Chris Burden - The New Museum

The Missing Book of Spurs (after party: slow motion drink spill)

Billy Cancel Told Me

Billy Cancel told me
air collapses into light
sockets and shocks the pubis
into a hip shake frenzy.
He said dance amid the cobwebs
that happen to be nutritious and
delicious smeared on your clothing
or melted on your tongue. Get your
walk on so the template is wiped
clean with blue Windex and some
soapy shovel with a napkin
at its edge for scraping
the dodgy bits from the panes.
You think you've got all day
to climb the stairs, Billy said,
but your collapse is imminent,
will come suddenly and so draws
to a close. Daisies stuffed into
the barrel of a rifle, Billy said,
look pleasing but stop nothing.
The future is now, Billy added,
it will ripple through your days.

The Visit

When we got to the lake
it was broiling in the car. The house was brown
and chalky. Next to it, a dead rodent lay on its side,
rotting. We expected these things in America.
An onion field provided a quick glimpse
into the void of summer. We felt a spasm of grief,
so we soothed ourselves with a thermos
of cold mint tea. Once the luggage was propped
next to the car, we walked stiffly into the house,
which quivered in the heat. Now and then a bluejay
or an airplane made us look up at the sky,
which was errantly blue, as though it
was overloaded with pigment put there by vandals.
Had we been scotch drinkers, we would have
sat on the porch in the faded yellow
butterfly chairs, and drank it from children's cups
with various cartoon characters on them.
Instead, we decided to christen the house
with a round of fucking, which we did, vigorously.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Wednesday Top 10

1) What are Megabucks?

2) Knife in the coffee.

3) A pot of crayons melting.

4) Little Velvet Things versus A Fully Functional Human Being.

5) A bunch of fancy marshmallows with tiny pieces of roasted coconut stuck to them.

6) Grey blue jeans.

7) Rainy & windy bullshit.

8) Lightning Bolt.

9) Splash State.

10) Tara.

Rest Stop

The slanted light of Bergen Street
blasts the back of a bus like it was
a metal shed. The blossoms have been
nipped off, pressed hard between
thumb and forefinger; establishing
a red juice thumbprint from the petals.
I'm loafing all the time now that the
volition of tasks has slowed
to a murky expanse of morning
into afternoon into the dark by
4:30 pm. The silver radiator
hisses red steam with the radio
on. The trees are almost stripped
bare by the wind, even. People used to
thumb a ride, wander in consternation,
do battle with evil spirits, that sort of stuff.
Nowadays, it's buddy-buddy chats, status
updates from the urine temple,
and a light dose of canker for the
tongue's laborious excursions.

You Can't Eat the View

You can't eat the view
but you can take a tumble
in that pile of golden ginkgo leaves
pressed against the gate. My actions
are frequently ill-advised,
but percolating anyway.
Fists pump to breakfast metal
while a plastic bag appears
to be struggling to stay in a tree.
Good morning, from the end of something;
where melancholia meets promise.
But first, this robust German bread
with a dollop of peanut butter
and a glob of honey.

An Artforum photo from last night's performance of The Missing Book of Spurs

The Missing Book of Spurs

Performa 2013 and MV Studio presents

THE MISSING BOOK OF SPURS
a new work by Marianne Vitale with music by Mike Stroud starring Todd Colby Cole Mohr Walter Gambín Caleb Addison Billy Cancel Susannah Liguori Jingles Boiler Janelle Miau William Burgess Olimpia Dior Bennet Williams India Menuez Amanda Topaz Anat F Chichton Atkinson Janet Castel Chole Rosetti Victoria Crowbar Rukhsana Farman Jack Shannon Stephen Franco Simone Cole Blumstein and Adrian Caridi with Michael Gerner Bogdan Teslar Kwiatkowski

costumes: Diva Pittala & Francois Hugon makeup and hair: Andrea Helgadottir lighting: Kiki Lindskog, Matthew Reily and Ross Epps sound and light coordination: Rosey Selig-Addiss sound tech: Tommy Malekoff and construction: Louis Perez

NOVEMBER 20, 21, 22 and 23, 2013

8PM SHARP

DOORS OPEN AT 7:30PM

Queens, New York

FOR TIX, VISIT: http://13.performa-arts.org/event/marianne-vitale
photography: Silja Magg

Colleen

I'm Just Saying

Basically, I’m about as crisp as a frozen duck.
I sleep so lightly that my bed could be a boat
drifting out to sea. I’m aware of the wires under the world
that are just nerves along fault lines that startle the city
awake late at night. When dried rice is dropped on the sidewalk
it springs back up. That’s just the nerves in the earth
snapping back. I’d like to thank today the same way
I would thank a mechanic for fixing a machine.
Such an odd way to be walking around thanking things.
I’m alert to this bland mode of my becoming.
I mean really: if I were a sailor in the Atlantic
with swells lapping at my boat,
I’d be all like, I’d rather be home.

The Captain

We taught the Captain how to interact better with others while playing the piano. He was a tremendous showman, and he displayed his showmanship by behaving seductively when he performed. He was not a monster. He was hungry after he played for us, so we made the Captain walk, and he was good at walking. We never approached the Captain if he was eating, sleeping, or chewing. We exposed the Captain to many different situations and many different people so he knew how to act appropriately in a lot of situations. We enjoyed watching the Captain move after we applied oil to his body. We never left the Captain unattended. We stroked the Captain affectionately until he fell asleep with his head in the crook of his arm. The Captain was not aggressive or territorial. When people outside bothered the Captain, we removed him from the window. Please: no pinching, hitting or pulling on the Captain, no matter how playful he may appear. The Captain’s personality and physical demands complement our lifestyle. We don’t ever allow anyone to play tug of war with the Captain. We monitor the Captain until we hear a tinkle and bonk sound coming from his piano. If the Captain appears nervous, anxious, or afraid, we immediately remove him from the situation and reward him with a deep tongue kiss. We made sure there were no holes or gaps in the fence so the Captain couldn’t escape. We observed the Captain in the yard a good many hours. So tired was the Captain, so very tired.

Colleen (Cecile Schott)

Colleen's music (Cecile Schott, from France) has been the soundtrack to my writing and editing mornings of late. Her music is enchanting and hypnotic, a soothing balm for the mind. Her website is here.

Collage #13

Jonas Mekas

Dan Weiss's drum interpretation of auctioneer Ty Thompson

Washing My Face

How small my head feels
when I wash my face. Like a peach,
my head. While applying water
to my face I think,
"My peach is so small."
But my head is large
and heavy. Actually, it is unwieldy.
My head is a burden, so to speak.
In confined spaces it
bumps into things, a lot.

Lou Reed

I'll be singing the song "The Blue Mask."

Program for the Day

What you can do is stop being gloomy
long enough to eat an entire lemon;
skin, seeds, and all. Or, become one
of those people who eat an entire bulldozer
by sawing it into small, lozenge-sized chunks,
eating it bit by bit. You could do that.
Or you could play a stacking game, where you
stack things in your apartment by their approximate
size or color, starting with the largest objects
on the bottom and working your way up to the smallest.
That could take all day, or at least until nightfall,
when a new threshold is crossed, and all the snow
reminds you November is here and that you should
bring your mind back from September and join us.

Donny and Joe Emerson - Baby

Franz Kafka

"Don't despair, not even over the fact that you don't despair. Just when everything seems over with, new forces come marching up, and precisely that means that you are alive. And if they don't, then everything is over with here, once and for all."

Franz Kafka, July 21, 1913 from Diaries

The Missing Book of Spurs (Rehearsing)

"It doesn't hurt at all. That's awesome!"

Sunday Night!

The singular work of Paris-based Spanish filmmaker, playwright, poet, and artist Fernando Arrabal defies categorization, utilizing humor, shock, and confrontation while embracing excess, irrationality, and the grotesque. In a celebration of Arrabal’s provocative oeuvre, poet Todd Colby will MC an evening of poetry, cabaret interventions, and impromptu performances at the Bowery Poetry Club. Drawing inspiration from Arrabal’s 1992 film Farewell Babylon!, in which a modern-day Nadja traverses the streets of New York in the chaos of the city, the evening will feature a collage of vibrant characters. Featuring interventions by Amanda Alfieri, Gage Boone, Todd Colby, Mel Gordon, item idem, Joseph Keckler, Irvin Climaco Morazan, Ariana Reines, and Jacolby Satterwhite.

Presented with Martin E. Segal Center, CUNY and Spain Culture New York-Consulate General of Spain. Curated by Marc Arthur and Charles Aubin.

Sunday, November 10. 9:00pm

The Bowery Poetry Club
$15

Tickets

Good Morning

Metal

Enthusiasm is a silver tonic hot for teacher.
These candles flicker in the night. A bedspread
soaked with peach schnapps. Solve the most kinked doubt
with a unit built for speed marked GET OFF.
On a map the bits of color signify states.
I shall name them in the order of my awareness
of them, their names, not my arrival in the actual
places they represent. I mean nothing to you.
Let this all boil down to confusion, followed
by a shortness of breath, pacing, METAL MACHINE MUSIC
on REPENT, which masks the highway sounds
and helps devour RENE DAUMAL in my sleep,
even. A rosier tonic was never, or ever was.

Colleen - The Weighing Of The Heart

Thurston Moore

Thurston and Anne Waldman will be reading this Wednesday night at The Poetry Project at 8pm. I'll be introducing Thurston.

Stephen Mitchelmore

Stephen Mitchelmore, always compelling and insightful, has a marvelous review of Reiner Stach's biography of Kafka, Kafka: The Years of Insight. Here's an excerpt from Stephen's review:

"While readers of The Years of Insight receive a rich and moving account of the pressures of one man's life in a certain time and place, the true authority of the biography is felt in what is glimpsed around the accumulated detail, and even more so in what gets lost: photographs taken with Felice Bauer ruined because she inserted the film back to front, the stash of notebooks written in Berlin confiscated by the Gestapo, the life not lived because it was ended prematurely by a disease that would soon be curable and, most of all, what happened to his friends and family years later. It is not an authority of power." -Stephen Mitchelmore

Read the entire review here: This Space.

Blue Empire

The Missing Book of Spurs