the text and images below are posted from beijing, berlin, buenos aires, hong kong, los angeles, new york, sado island, shanghai, tokyo and zürich. there are a few of us, and this is the space in between.
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i sincerely wish this for you

“you said you didn’t care when people were not talking to you but in your films, your characters are actually always trying to connect with somebody — following someone, or trying to make contact — but they just don’t seem to be able to connect.” “i prefer some distance. i don’t decide what the best distance is — how two people can get close and not feel uncomfortable. my films treat human relationships like an experiment. there’s no real conclusion. they are always experimenting, experimenting with that distance.” from an interview here

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alone and drinking under the moon

Amongst the flowers I
am alone with my pot of wine
drinking by myself; then lifting
my cup I asked the moon
to drink with me, its reflection
and mine in the wine cup, just
the three of us; then I sigh
for the moon cannot drink,
and my shadow goes emptily along
with me never saying a word;
with no other friends here, I can
but use these two for company;
in the time of happiness, I
too must be happy with all
around me; I sit and sing
and it is as if the moon
accompanies me; then if I
dance, it is my shadow that
dances along with me; while
still not drunk, I am glad
to make the moon and my shadow
into friends, but then when
I have drunk too much, we
all part; yet these are
friends I can always count on
these who have no emotion
whatsoever; I hope that one day
we three will meet again,
deep in the Milky Way.

– Li Po (701-762)

Yvette And Doreen are taking a seminar on Li Po at the Poughkeepsie Center for the Eastern Arts.

Yvette: How interesting.
Doreen: How delightful.
Yvette: The moon, a man talking to the moon… you gotta come up with that…
Doreen: Yes ha… quite unexpected.
Yvette: …Turn off your cell-phone, Doreen.
Doreen: It’s on vibrate.
Yvette: I know Doreen, but I can still hear it. It’s not nice for the other people.
Doreen: …
Yvette: (to student B to her left) We’re sorry, it’s just her… cell phone. (To Doreen) You see?
Doreen: If I didn’t know you, I’d think you can’t stand me.
Yvette: Shhh, it was your idea to come here so be quiet please, let me learn.

Doreen starts sobbing and takes out a huge vibrator from her purse. She stands up and starts waving it on the air. The whole class is staring at her.

Doreen: So now you can see… it wasn’t my cell phone, no, it was this. How depressing am I? How desperate?

Instructor: Excuse me miss, but I actually think that you are the only person here who really understood what Li Po was trying to say. It’s exactly that acknowledgement that we are alone even when we are surrounded by people. That false sense that our despair is shared by the people who seem to care the most. Bravo, miss…?

Yvette: Doreen, she’s Doreen and I’m her best friend Yvette.

Doreen stares at Yvette and sees in her eyes the truth of a lifelong friendship. Yvette puts her arms around Doreen. While Doreen is trying to put her vibrator back in her purse, it falls on the head of Student D, who’s sitting right in front of her. A moment of nervousness is followed by a relaxed and shared laugh in the whole class.

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Zürich night

Photo courtesy of Nic Shepherd

Some 15 minutes after having been abandoned at the Perla Mode by an American living in Zürich, I found him again at another opening at a small exhibition space called Les Complices. He made some comment about how I was typically Canadian because of the desire I expressed (which admittedly had structured my last 5 years) to keep going out rather than back to North America. I had not assigned value to my statement, and in my view it could indeed be taken as a lack of control and capriciousness. The space, which had a DJ playing, was a queer art space. I was not sure if my jocular, drunk brotherness was appreciated, and I was in the mood to joke. Out front one of the drunk women, who turned out to be a Canadian from Montreal, tried to convince her acquaintances to go out to a non-gay place to dance. She appeared to be quite drunk, and unless I was mistaken, the other two were not very fond of her. She had pimples. The other two returned to their friends inside and I was left, so she asked me and I thought, why not, I’d like to go dancing. We walked arm in arm down the street to a place right on Langstrasse. She joked with the bouncer who tried to remain stern, they were obviously familiar with each other, and it made me feel that this was a small town. Inside it was hip hop night, and various large men rocked back and forth in the red velvet surroundings. She knew someone (although they claimed they hadn’t known each other before) and they began talking. She asked me to buy her a drink, but I really had no money on me. This other girl seemed to be looking for someone to go home with. They asked me if I wanted to fuck, said that it was what everyone in the room wants. I joked that I was a virgin and the girl believed me, appeared to take pity on me, which made me uncomfortable – when I retracted the statement she asked me what kind of lover I was. I motioned to some of the large men standing near the turntables “maybe they want to fuck.” She considered this and went to see about it. When the lesbian’s back was also turned I used the opportunity to slip out the front door with my backpack on. I walked home along the vacant street car lines. I kept thinking of the girl’s sad expression when she said she came to the bar quite regularly, but no one had interest in fucking her. It made me kind of sad too.

[courtesy of Michael Eddy, October 2009]

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at night i dream i speak

for the full moon tonight, the others away or asleep…中秋安

atnightidreamispeak

“晚上我做梦说话, 白天做不了什么”

[still image from new work-in-progress, www.overseasproject.net]

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to find and not find the centre of things, all things aside

working_nightshift

nightshiftabove: putting up the exhibition (photo by 高灵 Gao Ling); below: walking back after finishing the installation ｜ 上海 shanghai，2009年9月

i am sorry. time is everything.

cannot go there, too much or too little, traveling, hanging there, a collection, hanging on. i seem to have an affinity for stories of people getting lost, perhaps a bit too direct a reference yet were i to introduce myself to you as that one who liked to find this little thing in the street it perhaps would remain too ridiculously nebulous.

direct.

direction.

we would have been looking in the wrong direction to go astray, to find the beside. aside, as in put in reserve, for future use, the collection of objects for which we may find value or function at another time. we never know what will become useful in the end, or the lessons come too late, i feel the top of her head and wonder what positions i layed in as a child, what positions i moved in sleep, next to you or dreaming without you. we cannot always think so functionally, in love and in war. i don’t strategize very well. but we may very well have a hunch.

a hunch is an open space of time, a forethought without expectation, like a collection of random things for which we may find use later. i suppose it could be important to figure out how to make use of them, but perhaps their being together could be enough. find meaning beyond use value, a cabinet of curiousities, our collection of oddities.

that’s the thing i’ve been missing lately. to take time for my collection of oddities, to try to go back to a certain kind of objectivity without expecting too much. i have a hunch. perhaps i was looking in the wrong direction and now find myself lost, a story that i liked to hear, her voice in two languages on loop. it’s my own aside that is now addressed to you, without letting the other characters hear, a story shared without knowing if anyone is listening. you, dear audience member or director, the lights are shining so bright…i cannot see if you are out there.

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sit down next to me

tiledbench

livingroom

bench_cph

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in passing, black-capped chickadee

Michael writes to H.F:  “We enjoy the space between being ‘in the know’ and simply being attentive to one’s social environment where the unexpected may occur, setting up an interaction that will provide a meaningful communication, ‘loading the decks’.”


[photos by 戴璞 Dai Pu]

It ends with a face in rain, or two, that washed away one after the other like passing faces in a party.

The next day, he sends me a message: “One day I will explain to you why things are so complicated.”

And then it becomes difficult to respond, silence an only recourse, uncovering to plot thickening. The loneliness amidst joyful crowds, like the stripping away of an impersonator who says, “I don’t know. I was born that way.”

People ask questions all the time to which we must answer, “I don’t know.” I can’t remember anymore which way it was when i was born, but somehow I always return to a letter read as a child, from an old woman. I read her as if I were her already, so confounded by the inexplicability of my thoughts, to the possibility of their being expressed. It seems now, in future, utterly impossible to answer any question asked of me. I find less and less the words to place the complexities of my feeling.

Perhaps now back outside of each of those moments, I could answer each of you in turn, eloquently and honestly. Like an old woman’s remembrance of the sound of a black-capped chickadee, a doing nothing kind of being or simply, so simply, the fullness of…

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spam

iwishformorespam

(looking through the spam folder, in lack of other responses (sigh), oh the things you discover in the trash..! but i wish you would say something, dear reader.. how are you today? here it’s cold and grey again, they call it the summer.. hmm.. time for more coffee now, a soft-boiled egg.. good morning!

oh and please make sure to let us know in case you are ‘saa’, ‘penilopa’, ‘domainmaster’, ‘chad’, ‘uyit’ or ‘blogger’ and your message mistakenly ended up in our spam..)

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