it untouched and thus uncontaminated?

yet, my processes were always current and would find resolution in the little sliver between present and soon (i steal this line from Warhol and invert its temporal ordering). i am stalling, undecided if that is helpful or not.

 

i pause one. initially in anger, then i realise what the absence offers. i contemplate absence as ending and it seems good. it is spacious. unexpectedly so, was i not just now contemplating loss.

i find a new site for two. then i realise what the discovery offers. i contemplate discovery as opening and it seems good. it is spacious, temporally too. unexpectedly so, was i not just now contemplating loss.

 

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struggling for words :: Ωθησατε / Ξέρω

posted a revised and shorted version of this on FB [almost titled]
Gesa Helms added 12 new photos.
3 hrs · (4 October 2019)
Ωθησατε / Ξέρω (struggling for words)
stalling with a lack of site, an inability on my part to be soft and porous enough at the current time
[this is the section that is aka my Brexit shite]
Ωθησατε / push! / google pretends that I am pushed.
I know / Ξέρω
der Rest / το υπόλοιπο (I am thinking of Perec’s Oulipo)
Ouvroir de littérature potentielle, or Oulipo,
xthes / gestern
αλληλεγγύη / Solidarity
ερωτευμένη / in love
exodos going to/ from.
κανένασ / κάπειοσ noone someone anyone
pretty doll (not us)
xorto / grass
eating worlds, doors, oak and wood.
Θάνατοσ στο φασισμό
κρι κρι
die Gebuehr η προμήθεια (της τράπεζας), η χρέωση, το τέλος
the plum that fell onto the car. P. is likely to know that word
here it is: κορόμηλο / wild plum (google briefly assumes fairy, Jutta and I later bake a Zwetschgenkuchen, δαμασκηνόπιτα )
τουσ πελικάνουσ μου, Pelikans too (with questions of ownership).
what sites and narratives do these sit against?
there is also something that I struggle to learn verbs from German (and little words), they are too fragmented for me to make sense and too distant from my day-to-day thoughts to register in this way.
there is also something about the digital form of learning is not tactile enough, it doesn’t stick this way. I go through loops and loops of words that float past meaninglessly.
this is not (yet) the glossary for Research.
[there is a visual order to this, FB ignores it in upload]

satellite objects make love

she liked. (a lot) (and as if liking was important).
her geek got fully piqued when i told her of the relational tables that GIS produces. she: go, go, go (near, and far and explore that distance).
of the glossary she made satellite objects.
i went, predictably to here. (it kind of returns it to drawing/contact, if Brexit wasn’t a thing).

Lou Reed – Satellite of Love
the original song from the album transformer… lou reed satellite of love

d/c event: walnut gravity support

— it’s a working title, and it is the continuation of my earlier post (and research) on absence, walking into the verge, small performances.

These happened on the day of my departure. They are planned differently (like me walking on my own across some of the fallen walnuts. My dad comes and offers assistance. I don’t refuse and a series of explorations on drawing/contact ensue:

absence in drawing/ contact

There are a few routes that I would still like to explore for Part 3 of BoW. The investigations of edges, sides, spatial demarcations and what bodies move across has been there since the bridge and road crossings in Northern Greece, they got taken further in August and September with explorations of routes, bridges, side views when moving (see here), as well as the biggest series of work around verges/weeds (minimally here).

When I started drawing the concept maps for this project, I kept finding some questions about in/visibility and absence. I conceptually knew this to have been a recurrent theme, it seemed to belong here too — in its most simple form: what happens when nothing, no drawing/contact happens, but I hadn’t got a sense how/why.

One medium I have continued to struggle with has been that of 1:1 performances or even of devising solo ones. It seemed futile, insignificant, compared to the materials that I would come across and find and develop further from an initial find.

Last week I did however pick up the idea and it was a simple one: to walk into the verge, and then later: to purposefully walk towards a point (in this case, a single apple). These developed over a few days and became some investigations into gravity, movement, our initiation and observation of these (it is also a lot more, but let me see how I want to articulate that).

The ‘verge’ is one of the wild flower borders in my parents place. It continues from there to two apple trees and later a walnut tree (all in early October).

This is the FB post and commentary I wrote about it and which explores ‘absence’ at the heart of the project’; I am also including another post on failure, which is similarly relevant, given my concerns about smallness of the subject matter.

  1. sweet Rambour

he is already my substitute. i ask her first, she is not keen: i don’t think i can operate your phone camera. he, as usual, is as keen as i usually am. when we walk down, we walk underneath the walnut tree and as on the days before, we step on nuts, on cracked nuts and on empty mushy shells. i say what i would like to do. it sounds simple. it sounds again too little. i am tempted to apologise and then think better. he says: so you want test what happens when you step off the marked way. i nod and explain him the camera and what i would like him to do.
he does it (beautifully). and we acquire this sketch.
later, she asks: are there more walnuts. i say: what do you mean? of course there are. if you asked me if i specifically stepped on some i hadn’t stood on before, i can’t say (but perhaps i should).

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  1. Gesa Helms [i cut myself out of the video. it doesn’t work. it’s not the important bit (but i may need to know what bit that centre bit of myself is).]
    Edit or delete this
Gesa Helms — in this, underneath the walnut tree and later, early in the morning i discover why i had not removed the absence from the course instruction. it is clear. it resides in the mobility and it is an absence of site. it turns everything mushy and small and fleeting from what was before. it sits right at the heart of things, i have been practising it for a couple of years and it’s as simple as that.
Edit or delete this

 

 

2. just after, I write this on failure:

earlier, still, i write a note on failure. the failure is obvious. i speak of it on the second phone call. the first one was mainly my silence, after stuttering: it’s not good. then i am silent again.
the failure is simple, i try to bypass it, to make it non-consequential but it sits at the heart of things. it pounds with a steady beat. it was what invited me in. and now it just evades, i reach my hand out and it remains nothing. not a single thing.
i offer a reason, i don’t think he believes what i offer though he sees the consequences and hears ‘i don’t want to talk about this’ and ‘that is enough now’.
.
let me turn to the note. it is a line through the year, you can fill in the gaps (you will know a few of them).
.
.
The form that folded onwards and sought to become different, other, more, and different again. The final piece in the room contained precisely that: an instruction of a performance for one. Folding, opening, folding again.
He admired my enthusiasm. He mistook my accent and my determination.
In the grass there was everything I desired for this. Like that.
I say later: I don’t care.

Image may contain: plant, nature and outdoor

i catch late and early sun on a couple of rolls each

Album [almost titled]
Gesa Helms added 7 new photos.
1 hr

last evening and this morning i catch late and early sun on a couple of rolls each.
— the verge romps ahead in late summer resolution towards its demise: the only plant growing in abundance is the bindweed and it helps topple thistles and nettles along with all else and creates the most intriguing sculptures (it is Daseri in miniature, no villagers displaced here).
i don’t find what i found all other walks but am again enthralled by the lure and beauty of that waist level viewfinder. part of me wants the world in that viewfinder forever. a bit like the wind last Sunday it separates the view and isolates (here: by distance, i can take the narrowest slices through).
the images become in this much more still and sculptural (it’s not what i have sought and still it is of course also in the ones from three years ago). i stick with it and it’s abundant along this route too. it is warm and while i considered the insects i did forget that stepping into verges to photograph tall and extensive nettle patches has a bodily effect. this morning i at some point jump in front of weekend cyclist with a loud ouch. the sunlight is pretty glorious and sculpts further. it is all a little too pretty and the film substrate will make it more so. but then: nettles and bindweed.

Image may contain: plant, tree, flower, outdoor and nature
Image may contain: plant, sky, tree, outdoor and nature
Image may contain: shoes and outdoor
Image may contain: shoes and outdoor
Image may contain: shoes and outdoor

sketchbook: thisconnection as bridge

for months i have been circling around her. like an elastic band i stretch the connection and at points then jump right onto some of her pages.
.
i write a cryptic line in my summary and off i go again.
.
this morning i pack all three and search.
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among other things i find:
.
as i continue swimming i bodythink through the cosmos. through the work the living and the dying are doing for each other at this moment in time and any other. i had realised earlier this summer that my dad is going to teach me something vital. and here in this process with Achim i realise the work that is being done by us around to facilitate the movements between here and there and what each receives in this. i think i rarely felt so tender amongst it all.
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thisconnectionofeveryonewithlungs (juliana spahr)
..
it is the closing line of a longer thisconnection (men, women, roleplay, victims, essentialism)
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she will be the bridge across and away from the site. form content that connects while standing apart.
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in army of lovers, she and David Buuck investigate a plot of grassy wasteland between a few major roads.
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i have precisely such a plot. a pontoon bridge leads to it. all sorts of insignificant incidents take place. some are fantasy. a good part happens on speed. someone falls into the water and eighty-seven pelicans take off while the sparrows argue over the best spot to pig watch each morning. he who opens the kiosk at will and hides in dark corners within sells me an ice cream for €2.50. i think he made the price up. next time i check and i know he did. but he settled on it, having committed to a sun-worn board with lots of expensive ice cream (all cost €2.50). it sits next to the instant cameras,€20 for 2. how did the film develop?
.
.
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unrelatedly, i observe the verge. in mid-July on the abundant West Coast it is exuberant. i move along and record it. later i step into it and record some more. elsewhere in the village, the council spent money on controlling growth. it does so abundantly. i record eagerly and just wait for being approached by watchful neighbours (none so far).
.

the specific connections this post makes are to Ag Achilleios as site and the bridge as site

I have an earlier short note also relating to Juliana Spahr here.

site: the bridge of Ag. Achilleios

the bridge, the bridge, the bridge
– is what made me go for the accommodation
– is possibly what made everyone else go for the accommodation
– i cross it probably around 15 times or more over the week.
– i rarely cross it on my own though, perhaps only 3 or 4 times
– the first time i see it it is dark: Jo drops me and Laura and Paul off. Laura and I hadn’t been. the reed, the floodlight and the mosquitos, then the noise; i have to tell them that it is my birthday. i am bursting with joy.
– crossing it in darkness is still the best of it
– i walk early one morning (around 8am) and take the spider web photos
– early on, Georgios and I cross it slowly, he films, i film a little too
– early on, we walk upon a boat that wants to go underneath. the old couple gestures for us to wait, while they duck down and move underneath
– on Friday evening, at the end of our pelican tour, we all do the same
– i watch red dragonflies, snakes and snake skins, many water birds, i see a dead trout drifting past one day, see green lizards and Greek wall lizards, hear frogs, so many frogs.
– one day i return and find some chalk marks. later we find that they are Manuel’s who wants to talk about them in the village hall.
– we hear the story of how the bridge was built from Panos and later again from Eleftheria. it was built for her friend who couldn’t get to school in winter and wrote to the president. they build the bridge so that her school wasn’t just summer school.
– some nights the bridge meshes with the tsipouro. one day it is windy and the wind animates; and then one day i watch a thunderstorm over Vitsi while i walk across on my own.
– i meet Karla on the bridge when she arrives. i meet her again not much later. we stop and chat
– Jo sends a text that she has just arrived. when i cross i find her chatting with bean lady via the voice animated google translate.
the bridge was so absolutely worth it.

 

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sketchbook: FB: old/new control/excess across the line

— staging post: old/new; excess; control across a line.
#minimaldrawingthesedays

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  • Gesa Helms — it made it quite clear what it is not (and the FB album format is in no way a better format for what I already had): it is not a single line narrative account. It was never meant to be that and it is curious how the format (that in itself took the gossip, the 1:1 social media interface serious) reduced it in terms of narration and authorship. I have a long account of various worries and concerns over what follows what post and how they relate to each other; of choosing one and taking a particular turn. — all that is really useful for what is coming
    Edit or delete this
  • Gesa Helms — it also made it quite clear as to what is new in this ‘republishing’ and what is the difference between existing and new work; in this sense I actually did test quite a bit of my reading around what constitutes a performance, an event.
    Edit or delete this
  • Gesa Helms — it also pointed, and that is possibly the key substantial insight into the material, to an existing secret and existing omission: one relationship (towards F.) never got moved forward and rearticulated (with her) — but: I have moved it into the present, notably with a conversation last week over lunch, that was exciting to see what it would yield if I simply stretched my arm from here to there and let it slide along; I also never revisited and tested that one evening sequence that happened and which needed re-positioning. I did rework it but only ever in practice, entirely serious, I never took it as a play thing but it was dead earnest. So, there is a site, a stretch of road off Oxford Rd that needs a bit more re-appropriation. I will fly from Manchester in a few weeks time and I think, while I made sure I don’t need a flight that needs a stay, that I may stay for a night and revisit. I will take Kapil with me too and be curious as to what new thing this may create — taking it to Prespes with me seems entirely fitting.
    Edit or delete this
    • Gesa Helms — the fall out, the one I never put anywhere and that I barely related to one or two people concerns our approach towards secrets. Her anger at my refusal to conduct matters in secret (which she in turn did ). That anger then manifested in the account I included in the line (and some more, that I didn’t include)… It is interesting how that non-resolution remains and is carried forward to face me, us, you at various turns (and I stumble over it yet again). tappel-di-tapp, once stepped across…
      Edit or delete this
    • Gesa Helms — it doesn’t ‘need’ reappropriation: it is resolved as event. And yet, there is something in it that intrigues me, intrigues my sense that it may yield another route/ perspective onto it and with having recorded some new audio for the work; I wonder if there is another visual/ another material in there…
      Edit or delete this
    Write a reply…
     
  • Gesa Helms this morning I get another email, this time personally addressed to me concerning the logistics of Prespes, it states my link doesn’t work. I don’t quite follow, as it works for me. I am so curious as to the logistics… I may get simply stuck with Saint Achilles for a week (but found the bathing spot within near walking distance… at least the one for the tourists). https://the———————–line.tumblr.com/
    Edit or delete this
    the line
    THE———————–LINE.TUMBLR.COM
    the line

    the line

imposter self and other: zine for workshop

Album [almost titled]

this is the zine (now as a revised analogue/digital edition with hand-colouring) about the imposter. it acquired an imperceptible design flaw in the file and only revealed itself half-way through my introductory performance on Saturday.
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today i played with pullprint to make it purposeful. i had layered and moved about the initial document as part of the construction in any case, so the extra layer is a useful commentary on my imposter’s perfectionism and how she reveals herself in public:

— the workshop/ event: Imposter self and others: desperate measures that I facilitated is this one here at Rhubaba Gallery in Edinburgh on 15 June.

sketchbook: the line as gesture

Album close/open

i talk at length about the line last night. he knows the work, he, like many of you, is in it. i talk about the reposting. the things the reposting is making clear to me. how it relates and how it alters what is central to the piece for me. i know that a photo essay will not be a sufficient form for it. that was already clear when E. and i finally spoke after half a year or more on Monday. it needs layering, looping and mingling. when i gesture about the state this work needs, i realise what else it is; how a conference paper on state and street violence is not sufficient for it; what else it is and how the list of participants for Prespes allayed some of my fear. how brazen it feels to bring violence and desire to walking arts. how it genders the walker, the walk, the city, the street.
— it doesn’t gender it, it only make apparent the deficiency of a whole number of accounts. it’s not like we are talking about a female principle. far from it.
towards the end he asks if the timeline stresses me. i: no, not all. i have a whole month to do this and there is little else that i need to do. this is fun.
the gesture i make is one that i recognise as my own, about myself. i get moved by it. literally. i may have to move it with it.

Angela Last
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  • Gesa Helms — I still can’t believe that former tutor wanted to get rid of the core, the body, the heart of it…
    Edit or delete this
  • Gesa Helms i make the gesture of the line twice and pursue it further. it goes into different directions.
    i watch it and i sense it.
    nobody else watches and senses it.
    i wonder what T watched and sensed when he saw me doing it yesterday.
    .
    did it happen?
    did i perform?
    .
    what did it leave?
    .
    the sense sensation is strong. it persists, increases, ebbs away a little, returns. it is that which animates the gesture and continues, prolongs it.
    .
    i watch intently and wonder if it is of interest to anyone who watches. or, is it something that needs doing in order to be something.
    .
    what do you see?
    Edit or delete this
  • Gesa Helms it poses again the question of the mirror
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sketchbook: the line (omission 1)

Album close/open
Gesa Helms
31 mins

the / line

— following that secret (along with my headache, why is that a thing again, btw) from last night’s post, i retrace my steps that first time i walked along Oxford Rd. i remember how far the hotel was, how the road changed abruptly past the Aldi (or was it a Lidl) and I realised that I had misjudged the proximity of things. I arrive at the hotel and am shown to my room. I am shattered and while I briefly wonder what is in the bathroom. are they for me? I undress and lie down to a mid-afternoon nap. shortly after, there is a knock on the door, i open, the manager is apologetic. explains the room hasn’t been cleaned. shows me to another room while the cleaner tidies. she and i chat, about working in Germany and in England, then i return. there is new bed linen. i shudder a little, realise i can’t quite sleep now and get dressed. i leave the hotel and wander to Andy Warhol.
do i see the grasses then? i don’t think so. i think that only happened the next morning.
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i slept in someone else’s bed that afternoon. i still feel the duvet cover on my skin. i remembered how i wondered how used it felt, then dismissed that thought as one of cheap hotel bed linen.
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something happened later still, when it was dark. i may still write about that. or maybe not.
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in any case: i think i will redo the hinge of the work and see what happens in the process. i will report.
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it may become a new thing.

sketchbook: Walter Benjamin’s One-Way Street

Gesa Helms added a post to the album [almost titled].
13 May at 16:42

i read Benjamin’s Haschisch in Marseille (though in English). i want to be annoyed at it and subsume it under that bourgeois bloke who meanders, flaneurs along, unguarded and naive, seeing universality in all he does.
of course i am not.
i never read much of Benjamin beyond the Berlin childhood and Mechanical reproduction (i think my younger self never considered herself bourgeois, cultured enough to be illuminated into the arcades). there is so much in his that i recognise as a well-known modality of my own, sans l’haschisch, the receptive introspection and the meaning that shifts along, tumbles forwards, connects out while being thoroughly with oneself (at once in fragment and complete). then there is the recording, the protocol, the account.
— there is also something incredibly tender at play, there is a curious affective touching that goes on, almost in passing. (and i am thinking of that loud pose that Springgay and Truman strike with their call for affect, which drowns out the above, or perhaps also doesn’t quite know what do with that that they can’t categorise/ identify as white settler self and his others).
i had, this morning, when i dreamt up the modality for the meeting, also figured the relational forms that i am tracing, holding and letting go in the moving-with that i am doing. it is quite different too from any of the participatory stuff and aims at a social, it may just be boring social geography after all. it needs that social, both to understand the violence (close and far) but also to conceive of the tenderness, the longing. it needs a little trippyness too, i know where i get mine from, Benjamin clearly described his.
(work in progress)

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the————line as facebook album

— while reworking the line for a presentation in summer I am testing it out as a different format: a public facebook album, here:

https://www.facebook.com/gesa.helms.3/media_set?set=a.10215853324378587&type=3

edit:

— I am also suggesting to view via my timeline. If you are not friends with me, this will be easy, as there aren’t many public posts, if you are friends, you may have to scroll a little:

https://www.facebook.com/gesa.helms.3

BoW: what i will be doing

Gesa Helms

5 April at 13:18 · 

Wednesday morning I say what it is that I will be doing:
– a series of performance pieces/ drawings
– a couple of workshop/event things and 
– some documentation of the above.

That is it. 
The spatial praxis/ production of space/ site-thing will be part of it as building out and up from the encounters that constitute each. It will be utopian in its concrete practice. Nothing more, nothing less (I would love to call it Beziehungsweise Revolution/ relationally: revolution, but that title is already taken, unfortunately).
The documentation will be either in book or in moving image form.
Each segment/ section will address or: can address a particular question/ enquiry.
I am uncertain if the talks will be part of it or generally merely context. I think that is part of the wider question of what constitutes the site/ the work, i.e., really: if we talk an expanded field of drawing, do we need to have a sense of what is not part of it? what is absent? outside? and, why would that be useful. In that sense, I will have a consideration of distance/closeness in this too, and at that point it loops back into the overall thematic of drawing/contact.

The first four events in drawing/contact are intimate and in hindsight, retrospect. I am testing how these relate to the theme and what they do medium/discipline-wise. I am trying not to be too wilful with them, to let them hover for as long as they need to. In some ways, these take inspiration from the events around the line, and reworking the line for the workshop in July into a photo essay and presentation will be great. The drawing/contact encounters are different though as they transgress media/ reach. They are possibly less concerned with secrets and veracity but more curious about the contact, the stuff enacted, where and when it reaches, etc.

In this, then, the line, the Gap, and the wider corridor thematic are aufgehoben in the best dialectical sense: they are concluded and superseded into a qualitatively new question (I remember how for each time that aufheben needed translation I was stuck, as stuck as I am now as there is no equivalent in English).

sketchbook: secrets along the public and the private

Gesa Helms

6 April at 11:37 · 

secrets, along the private and the public.
.
– the person who keeps calling to say that they know where Katrin Konert’s body is buried. they then hang up.
– the judge who places the burden of naming undercover cops on the women they deceived into intimate relationships
– the initiation secrets of the Hermit Triad of O.T.O. (sex magic)
– the book that I leave with my dad, which talks of how nostalgia for 1945-55 worked in reverse: it became darker as it receded into the past, what was being left out from the narration, then and now.
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with these, i turn to the notes when i started rewriting the line. it is less a rewriting that i did in autumn but a new iteration: so much new material assembled as i tried out if i wanted to write fiction. then the dying and leaving started in earnest and i only now loop back.
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i do not want to revise the work but i want to edit it anew. to see if a stronger focus is beneficial for it. but also: how do these images, which are after all still, not moving, hold up next to a written narrative. if i push the the temporal unfolding entirely to the viewer, reader and no longer let it animate through my voice. the line around secrets is reworked when i post this to facebook, as public album, having practiced already with […]
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i am such a slow worker with all these secrets. sometimes i worry that my life simply won’t be long enough for it all. in all this, we are firmly in surplus time, with both of them: it is fun, easy, joyful. we tell stories that are surplus and are having a good time with them. i love what i learned about the train station in Celle, of my mother’s routes through the biggest town she ever had a daily routine in. how on the next day she would fill in the gaps and connections between her teenage self, my teenage self and our contemporary selves right across the town, by foot and in the car. my dad was eager to learn about what we had seen and so i promised him to show him in summer, when i travel back from Macedonia.1 commentLikeShow More ReactionsCommentShare

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Gesa Helms this is one of the strongest pieces that i wrote in autumn, it is rather different to anything in the line, it puts the fragmentation right into the text and connects a number of themes and relationships through the movement along Gt Wester Rd (and, hey, my notetaking processes hold, it seems: i find things again)
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i sit invisibly in the dark window. the phone tracks my motions but not much else. i disappeared. again, never for long, each disappearance is an in-breath. yesterday and today i move back and forth. not quite rocking my upper body back and forth while sat on a chair, it bears resonance, witness. to other, i am doing chores, tracking apps and delivery routes.

earlier, i made my bed. i dress it in the new star-like dark blue grey cotton-weave. underneath: fluffy summer clouds. i crawl underneath and float, i can’t stop touching. it persists all night. i am sure i have found material form for her photos of me in cocoon. the night is warm, the space between my breasts collects sweat.

that night i kill. i am killed that night. i flee while moving downwards on material, structures that i do not understand. it doesn’t suffice: i am found. a large man with a wide red face and loud laughter. i wonder how the delicate structure still holds him. how can it. the structure is luminous and made for myself and yet, there is he and the other and they hunt. i swing my body up on the shelf above me and run, back through a field of high grass. someone, they, someone, different moves up behind. i reach the end and turn. this is my field i shout indignant. i have tended to it, it is not yet ready to unfold and i chase along. i realise it won’t suffice. it will not be enough.

i enter the room, he sits in front of me, a naked torso, his body turned away from me. i make the phone call. yes, i found him. it is him. michael. he turns around and i look into a mirror. but no mistake: i am michael. momentarily, the connection is interrupted. beeeep. beeeep. the familiar sound when she drives between one checkpoint and another. i briefly imagine her seeing the lights: on hilltops, bright and fortified, in the valleys, weaker, sparser, under siege.
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the path is a trail along beech and oak trees. it is a familiar route: out from the village I lived in as a small child, northwards. we have been often but not in a long time. the path is windy, narrow, we are a few. we come upon a group, at the centre a young woman, her face turned towards us, them, the world. they pour a substance over her, her face unmoved. she dies of the substance that solidifies her face. she, beautiful. we shouldn’t have seen.

i leave early to keep talking. her voice is breathless as she tells me how the day before the Anschluss, the people were dusting off little flags with swastikas and how they screamed themselves hoarse at his sight that 12 March 1938. then her voice breaks. i know that sound through the speakerphone as well as she knows mine. i try to think: do i remember her face with tears. i do not. when i see her face is the one that laughs. and when you laugh, i laugh too. always. beeep. beeep. she wants to call back and i will be at the subway soon. my face is wet the rain strong, it mixes with my tears. einen dicken kuss, beszede.

i return home and remember that my dirty linen from now on colour-coordinates my library. 

am i ugly.Edit or delete this

sketchbook: HJ Giles Drone

i went and saw a play last night. i open to write this post but then open messenger first and write a message. then i move back here.
i see so little live art. yet, if i want to do too i need to know it a little better.
besides a drone with a camera that was first watching the screen and then turned and projected us, the audience to the screen, it featured a loop pedal and a filing cabinet. they stuck their head into the filing cabinet, straddling their body atop and talking into the cabinet. i loved that. it was perfect.
the drone had a mother who told her early to smile, smile, smile. she got a new workplace, a breakdown, the watched rhinos as a protection scheme, then got a cat.
all the while, we would forget that her job was to carry bombs.
the themes repeated and the registers kept changing. i had seen their work before, it was largely angry work; this was angry too, and sly, and funny and seductive.
the drone wore a long silver dress, tried some sequined fine shoes for some part but was generally barefooted. i found myself keeping staring at her rather beautiful nipples (and delighted in the disobedience of not showing nipples in the UK).
— that shifting of body, narrative, register and object/subject was so well done. i really liked that. i had hoped for that and it was really good.
we had some good show before and after conversation too.
more of these things.

image 1: the obedient smiling daughter
image 2 and 3: she acquires a new work place, from the head inside the filing cabinet she too quickly, too painfully proceeds to whimpering on the floor, begging to quit work.

Image may contain: one or more people, people on stage, night, concert and indoor
Image may contain: one or more people, people sitting and indoor
Image may contain: one or more people and people sitting

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sketchbook: FB: writing doubt

possibly unsurprisingly, i rather like this rather certain piece of writing doubt:

Salvage Quarterly

10 April

Esther Leslie’s beautiful essay on Fortini, Benjamin and Brecht is now available for everyone to read:

“Contradiction is life. Change is what is valued. Fixity of positions, certitude has no political, or living, efficacy. Dialogue is what matters – to be heard and to hear. Contradiction is in the world. Contradiction is in our minds. Contradiction is between us. That is political. Beginning again, because of all these contradictions, because contradicting is political, because the last effort did not work, did not find its audience, or found one but could not speak to it, only at it, or because there was a level of doubt that it was the right moment, and it remains doubtful that it was the right way. At least that question needs to be posed of what one does. Otherwise there is only assertion, versus belief, and all the sins of political activism from voluntarism to tailism to hectoring to the seeding of confusion to determinism to being stranded between theory and practice. We might call it being non-dogmatic. “

PATREON.COM
Men of Doubt: Fortini, Benjamin, Brecht | Salvage Magazine on Patreon
Official Post from Salvage Magazine: I will present my ideas as theses, in recognition of the fragmented and poetic modes of the men I discuss. And, too, as reflection of the central idea here, that of doubt – aiming at a certain non-definitive articulation, the wish to leave something uncompleted…
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sketchbook: Pawel Jaszczuk: High Fashion

these are quite some images. they are about ten years old, from Japan (Tokyo?), when a Polish photographer scours the streets on his bike every night to find officer workers (all male) who fell asleep on the street. apparently common, apparently only transgressive (the sleep, the photo) for me, you, not them, not their fellow workers.

PAWELJASZCZUK.COM
High Fashion – Pawel Jaszczuk
In the street is a man. He must be a man because he looks like a man and is dressed like a man. But he is lacking somehow: too tired and crumpled: the buttons of his suit wrongly fastened; the creases too far extended and the bag he carries,…

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