Looking out the window, New York is coated with snow once again. It can stay this way as far as I’m concerned, this is all still a bit exotic to me and I quite like it.
The days are crammed full with work on the Smart Pill project with Stefani Bardin, preparing for a Kunsole performance with Deric Carner (to be broadcast on Manhattan Cable Access, details soon), as well as prepping for my trip to Tokyo in February. On top of that, we have an amazing group of residents and fellows starting at Eyebeam. 2011 feels like a busy and good year.
I was invited by an artist to build a sound component for a project she’s currently developing. It’s an installation built around gastroenterology. The more I learn about it, and the fragility of any sort of stasis in this complex system, the more I am in total awe both of the scientific marvel and its aesthetics. I’m constructing sound pieces, small gestures for now, from data and recordings made from a pill that passes through the intestines making recordings the whole way. Eventually the sound work built from data recorded by the pill will live in installation form within the final piece.
After discussing the project with Stefani Bardin, the artist, at our first meeting, I was intrigued by her nonchalance in describing the ins and outs, so to speak, of how our bodies deal with ingested food. And there is a lovely balance between the way she relays her earnest desire to educate and a simple aesthetic awe of, say, the hairs that live in our intestines and pass food through it like a crowd surfer riding the audience at a punk show. I’m also struck by the scientific community’s lack of interest in understanding how foods interact once they begin passing through our digestive system, typically labeling anything they don’t understand as GRAS (Generally Regarded As Safe).
I did have a few kind of “this is, like, totally gross” moments when first learning about it. But the beauty of the mechanics of it all, and the visual beauty too, ultimately outweigh those juvenile moments. When writing, now, I was reminded of J.R. Ackerley’s “My Dog Tulip” (described by Truman Capote as “One of the greatest books ever written by anybody in the world”) which recounts in vivid detail the many ways in which Tulip, his beloved German Shepard given him by a trick he picked up, would relieve herself on the street. And his philosophical appreciation of that act, and his reverence for the directness of animal contact. Ease with what is deemed unclean and perverse in Anglo-puritanical culture is to this day a very rare characteristic.
At the end of the day, I reckon, we’re all animals with bodies that drip, circulate, pump, and run internal hydraulics. It’s healthy to be reminded of that sometimes and maybe, in the process, learn to see the beauty of it.
Two nice poems (and I really am not a fan of poetry) by Luna Miguel, 19 year old wunderkind, via 3:AM Magazine.
Cave Lunam
Beware.
Mine is swine flu and malign.
Mine is Cow flu and mad Bird.
Mine is Nietzsche so poorly translated.
Watch my swollen veins,
inside I keep Panero’s slobbers.
Inside, the heart of a Kinder Egg
with no surprise:
Sylvia Plath Dead,
David Foster Wallace Dead,
Virginia, swimming butterfly, Dead.
Attention. Purple flag.
The flu of souls.
The flu of smoke.
The flu of codas and plucked
font.
Attention. They spread.
Beware.
I bite.
(From Poetry is not dead)
Everything Shaved
Everything shaved:
to the last eyelash
of this monotonous nightmare.
Everything shaved.
Everything false.
Punk imitation of a dead poet.
If Pizarnik raised,
will you do it,
you idiotic suicide,
who look from the reflection?
Everything shaved,
cunt or heart?
Does it matter since both smell of life
since both bleed and stain with love?
Everything shaved to feel the ice better.
Everything cold.
Everything very cold and beautiful.
Everything empty, for the last time.
(Previously unpublished)
Translation: Ángel Arqueros, Pedro J. Miguel and Kika Martínez
