ft ground

Also, as my life continues on, day after day like the grey suit of the genius, the sameness builds up in columns of like items where an occurrence that was long ago a ‘one-off’ is now in a stack of familiars that are warmed by their approaching a constant ‘room temperature’ and ooze together into a single item. That unforgettable visit to the Marquis as a youth, wandering alone to Peachtree Center mall to look at Stephen King books in B. Dalton is now, although still distinct as a base, the beginning of a long dive through what now must be hundreds of visits, no one separable from the others. Conversations, even those with friends or those with stimulating content become grouped together. As Merrill spoke on the terrace over Congress at the Stephen Austin one night I sadly told myself that I would forget every word she said. Unfortunately it is not as easy as flipping the switch to the recording mind. That mind has contextual controls. I don’t think conversations can be picked up this way unless their grain is somehow concurrent with the material of the experience (either reflecting it or shaping it, more likely the latter, see the numerous ‘getting dumped by your fiancé in the Zocalo ruminations’). Conversations are more of a way of marking time. They are necessarily fleeting. They don’t create space. (more…)

Cathy Fox sends out an email every time her site is updated so I only look at perhaps 1% of the material. It is the blog that cried wolf. I had the misfortune to read her alert about urban hikes as art this morning.

In a symbolic reclamation of Atlanta for pedestrians, Stuart Keeler will walk from Midtown to I-285 in each of three performances on December 16, 18 and 21. You are invited to join him. Dressed in primary colors, armed with maps and his cell-phone GPS system, the Atlanta artist (and co-founder of Le Flash) will depart at 9 a.m. on the appointed days at the intersection of Peachtree Street and Ponce de Leon Avenue.

It seems typically suburban-millennial to not recognize that the ‘piece’ you are doing was done 50 years ago in Paris, to not recognize the preposterousness of reclaiming the city streets when your carrying of a gps device is an outright admission that you still fear them, that the thousands of people you champion with far less idle time who make such pedestrian/public transit jaunts every day because they are forced to will either know nothing about what you are doing or would think you were a fool for walking to the perimeter if you didn’t have to, and that the other idle people whose interest might be piqued by your work will never have an interest in reclaiming the streets that they will have to share with the former group. I see this being about as well thought out as your standard balloon-boy, sex-tape, party-crashing ‘happening’ that relies on the notion that if you tell someone about something you are doing loud enough they will find it interesting. i guess that has always been the mo of the art community. i dont know, maybe his drawings will be fresh.

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enjoy this first full draft of the short fiction piece i have been working on [pdf]

From a crouch of a fire stair John enters the hospital cafeteria like a paste extruded into a denim ensemble with paste still for hair, taking a lidded plastic glass of thin orange juice from a chilled cabinet, alights at a too large round table the color and texture of souse, where two ample black women in scrubs beam. From the distance, where every body can be seen from head to toe, the measure of proximity in a hospital, he could be seen as immediately shaping the moments as they came, with his arms speaking like a conductor or puppeteer to draw out voluminous shrieks, moans, exclamations, through the undulations and ripples of the womens’ squinting bodies. And also he spoke, with a singularly human distraction, in words that, from where the gallery sat around the perimeter of the hall, arrived in concussions on the antimicrobial air that blunted the nuances of the tale or fragment which had the women rolling out glee from the cavities of their legs and sucking his full excrescence of words from the air in their tremendous gasps. He held court. Daily immemorial and onward daily they danced. (more…)

After a black swoop through a wet slip of days, of unmarked time, the multiplied edges of walls and shadows and lines against the imperturbable sky creep toward their twins. Like sleeplessness and television hypnosis, the real edge won’t appear until those two questionable figments unite and you can reach out to trace a corner in its straightness and coolness. You try to ascertain which places those two manifestations are existing in, right at the moment you take them in. If one is in the haze of your sickness as it tapers, the other is waiting on the fringe of consciousness and clarity, but it is not more real, that tangible world of normalcy, because it is always out ahead and unattainable, like a man matching your paces. You only see his back, forever. You see things in a different way through illness. They become pure and separate from you, not stage sets enabling you to move through time, but existing in each second with you, both alone, both with questions for the other.
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From some nowhere inside of you visions slowly arise, first pastel petals to your eyes and then wallowing distant squealing lances pins through your stuffed ears and escalates as voices and sounds break through like you would have imagined regaining consciousness in cinematic replica. You felt the weight of the still air filling the hollow column of the hotel all above beginning to put folds in you. In the moment you were a crystalline figure locked in the thick fluid air that turned under slowly like a batter through gorges between glass castles in which you could see each inflection of time and posture of prop as you were trundled through the lobby to a service elevator. The wheels of the gurney exact and silent and the entire gullet of the whale hung over you, turning as your attendants navigated its ribs and stays, and when you stopped turning it began to turn for you as your breath spun circles in its steam structure. But as each second passed it didn’t depart with the criminal clarity which its occurrence might have forecast, it stayed in the moment and the perfect visions of damp surfaces and glimmering lines out to the sky began to pool into a kaleidoscopic forest of pure steaming ice. (more…)

Far away again in autumn. The sunlight through a flat cloud as you stood on the sidewalk outside a door without a handle flat into the glazed bricks was quiet. The one week of the year had come across trees that had enough leaves on them to blot out the southern sun and the shade was warm enough to sit out in. You spent the long afternoon in a plaza downtown sitting on the swept bricks. In the absence of those faces you couldn’t retain your eyes filled with the white sky. You worked your way back through the mosaic, around cavernous voids that you could feel between your eyes and your skull where whole weeks had been handed over to some black vessel willfully, intentionally. You rock back and forth in the gathered up twine of time hanging down from Atlanta. In some phrases you are there, like now, under a sparse pear tree in the plaza, or slipping back down, not as a journey into that empty Valley, but a plummet, or a twinkling transmigration into a moment. When you began at the end, as a human destination with a trail let out behind it, there was nothing concrete enough to withdraw from but the euphoria of the continuing tides of the hotel, to step backwards from your death and gaze upon it from life. You knew the debris that ended every story. The same things with different connotations. You felt like a bronze cast. (more…)

In the autumn you got an efficiency apartment, found the ditched car, and unpacked all of the contents, including a large, wise-eyed brown cat asleep on its roof. You hadn’t noticed how much had been left in the car. It seemed to be everything. Everything was just barely enough, for a long time. (more…)

This is another artifact. I can feel when one gets caught up in me, physically, in a layer of my skin that feels sore in a continuous dull sheath around my body. I have thought, at the onset of the feeling, in the past, that I could not physically soothe it without clawing through myself, and I didn’t know what I would find. I shivered like there was an old man in me, right below the surface. If I bled myself he would seep out and dry onto paper his real voice, when, every so often, I feel him struggling to whisper through my skin. An ink wash of some time out of sorts. (more…)