“what a lovely name for a street.” feeling. still. yes. no. nostalgia. for something that will never be. alas. so we walk. we walk. with the need for dreams to commit suicide. sometimes. “c’est la chose la plus horrible à faire“. or is it. again and again. and an afternoon in the sun. tracing and retracing and walking anew. circles perhaps. fly. yes. fly again. it’s good to be in a place without lists and rows. construct to reconstruct or an economics as a doing. in the city. it would be nice to see what we cannot see. “precisely to fill the emptiness with emptiness, and thus to share it.” you do with it what you will. never a prescription for life. and yes we are left ‘inconcluded’. always. upon arriving home a message overheard from the new york subway through to london: “everyone knows. that love. belongs in the microwave. for two minutes.” 哈! thank you maria.
Posted by a | reply »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
Posted by a | reply »ideas about karaoke
recorded at Lee Kit’s “Someone singing and calling your name”, december 2009
Posted by 丫 | reply »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]
Posted by secretary | reply »community building
Our recently-met companions say, unfortunately, that Christians cannot really be friends with Buddhists.
(video courtesy of members of the Beijing Chaoyang Church)
Posted by 丫 | more »reflections, some nights before the incident
we drive into the night. not a soul. hardly a light. darkness and four lanes. and the vast abyss. enormous factories. chimneys. machines. conveyor belts. abandoned. left in silence. a grand rail station, concrete, steel and the dark. gas stations as pits of sand. dogs, astray. then, the chaos. the mess you forget sometimes confined in the capital and its delegates. truck upon truck upon truck. load upon load upon load. and coal. like black soil. rows of trucks parked along the highway like a derailed train. waiting. for a call. a sign. north (the privileged) or east (the lacking). cardboard boxes six meters high, heads up on the highway. excuse me, i think i’ve lost my way. mapless, pointless, endless. east ring south ring west ring. east it is. day time now. two lanes. sea. goods. conformist transport for alternative transport. but how long will it last? how long will we last? he enters, sits, and it fills the room. “so uncalled for”. electric fingers. “knocking down the banks of guilt”. electric toes. loss and losses. they become a part of you. they are a part of you. hold on and learn or let go and learn. or repeat your ways to infinity. nothing ever changes but we live in a place that is ever changing. the television set. handshake upon handshake upon handshake. so and so and his wife. so and so and his wife. the park shows an “ethical culture show”. where do we stand with ourselves. so many things left unsaid. left undone. forgotten. did we really meet someone that so reminded us of him. too many people have come and gone. not sure where dream and memory and story meet. it was the characters name in the latest chapter, but ‘v’ replaces ‘w’. what answer are you looking for. you keep pushing the question. it’s in the way you arrange your life. the way you do. the way you are wrong. the way you are right. just watch and you’ll see. we can’t say but we can do. or better yet, we can be. it’s one big, humongous run. another puff. he goes away for business. her baby is finally born. it was a girl, no? never had friends from that far away place so i’ll give you my number. a monolithic sculpture at the centre of the square. that image returns, as it does every now and then. a cap, a green coat, a dark night, frost, and the light, and the light and the stare, a memory like a photograph, lacking the evidence. here, now, tube lights, all white, in motion. the centre of one square kilometer. and la-din-wu. latin dancing. 11-year olds. boys and girls. a bleached-haired teacher. a long way we have come from the spring that came again. no, we can’t allow foreigners. no we don’t have any rooms left. no. no. no the rules have changed. yes, oh, she too? no. at 4 am a yes. a man in pyjamas. faded glory. lions at the gate. emptiness. the secret floor. the 28th floor. the 8th room. 158 yuan. waking up to the foundations. the new. the next. things have changed. six months. 
things have changed or are the things only surfaces.
生 日 快 乐
a not meaning to be so direct, yet, a surprise from the wedding batch, found within the files on your computer, an unknown photographer and an unknown boy, startled, staring you in the face, t-necked. make yourself a crown. 生日快乐。
installation, the morning after
As creators, we can say that there is an audience for our work, whereby “public” is both an excuse and a reason. And yet as creators within a social sphere, our unabashed ability to colonialise spaces, and even publics, actually distances us from any notion of real interaction rather than that of working context-specific, conscientiously and in cohesion with those collaborating with us.In the example of the bi/tri-ennial, the clearest cut form of discourse seems to lie not within the vocabulary of the host city, not within the realm of “the work” and at times hardly even within the actual processes of production. As recently overheard from an independent curator about the opening night party of the 2007 Shenzhen-Hong Kong Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism, “Well, that’s what we came for.”Chief curator of the Biennale Ma Qingyun is at a loss. “But we worked so hard…”The bi/tri-ennial are event-based phenomenona, as new technology, “our latest project”, and another friday night scene. Critical exchange, then, takes a cue, as a breather after all that hard work—-at bars, the after-parties and nestled within the snide comments made during other people’s speeches. It is hard to understand what sort of feedback and interaction one can stimulate or expect from an event involving a mass public audience. “I hope they’ll collect the press clippings,” says one architect in the back of the taxi, on the way to a bar after the after-party. And yes, these traditional forms of review may still be helpful and necessary within a larger system of creative production. But the formality of a critic’s theoretical opinion or a blogger’s on-the-scene action shots bely the stagnancy of the actuality. The sponsor hotel where most exhibitors stay always makes for a much more active and dynamic space than that last exhibition hall.Where are the relationships between work, audience and creator within the framework of the art event? Are we merely using ideas as a way of colonialising the spectacle space? Working carries over into presentation carries over into documentation carries over into publicisation. And where again is the space for the work? Somewhere between making contacts and trying to catch hold of the installation team to get the right equipment.
This is not meant to bemoan the poor artist who tries to be simultaneously active in all of these areas of art production. Nor can we blame the event structure alone. But is it naïve to still long for project-based work that does not neglect the need for post-planning, responsibility and respect for the other?Would it be possible to leave an event of this kind without a feeling of the morning-after?
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