I'm in Liv's childhood house. She's a teenager in a dramatic neon get-up, weilding a brush made of wires stapled to a wedge of plywood. She snaps the brush like a whip, dripping a soapy sheet of bubbles. She hangs the suds across a grid of strings like wet music notes. She says it's a John Cage homage but I'm reminded of Ray Johnson's performance where he berrates a cardboard box with his belt. At some point I can't stop myself from eating a melted VHS that's turned into sticky sweet rubber, but it starts to coat my throat and fill my sinuses so I have to make myself throw up. Also babes with fleshy backs playing guitar solos they're desperate to finish like orgasms.
***
Today furtively combing the web for "Kathy Acker Puppet Adaptation," (I swear I didn't make this up, that I read about it somewhere!) and organizing my gallery of modernist bummer public sculpture for a slideshow presenation coming soon.
Art rule: If your sculpture sucks, make it big. If it still sucks, paint it red.
My friend Cathal Liam McFee, iconic coffeeshop patron and postmodern media cryptkeeper, is deeply entrenched in organizing a William S. Burroughs 100th Birthday Festival in Bloomington, Indiana which I am eager to assist and attend. However, because I'm a brat who works best oppositionally (even when the opposition's an ally), I've been doing some deep fantasizing about holding a counter-festival/sub-academic basement panel loosely indebted to Kathy Acker. It would showcase experimental transfeminist media applying the cut-up technique, unabashedly raiding Burroughs' icebox for what's relevant and leaving the rest to ferment.
I imagine it as analagous to Bart Simpson's treehouse casino-- siphoning guest speakers into my neighborhood through willful confusion, giving visiting scholars a ride on my bike handlebars, inviting Genesis P-Orridge to flop on my couch for the night.
Back in "reality," my brain is numb from hours of worthlessly combing internet grant writing materials. All I have to work with is the velocity of recent events' successes and loose structures provided by past radical events. I click on dead links from Pilot Fest in Chicago, 2004, reading ephemeral interviews with organizers in search of suggestions. My best-case-scenario free associative search engine blurbs (Sontag camp performance grant, Acker estate individual residency) turn up few useful results but keep the daydream rolling.
Job description:
"Should be comfortable handling meat, post-consumer waste, light lifting. Love of stains and being damp a must (Thanks William)! You supply uniform. Late hours preferred."
Pictures and it never happened.
Tech Grumbles: New blogger format smooshes everything around me.
Also, it took a lot navigating technological red tape just to publish this post which kinda made me interested in class war. I've cracked yr code, IU computer labs! Free the information!
Coat in color for increased visibility. Covered in stuffed animals. Playhouse looks amidst bricks. Make it stand out. Mark a trauma. Where did something really awful happen? Where did I fall off my bike? Strategic trash re-structuring. Foam coating and rain-battered bears. Human hair walls and the uncanny. Saying the word "anxiety" might even make your heart race. Lost time, lost looking.
Extreme Appearances: wherein I release into the ether the ideas I never use, like the plants spitting out flies in my trauma landscape dream last night. Because of overabundance. Too much information. The fun postmodern affliction.
You can start by making that video with the "Honk if you have a blog" sign, then move on to cross-stitched underpants that say "bless this mess." Check back periodically. I'll have you making millions. I'm a life coach.
