raw computer memory as direct cinema

Whoa! Check this out.

market vs state censorship

For the "fodder for past and future arguments" file . . .

Thought this tidbit -- from a 2000 interview with Hungarian auteur Béla Tarr -- might be relevant with regard to the question of whether or not art and higher education should be supported solely via the market. The interview was published in Bright Lights Film Journal.


Did you attend a film school?

I went to film school after my first movie. Because you know at that time everybody needed a diploma. It was communist time, if you wanted to be a filmmaker you had to study in the official film school. But first I made a movie (laughs).

Did you suffer from censorship?

I think censorship is always there. Then it was the censorship of the state and now it's the censorship of the market. Some differences but…

Otar Iosseliani, the Georgian director, was telling me the same, that the censorship of the big audience is worse that the censorship of the state, because you only get money for movies made for the big audience.

Yes, he is right. Because during the communist area you knew you had to make some tricks here and there, like a snake, and if you were very fast and you had some good ideas, you could do it. I really did what I wanted. We had a lot of difficulties, but finally we could make the movies.

35 men to be tortured in saudi arabia for being gay

From Amnesty International (click on link for the "Take Action" web page):

End the Criminalization of Homosexuality in Saudi Arabia

At least 35 men are to be flogged after they attended a "gay wedding" in Jeddah in March, according to an Agence France Presse (AFP) report. The men may be prisoners of conscience, punished solely for their sexual orientation. Amnesty International has written to the Minister of the Interior seeking clarification of the report, expressing concern that the men have apparently been sentenced to flogging, and appealing for any such sentences to be commuted.

Recommended Action

Please send appeals to arrive as quickly as possible:

• expressing concern at the AFP report that 35 men are to be flogged, and, if it is true, calling for the sentences to be commuted regardless of the offence for which they have been handed down
  
• expressing concern that the men appear to have been punished solely for their sexual orientation, and stating that, if so, they are prisoners of conscience, and should be released immediately and unconditionally
  
• asking for details of the exact charges against the 35 men, together with details of any trial proceedings and the evidence against them
  
• stating that you consider the use of flogging as punishment to be cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment amounting to torture, contrary to Article 5 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which states: "No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment."
  

APPEALS TO:

Minister of the Interior:
His Royal Highness Prince Naif bin 'Abdul 'Aziz
Minister of the Interior, Ministry of the Interior
P.O. Box 2933, Airport Road
Riyadh 11134, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia
Fax: 011 966 1 403 1185 (it may be difficult to get through,
please keep trying)
Salutation: Your Royal Highness

Minister of Justice:
His Excellency Dr. 'Abdullah bin Muhammad bin Ibrahim Al-
Sheikh
Minister of Justice, Ministry of Justice
University Street
Riyadh 11137, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia
Fax: 011 966 1 401 1741
Salutation: Your Excellency

Minister of Foreign Affairs:
His Royal Highness Prince Saud al-Faisal bin 'Abdul 'Aziz Al-
Saud
Minister of Foreign Affairs, Ministry of Foreign Affairs
Nasseriya Street
Riyadh 11124, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia
Fax: 011 966 1 403 0159 (it may be difficult to get
through, please keep trying)
Salutation: Your Royal Highness


COPIES TO:

Ambassador Prince Bandar Bin Sultan
Embassy of Saudi Arabia
601 New Hampshire Ave. NW
Washington DC 20037
Fax: 1 202 944 3113
Email: info@saudiembassy.net

book from another dimension

While writing the previous entry, the following "paradox" came to mind. The fact that Thomas Basbøll's theatrical paradox is still bouncing around in the periphery of my consciousness probably had something to do with it. I must say, however, that my "paradox" strikes me as a bit silly, and I'm not confident I've stated it as well as I can.

---

I find a book on the street that seems to be written in English (or whatever language I happen to speak). Moreover, the book makes sense. For the sake of the example, let's say that it's about baking deserts.

That night, a disturbing thought occurs to me. In fact, the thought so preoccupies me that I can't go back to sleep. I recently saw a newspaper report indicating that objects from another dimension are somehow popping up in ours. It occurs to me that the book might be one of these objects. So I google the publisher, the title, the author, and so on, and, to my horror (or delight), nothing comes up. Ok, so now I have a book that may be from another dimension. In itself, this is no big deal. What keeps me awake is this: how do I know that the book was really written in English? What if it's written in a language that looks and reads like English but is really something else? What if it's, say, a romance novel that only appears to be about baking? Or a set of plans to destroy the very universe I inhabit?

Unless I find a reference to the book somewhere, how I can I be certain that the book really says what it appears to say?

morality and the (post-)avant

Reading Silliman's post (and, especially, the battle in the comment box between Joan Houlihan and others) regarding Billy Collins' attack on "inaccessible" poetry, it seems to me that those on a crusade against (post-)avant writing often take a distinctly moralistic tone. As in: "How COULD you write a poem that doesn't 'make sense'? It's wrong, I tell you, wrong!"

Consider, for example, the third question of Houlihan's rountable debate on post-avant writing:

Can you find pleasure in a poem that does not display some kind of organization and context, however loosely constructed? In other words, do you enjoy reading a collection of individual, unconnected lines? If yes, please explain. If no, same.

Maybe it's just the way the question is phrased, but I get a palpable sense of moral condemnation here. Like anyone who could possibly enjoy reading a "collection of individual, unconnected lines" (never mind that very notion of such a collection doesn't hold water, as several of the commentators point out) should be sent to do forced labor until they've been "re-educated".

It seems, though, that we who admit to indulging in such perverse and forbidden pleasures are more apt to rationalize our preferences than we are to present them in similarly moral terms. E.g., we might say that we like post-avant work because it "complicates the subject" or because it "doesn't take our being situated in language for granted". But we probably wouldn't say "I like being able to think for myself; how could you possibly enjoy a poem that tries to tell you what to think or feel?"

I suppose this is all just a microcosmic rehashing (or a personal projection from my own subconscious) of political left/right debates -- we on the left try to argue our positions rationally, whereas those on the right speak an entirely different language. Same words and basic syntax, perhaps, but entirely different languages nonetheless. It couldn't hurt to learn to speak their language. They certainly aren't going to bother learning ours.

was hoping for less of the dixie, but i do say "y'all" sometimes . . .

Your Linguistic Profile:

60% General American English

20% Dixie

15% Yankee

0% Midwestern

0% Upper Midwestern

What Kind of American English Do You Speak?

Thanks to Laura Carter for the link . . .

cowpastor

Jordan Stempleman provides a list of poeple to write regarding poet Kamau Brathwaite's struggle to save CowPastor, Barbados from destruction via the construction of an airport road.

microsoft caves to bigots

Just now read about this..

Microsoft apparently pulled its support, at the last minute, for a Washington state LBGT-related anti-discrimination bill after receiving pressure from a locally prominent anti-gay evangelist. Americablog reports the bill lost by one vote.

From Americablog:

What we may have just witnessed over the past 24 hours is the beginning of a business backlash against gays and our civil rights as Americans. The attacks started years ago from the religious right, worked its way into the US presidency and the Congress, and then down into the states. And now, America's top corporations - businesses who we counted as our friends - are offering us up for slaughter.

Shame on Microsoft. It had the chance to stand up and show the country that you can do well by doing good. But instead it sat by and shut up while our civil rights went down in flames. And yes, Microsoft was great on gay rights issues in the past. But that's all the more reason to be confused and troubled by their actions today, and all the more reason to be concerned, very concerned, that this is a sign of more betrayals to come from Microsoft, and those businesses who now choose to follow the prejudiced precedent that Microsoft just set.

Of course I can't even pretend to be surprised that corporations would "offer us up for slaughter". And yet I think a part of me wanted to believe the free market theorists who claimed that corporations would be good for tolerance and diversity in an effort to attract intellectual talent, loyalty, and new customer bases. The reality is that they tend to play into the hands of whomever they believe will be in a position to grant them favor -- not only now, but just over the horizon of the immediately foreseeable future. Gambling on the probable winners in politics is just another form of investment. The company I work for made pre-election campaign contributions to just about every winner in the last election, including Bush and including Barack Obama.

I guess my point isn't so much that this could be read as a sign of corporate America turning against the diversity that some of its denizens have supported over the past 10 or so years, but that this very turning could be read as a sign of who's going to be in power for quite some time.

No real surprise there either, I suppose.

Maybe there is one very thin silver lining -- if the heavy corporate sponsorship drops (or even wanes) from gay pride parades, gay pride parades could become fun again.

Looks like it's time to read up on Linux.

tokto island dispute

Alexander Cumberbatch of ZXentrick Libretti brings us news of 106 Korean poets protesting Japan's claims on two islets between Korea and Japan. The link above is to one post among many -- Alex has been following the story for several days.

new profile photos

I recently downloaded Picasa from Google, and the software found a ton of strange images on my computer that I'd never before seen. Apparently they're part of the MS Office clipart package. I picked about 46 of them that I particularly like; whenever I have a chance, I'll randomly swap my current profile photo for a new one of the 46.

an exercise toward the discovery of a poetics of impermanence

This exercise is to be conducted by a group of poets. Each poet takes a turn.

1) Compose a poem. Discard all versions but the final draft. Ensure that there exists only one copy of the final draft.

2) Circulate the poem among the group of poets. The poem should be passed from person to person, then eventually back to its author. No one is allowed to make a copy of the poem.

3) The poem is burned by its author, either in private or in the company of the other poets.

Repeat until every poet has circulated and burned at least one poem.

If anyone wants to try it, drop me a line at badwithtitles at gmail dot com . . .

impermanence

I’ve been doing a lot of surfing on the peak oil related websites I mentioned in the previous post. In just a couple of days, I can honestly say that my worldview has shifted and is still shifting. The ground beneath my feet feels insubstantial and rubbery. It wouldn’t be far off the mark to describe the shift as a conversion experience.

I’ve had two previous conversion experiences, if you count coming out of the closet (to myself) as one of them. The first I mentioned yesterday – it was a relatively short-lived conversion to Christian fundamentalism. I felt I’d been yanked out of the stream of life and placed back into it an awkward and immobile angle. If I’d been something of a fish before, swimming along with the currents, I was now more of a rock. Somehow, my world was no longer my own.

Learning about peak oil theory feels a lot like that first one. Maybe I should take this fact as a warning to back off of the topic for awhile. Or maybe the feelings the first conversion awoke, having remained dormant for years, are finally finding something real to attach themselves to. Is this what one calls a “return of the repressed”? Or maybe what I'm feeling is a perfectly normal reaction to taking seriously the notion that we'll be extremely fortunate to have running water, electricity, medicine, and a civil infrastructure by the time I reach old age.

At any rate, I've been wondering what it could possibly mean to (attempt to) produce art in light of the possibility peak oil theory is correct. There's always the marxist social realism model, the artist as educator and propagandist. Or art as a form of distraction and escape. But neither of these strike me as cases of authentic art. Art opens onto or composes the infinite real (sorry, Thomas). As infinite or related to infinity, art is "spiritual" and not empirical and therefore can't be reduced to a role of broadcasting messages or one sort or another; similarly, as real or related to the real, art offers not escape but a pathway straight into the beating heart of it all.

Moreover, art and the artist can no longer strive for permanence or hope to be remembered by future generations. The best we can hope for is that the most significant of the achievements of the past 2500 years or so aren't completely lost and forgotten. And even if we're not spiraling toward the new dark ages as I'm predicting, the fact remains that the proliferation of objects artistic production as we know it today is sustained, ultimately, by the availability of cheap energy. There will be no small poetry presses in our relocalized and low-energy worlds (I say worlds for the very concept of "the world" will surely become a quasi-mystical limit meaning "as far beyond the reaches of 'here' imaginable"); with rare exception, poets will circulate their poetry among friends, neighbors, local communities, and no one else.

So we need a genuine art that "goes the distance" to the infinite real but which does so without pretensions of permanence or immortality or even global (as in beyond-local) recognition. In that scary essay, The Long Emergency, that I mentioned in the previous post, James Howard Kunstler writes that that "the survivors [of the upcoming changes to our way of life] will have to cultivate a religion of hope -- that is, a deep and comprehensive belief that humanity is worth carrying on." I'd add that art, if it exists at all, will have to show that this belief is justified.

I know I've been bringing up Burning Man a lot lately, but that's one place where I think that such an artistic project has already begun. Not Burning Man as a whole, but the art that's produced for it and that it inspires. Much of the art at Burning Man is destroyed or set on fire at the end of the festival, so impermanence is, so to speak, "built-in" to the essence of the work of art itself. For a large-scale example of such art, David Best builds an enormous and unique temple each year which is burned to the ground the night after the Man is burned. Here's a picture of last year's temple (used here without permission, courtesy of a photographer by the name of Rick Egan). Click here for many more images.



I'm also thinking of the more intimate and temporary installations/sculptures of San Francisco artist named Joe Mangrum.

Does a poetic analog of this sort of thing exist? If not, what might it look/read like?

the industrialization bubble

This essay scared the crap out of me. And it’s not about Bush.

I’ve kind of tuned out internet (and other) buzz lately, due to work and other commitments taking up a lot of time. So maybe I’m the last to hear about Peak Oil theory, the fact that some experts think we’ve already passed the peak of global oil production, most think we’re at least pretty close to it, and the changes this could bring about in our lifetimes.

The theory is basically this: oil discovery and production follow a bell curve. The industrialized age that preceded us saw the rise to the top of the curve, and now we're staring down the other side. The implication is that as supply decreases (and it will likely decrease much more rapidly than it increased, given increased population), prices will increase – so much so that we eventually won’t be able to afford to drive our cars, ship our food, fly our planes, operate our factories, and so on. As for renewable/alternative energy, nothing so far proposed would be scalable and efficient enough to sustain a fully industrialized society (though organizations like Local Energy of Santa Fe, NM give some hope of at least being able to keep the lights on). The range of views on the subject goes from “hogwash – private industry and market forces will solve the problem somehow; after all, it always has” to “the Mad Max films clearly depicted what our lives will be like by, say, about 4pm tomorrow afternoon.” As anyone who knows me knows, I tend to find myself in the latter sort of camp. But even if I resist my immediate urge trade my life in San Francisco for a life on a cooperative farm in, say, the Pacific Northwest, I think it’s clear that if the theory is correct, then we’re going experience – during our lifetimes – a pretty uncomfortable decline in our standard of living accompanied by an equally disturbing rise in both class and military warfare over scarce resources.

While I want to attribute my sense of dread to a hyper-sensitivity to all things apocalyptic -- a sensitivity instilled in me by the few years I spent as a Christian fundamentalist in early adolescence -- the scenario seems pretty realistic. As with the question of whether or not our nation has already crossed the line into a "soft" but irreversible fascism, there's just no way to peel back the layers of personal mythology to reveal a clear and unembellished picture beneath. We won't know for sure until "it" does or doesn't happen.

What inspires a small amount of hope about many of these scenarios is that a return to local community organization and cooperation appears to offer some insurance against utter misery. For example, as shipping costs rise, luxuries like grocery store will gradually disappear. Maybe during our lifetimes, maybe not -- but certainly within a couple of generations -- we'll have to work with our neighbors, literally, in order to feed ourselves. To the socialist in me, that doesn't sound too bad. Especially if we start learning how to do it now, before necessity forces us it upon us.

If you're interested in reading further, here are a couple of links:

Association for the Study of Peak Oil & Gas (ASPO)
peakoil.org
Peak Oil news & message boards

what i'm thinking about this morning at work as i program a database

One way to view the difference between human subjectivity and artificial intelligence:

Whenever something new is added to a system, the system can't recognize it until it performs a "scan". Here's an object. Have I already encountered it before? Yes. Ok, then it's not new. Let's find another.

On the other hand, someone taps you on the shoulder. You recognize the impact instantly. In a sense, the tap became an inextricable part of your "field of subjectivity" the moment it happened -- or rather, it's "happening" (from your perspective) was the very event of it becoming an integral part of your subjectivity. The tap is immanent to your awareness.

This immanence of everything in the "field of subjective receptivity" is what cannot conceivably be simulated by an artificial process. Indeed, we probably can't explain how it happens in much the same way that we can't explain how "making sense" happens.

burning man, rules, sacrificial logic

This is, by the way, the tenth or so time I've tried to post this. I'm leaving Blogger for MovableType or even a homegrown creation at the first opportunity. Either Blogger has seen little of the cash that Google received from its IPO, or Blogger is being horribly mismanaged. Or both. In either case, I smell "good-thing-crushed-by-corporate-incompetence" . . .

Thanks to Thomas and Edison for indulging my whim to speculate about games and Burning Man.

Thomas is quite right to point out that rules sustain the “zone” of indeterminacy. But this is true of any game/event (though my hasty sketch may have implied that I didn’t think this was true of BM). Certainly the rules oriented toward environment, community, and safety permit the event to take place on such a large scale without being shut down by the authorities or harming the environment. And, yes, BM does have what it calls “rangers” who are responsible for ensuring that the rules are followed.

But the question isn’t (for me at least) what sustains the dilation of the zone with regard to this zone not being shut down by the authorities or self-destructing, but rather what, on a more theoretical level, occasions this dilation in the first place. Or, to put it another way, I’ve presented Burning Man as a significant “advance” in the “technology” of the game/event – so how has this technology been altered or reconfigured? My suggestion is that the advance consists of two components:

1) the absolute dilation of the zone of indeterminacy to the perimeter of the event itself.

2) the revelation of a more extreme zone at the heart of the original zone.

My (strong) intuition is that 1 could not occur without 2, that 2 “sustains” 1 or is at least one side of a double-gesture; but at this point, I can’t rationally justify my intuition. The logic I’m working with, though, is one of a scapegoat or a sacrifice. In a board game, say, a game piece or token is a sort of self-representation that’s offered up to chance while one sits comfortably outside of the board itself; at Burning Man, one no longer sits comfortably outside of the board – but this is made possible or effective (psychologically speaking, perhaps) by setting up a new, more extreme version of the player-token relationship. The Man is the new, more extreme token (40 feet high on a platform of around 20-30 feet) which, at the climax of the festival, is offered up to a more extreme form of chance (being burned to the ground). One of many details I’ve left out so far that may be worth considering at this point is that the Man is placed at the physical center of the event and becomes the primary directional reference – the streets radiate outward from the Man in concentric (but incomplete) circles and when one has lost all sense of direction (especially easy at night), one can always reorient oneself by discovering where one stands relative to the Man. Perhaps I’m speaking only for myself at this point, but this directional dependency helps cement the feeling that the Man represents a part of oneself.

Here's a satellite photo, courtesy Google maps, that shows the circular "streets", pentagonal permiter, and the site of the as-yet-to-be-built Man (clearly the picture was taken prior to the event; the campsites go in the spaces between the streets). If you take a look at the actual Google maps page (click on the link above or on the picture), zoom in all the way to get a sense of the scale. If I recall correctly the diameter of the circle made by the outermost street was a little under 2 miles last year.

notes toward a theory of games & events, more about burning man

I haven’t fleshed this out well enough to articulate it in clear prose. So here are some notes, a rough sketch.

The structure of games and certain kinds of events (and I’m including artistic production as a kind of game/event) is this: a limited field of participation or spectacle surrounded by a space in which observers or an audience gathers. For example, the field could be a stage, a card table, a football field.

The field can be considered a zone of indeterminacy, a place in which chance “makes its mark” on the content of the game or event. For example, when a piece of music has been improvised, we could say that chance has “made its mark” on the composition.

The zone of indeterminacy is either literally or symbolically alien or inhospitable to human being as such. Players must represent themselves with tokens or game pieces, dress up in uniform or body armor, be trained in the use of certain instruments, assume characters or roles which are not themselves. For example, the football player’s uniform and body armor, a chess piece, the musician’s training on her chosen instrument, the character an actor plays. In addition, rules and limits for the engagement with chance must established (a script, the rules of teams sports, of checkers, the structure of an group improvisation), which serve to simultaneously buffer against chaos but also to focus and transform its power. In this way, the game accomplishes work, acts as a machine that transforms the raw power of chaos into something else (e.g., cultural or social capital, or material artifacts of artistic production).

By subjecting human being to chaos through the mediation of the game/event, something essential is risked. (A sovereign act in Bataille’s sense, if I recall my Bataille/Derrida from years and years ago correctly). The assumption of such a risk generates meaning. The game/event as an meaning-generating engine.

War is also a meaning-generating engine, but does not function as a game/event inasmuch as it attempts to eliminate close off the very possibility of risk once and for all. (When we go to war as aggressors, it’s because we want to secure our selves, our property, our way of life, and so on, absolutely -- not open them up to chance). The game/event as an alternative to war.

This loops back to the Master/Slave dialectic. Slavery isn’t inevitable; it could have gone the other way, toward friendship. Friendship is to game/event as warfare is to slavery.

One problem: games, so long as they remain mere “entertainments”, don’t generate enough meaning to pull the masses away from war. Art, as long as requires technical training and/or cultivated “taste” to appreciate, also can’t draw the masses away from war. Also – games/events which have winners and losers may sometimes generate a kind of meaning which complements rather than replaces the meaning generated by war.

Another thing: religion. Religion, not unlike art, also generates meaning by risking the transformation of the self. But for reasons I don't grasp at this point, religion too often works like competitive games -- the meaning it generates complements the meaning generated by war.

***

Now I’m going to do something that probably come across as a bit silly . . . (if this whole discussion isn’t silly already). I’ve been thinking along these line in order to attempt to articulate why I think the Burning Man festival is an important phenomenon, or (less arrogantly) to attempt to articulate what it was that made such an impression on me and that, quite frankly, obsesses me a bit.

To this end, I’m viewing Burning Man as a deliberate attempt to push the confrontation with chance provided by the game/event to a hitherto unprecedented level (at least within my lifetime). It does so in terms of both “quality” – by both reduces the amount of buffering between chaos and event participants -- as well as “quantity” – by incorporating huge numbers of participants (around 35,000 last year).

How does it do this? Imagine the zone of indeterminacy fully dilated – that is, extended to the perimeter of the event itself. This accomplishes two things – it obliterates the distinction between participant/player and observer, as well as makes the engagement with chaos less of a symbolic engagement and more of a matter of the human body enduring in an extreme environment. (Granted, even if you don’t bring enough water and food you won’t go hungry or thirsty (because people tend to be so generous) – and if you, say, impale your foot on a someone’s tent stake in the dark, there are emergency medical facilities on site . . . but there’s also a reason that the back of the ticket reads “you voluntarily assume the risk of serious injury or death by attending this event”. As anyone who’s ever, say, ventured into the wilderness to camp or hike knows, things really are a little less “controlled” a few hours away from civilization).

The gesture of extending the zone to the perimeter is, however, predicated upon opening another, even more extreme zone – a zone within the zone – which is absolutely inhospitable in a very literal sense. This is the space occupied by the 40-foot tall wooden and neon “Man”, which could be said act like a gigantic game piece representing every player equally and which is, of course, set on fire at the climax of the festival – literally given over to the chaos embodied by the flames.

Taking things to this level - it becomes a lot like religion. Because it's an artful game/event, it can transform the self. But, unlike art and like religion, it can attract and involve masses of people all at once.

So, um, yeah. I guess I’m saying that Burning Man is a significant advance in the “technology” of the game/event. An artful game/event on the scale of a religious event. There's something important in that, something incredibly promising (not to mention more than a little unsettling). It may never bring an end to war and enslavement, but . . . I think it’s one step toward something that could. Yes, I really do. And I realize that I’m probably starting to sound like that 14-year old kid describing his favorite rock band again . . . oh well. If you’ve been there, then maybe you know where I’m coming from . . .

late night fires

Thoughts have been quite scattered lately, and it's been nearly impossible to force my brain to wrap them up in packages neat enough to be considered passably presentable. My head feels like my apartment when I haven't straightened in far too long.

Spent last night -- all of it, until about 8am -- at one of the best let-your-hair-down events I've ever been to outside of Burning Man. It took place at an enourmous warehouse in a deserted part of Oakland. The place, NIMBY, generally houses gigantic studios for industrial artists. Two stages with magnificent bands and performers -- including an incredibly charming ensemble of clowns (literally) who played a delightful fusion of marching band/brass band music and funk with a "world-beat" flavor -- and an outdoor patio featuring the usual house/techno/etc as well as a raging bonfire inside of a overside iron drum, synchronized fire dancers, metal/fire sculptures, trippy projected visuals, and so on. One of the most oddly moving events of the whole night involved a man who started throwing boxfuls of restaurant order slips into the bonfire. When the crowd around the fire took notice, he passed the order slips around -- soon everyone was chucking orders for sweet & sour pork, mandarin chicken, and mongolian beef into the flames . . . it struck me as a symbolic protest against the inherently demeaning aspects of a wage/service economy . . . but maybe it was just me.

Also -- I tended bar for the first time ever. Keep in mind that I jumped in without knowing how to mix anything but the simplest drinks, the ones whose names describe their contents (e.g., rum and coke). It was absolute chaos behind the bar -- four or five bartenders dancing around one another to find the currently-open bottle of bottom-shelf vodka, rum, whiskey, or gin; multiple hands in the tiny cash box full of random bills. Super stressful but very fun.

The highlight - my partner Gerardo's flamenco drag performance. He'd worked on this thing for a month, I'd put the music together, and it came off beautifully. Gerardo's studied flamenco for years, but he's just now learning to do it in "high drag" - that is, drag in which the makeup, etc., is an additional layer to the male body rather than a disguise (e.g., facial hair remains, legs generally go unshaven), drag which sharpens the male/female contradictions rather than covers them over (the polar opposite of androgyny, I suppose).

The organizers of the party -- a Burning Man camp called Dustfish which we may camp with this year -- even fried up bacon in the morning for the hardcore stragglers.

Speaking of Burning Man, I must admit that my thoughts are becoming increasingly preoccupied with it. I'll try to write more on this later, but I think these thoughts have helped me stumble onto a theory of games and events that I kind of like (though I'm sure it's full of holes) . . . and I'm now trying to figure out how on earth I'm going to realize the art project I want to do.

Any poets out there interested in establishing a "post-avant" theme camp on the playa this year . . . ??