28.2.08

null y void: a 21st century story of True Love in 2 acts

TO BE PERFORMED BY A TROUPE OF 2 OR MORE HANDSHADOW PUPPETS AGAINST A COMPLETELY BLANK BACKDROP OF PUZZLING DARK MATTER


I.
“Hey, nice to meet you. I’m angry.”

“Likewise. I’m in pain.”

“So, what do you do to dull the awareness?”

“Well, right now I’m sort of in-between coping mechanisms? But for the past few years, I was celebrating my lack of imagination. And you?”

“Well, I don’t want to brag or anything, but I publicly flaunt my tolerance for apathy and boredom.”

“Oh, wow, that’s really interesting. Hey, maybe we should construct a monogamous sexual relationship that falsely promises to meet all of our physical, emotional, and intellectual needs.”

“Um, yeah…I don’t—I mean, not that I’m not interested? But don’t you think that maybe we should at least, I don’t know, idealize each other a little first? You know, form unrealistic expectations, start cataloguing what we want to change about one another, build up the insecurities…start off slow, you know?”

“Oh. Right. No, of course. Definitely. F’sho… I didn’t mean—I mean, I wasn’t, like, looking to rush into nothing or anything like that. I just thought—”

“—that we could avoid the work of being full, autonomous individuals by reducing ourselves to two diminished halves in order to form a crippled whole that can limp us along with the illusion of a life until we finally croak?”

“Exactly! God, it’s like you know exactly what I’m going to say before I never say it! You know, I think that you were totally made for—”

“—me, I pride myself on being my own personality traits and unique set of consumer preferences, you know?”

“No, I totally agree, me too! We have so much uncommon. Tell me, do you believe in love at first psyche?”

“I believe that true love is blinded.”


II.
There was a particular period in my life when I found myself surrounded by what seemed like an exponentially growing multitude of madly fluttering hearts and wildly delusional fantasies. At the same time, several people close to me suffered nervous breakdowns, while others found themselves seeking psychiatric treatment for the symptoms of manic depression, major depression, and mild bipolar disorder. Somehow, it seemed like the universe had concentrated in me some kind of strong magnetic force that attracted both sets of people to me at once. I remember feeling powerless at the time, inadequate to meet these kinds of challenges. By that point, it had been years since my own heart had stopped beating, and I was stumbling along on so many pain killers that I’d long since lost the ability to distinguish between schizophrenic delusion and good old fashioned psychotropic hallucination. What could these people possibly have detected in me that appeared so attractive? What needs did they imagine I could possibly ever meet? It seemed like the more I descended into my own chaos, the more people wanted to join me. And the more people joined me, the more I descended. Gravity. Increasing mass. Acceleration.

I started to lose it.

Then it occurred to me that maybe it was just a matter of simple recognition. Maybe it was not they who were attracted to me, but the other way around. They didn’t recognize themselves in me—I recognized myself in them.

That’s when I really started to lose it.

Every day I would fall in and out of love at least a dozen times. My fantasy was an elaborate reality. My reality was an elaborate hoax. I bounced back and forth between megalomaniacal delusions of self-loathing, and periods of complete, utter grandeur. And all of it, of course, was meticulously documented on various website blogs under a number of clever pseudonyms.

(Minor digression: I lived for my reader comments. Each new text message submitted for my approval was like a shiny little pellet of rare treats, a golden nugget of instant joy, a fat, twinkling star of achievement that provided the illusion of importance, connection, community, communication. But this illusion was always fleeting, of course, dissolving almost instantly as I read the words that affirmed my existence. Each fix lasted only a few seconds before I started fiending for the next. So, I would respond to the comments quickly, in order to generate more comments, and I would post new blogs, and check my email frequently, and comment on other people’s blogs, etc., etc.)

Anyway, they say that familiarity breeds contempt, but I say that it’s the other way around. I believe that home is where the hate is. I believe that love is a theater of cruelty, and insanity is a nice theoretical device—until you find it sleeping next to you. Then it’s just some scary-ass shit. I believe that those of us who function well are the truly crazy mutherfuckers. I know a man with a three thousand dollar watch who will probably die completely unaware of how insane his life has been. I believe that the future was as tragically irrelevant as the past will be, but those who live in the moment still need to fill their bellies at some point. Or not. Like the Taoists say, it’s not the belly, or even what fills the belly, but the empty space inside created by the hegemonic domination of transnational capital and corporate control through the neocolonial practices of globalization, urbanism, and Rupert Murdoch.

And so that’s why I believe, therefore, that we have the responsibility to be thoughtful in all of our interactions, communications, and spontaneous gestures. I believe that those who are reckless lack reck, those who are ruthless lack ruth, and those who are less lack. I do not ask why, I ask where. I do not ask how, I ask when. Where u at where u at where u AT? When can I SEE you? I believe that if thou givest, somebody else shall receive, and that’s all you need to know about THAT. I believe that I’m about as serious as a heart attack.

I believe that I’m almost there. Can you feel it—can you hear it? Nervous cackling. Maniacal laughter. Out of control giggling. The funny bone is a neatly concealed sliver of the void.

Tickletickle.

Crack.


~ ~ ~ ~ ~
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

[FOR F&D (P/V), AND ALL THE OTHER “TRUE ROMANCE” LOC@S THAT EVER WAS, & EVER WILL BE]

21.2.08

grapevine — 21 feb 08

some listserv postings, etc., to pass along/share:


*
MUJERES DE MAIZ: SOMOS MEDICINA

<<
Mujeres de Maiz presents...

CELEBRATING HERSTORY: March 8 – 30, 2008, Los Angeles

A month-long series of intercultural, intergenerational, interdisciplinary art events celebrating our 11th Anniversary, 6th ZINE poetry and arts publication, International Women’s Day, and Women’s Herstory month

OPENING EVENT(S):

1.
ART EXHIBIT (March 8–29)
Gallery Opening: Saturday, March 8, 5-7 p.m.
Self-Help Graphics & Art (SHG)
3802 Cesar E. Chavez Avenue
Los Angeles, CA 90063
http://www.selfhelpgraphics.com/

“Somos Medicina” visual and multi-media art exhibit highlighting women artists that carry on traditional, native, and indigena ways and values.

Exhibiting Artists will be some of those who paved the way for the new generation of Chicana artists as well as the emerging generation

A NOT-TO-BE MISSED EXHIBIT!
Artists (partial list):
Barbara Carasco
Lilia Ramirez
Yreina Cervantes
Marisol Lydia Torres
Linda Vallejo
Margaret "Quica" Alarcon
Gina Aparicio
Emilia Garcia
Poli Marichal
Favianna Rodriguez

+

2.
LIVE PERFORMANCE EVENT
Saturday, March 8, 7 p.m.
Self Help Graphics & Art (SHG)

FREE! (Donations are encouraged)

Live Art Show with teatro, dance, and performance art and song.

Performances by:
Las Manas (Bay area)
Xaris
Yei Tecpatl (San Jose)
Fire Dancer Poets
Gabriela Garcia Medina
Teatro with Marisol Lydia Torres, Marlene Beltran and Joanna Mixpe Ley
And In Lak Ech

+

3.
ZINE 2008—Limited Edition
available for purchase on Opening NIGHT!

+

Much more!

Full calendar of events and other information:
http://www.mujeresdemaiz.net/
>>



*
WARNING: ICE AT UNIVERSAL CITYTRUDGE

<<
Qvole gente!

MEChA de CSUN just got a call from an anonymous tipster that there will be a migra raid this weekend at Universal City Walk. According to the tipster, the so-called officers are actually ICE/ Border Patrol.

He didn’t tell us exactly which concert they will be at; he only said it was a “Spanish” concert. Most likely it is the following:

Intocable
Sunday, February 24th, 2008
Doors open @ 7:15 pm | Show starts @ 8:15 pm
(from citywalk website)

Por favor spread the word! Call up Frente Contra Las Redadas and
warn people.

-Danny Santana
MEChA de Los Angeles County
Communications Carnal 2007-2008
tmontanaff7@ yahoo.com
(424)205-0173
>>



*
WORD ON THE STREET!

<<
Join us for an artists’ reception and youth arts workshop Saturday, February 23, 1–5 p.m., at the Southern California Library (6120 S. Vermont Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90044, (323) 759-6063)

"Word on the Street" is an exhibit at the Southern California Library featuring art that was made for the street—put up guerrilla style as part of campaigns, actions, and interventions to educate the public and incite action and critical thought.

Check out artwork from: All Together Alone, Angi, Carlos Callejo, Deborah Krall, Pocho Research Society, Ulyses Ramirez, Re:Sister and Street Art Workers Collective

Carlos Callejo will talk about Chicano Street Art and Activism in the 70s!

TEENS: Join artists Irina Contreras, Hillary, and Sunshine, for free art workshops where you'll learn how to make stencils and print your own stickers!

Admission and art workshops are free!

Southern California Library
6120 S. Vermont Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90044; (323) 759-6063
http://www.socallib.org
>>



*
BEYOND BAROQUE IN TROUBLE

<<
On Tuesday February 19 Councilman Bill Rosendahl’s staff met with
City Attorney Rocky Delgadillo’s staff to take up the issue of Beyond
Baroque's lease extension.

The outcome of the meeting remains unknown as of this posting, but there is still time to organize resistance to Delgadillo's proposal to put the lease up for bidding.

Fred Dewey, the artistic director of Beyond Baroque, issued the following last weekend:

“Please write or call as directed below. This is important to our community.

Alert - A Call For Community Action

HELP PROTECT BEYOND BAROQUE, LA'S HISTORIC INSTITUION!

After much effort on everyone’s part, our Councilman Bill Rosendahl recommended a 25-year lease extension for Beyond Baroque to the City
General Services Department.

Unfortunately, it now appears the City Attorney is recommending against an extension.

We are now in great peril. Our lease is up in a few weeks and uncertainty is threatening grants, programming and our entire future.

Please express your support to the Councilman, ask him why this is happening, and what he is doing to protect Beyond Baroque.

Beyond Baroque is a vital and historic national institution and has been LA’s only literary center for four decades. Please do not let it be destroyed.

Here is the contact information for Councilman Bill Rosendahl:
Councilman Bill Rosendahl
City Hall Office, 200 N. Spring Street, Rm 415, Los Angeles, CA 90012
(213) 473-7011
(213) 473-6926 (fax)
Email: Councilman.Rosendahl@lacity.org

And to register oppostion to the City Attorney’s proposal:
ROCKY DELGADILLO, City Attorney
800 City Hall East, 200 North Main Street, Los Angeles, CA 90012
Phone: (213) 978-8100
Fax: (213) 978-8312
TDD: (213) 978-8310
Email: Rocky.Delgadillo@lacity.org



*
GEORGE A. ROMERO'S DIARY OF THE DEAD

Showtimes in L.A. this weekend

L.A. Weekly Foundas review


9.2.08

silikon sueños, vol. 3

At 5 a.m., my eyes opened on the realization that my brain has a great many dreams about houses—vast, strange, dark houses that sprawl with intricate, crooked floorplan layouts and multiple levels. Passageways that twist and angle. Hidden rooms. Lots of tilting. Always a sense of foreboding, the awareness of secret chambers, the ever-present threat of getting lost. These are not just physical structures, they are alive, they are menacing, they breathe around me, and they often shift and morph around me, too.

Long afterward—sometimes even years later—I can clearly conjure specific rooms, hallways, wall colors, stairwells, of a particular “dream house.” These are dark spaces, internal, psychic heterotopias that overflow with meaning. Each dream gives rise to a completely new, unique house. But they are never “new” in a temporal/historical sense—they are always in a state of decay, with peeling paint, dust, walls in disrepair, exposed wiring. They seem always on the verge of collapse. Stuffed with disused, broken antique objects and draped paintings, they are often held together by old repair jobs left half-finished, or half-begun. The “newness” of these houses lies not in their state, but only in their being new to me, spaces that I have never experienced or known before.

And yet, even in this, there is the hint that they might not be new at all, that they are already mapped on the peripheries of my memory, that this is never the first time I move inside them, nor they inside me, even if I cannot remember any other. For these are spaces of decay and disuse, but they are alive with memory, a memory that is broad, and so vague, that I cannot distinguish whose it is. It is multiple—my memory, your memory, the memories of strangers, the memories of all of us.

But how to distinguish between them, when all overlap and intertwine, when all memory is an oscillation?

As I move through them, it is as if I am scraping up against the damp memories of countless, vague lives that have lived these spaces, moving through the traces of the psyches of all those previous inhabitants, and those who still wander these passageways and unlit rooms with me. The spaces are still alive with the passages of bodies, their emotional landscapes and articulations, their interior traumas. Sometimes, the previous inhabitants are people that I can recognize as having known in my life; more often, they are total strangers, or, even more strange, people that I have never met, but that I know with absolute certainty that I will meet and know well in the future. There is the sense of knowing them retroactively from an (un)imagined future—they are people that I have indeed known, but only from some future point that I have yet to reach.

I move through these dark houses; I find myself lost at some point, or unable to exit, even if I can see outside through a window or other opening. There is the awareness of some kind of social gathering—a party, a discussion—in a nearby room. I can hear it, and I can feel it and sense the emotional experiences of those in the room. But I catch only glimpses of these rooms, snatches of sound from behind walls or doors. There is, as always, the awareness that I will not be able to find my way through the labyrinth of passages to the right door where the gathering is taking place, or, that I am too distracted by some other task to even bother looking. I am busy looking for something, or preoccupied with trying to get something to work, or to find a way out, or fix some element that has fallen apart, or ceased ticking.

At those times, though, when I have entered these social spaces, I move through the groupings of people unnoticed and uncommunicative, swiftly. I flicker. Our shadows overlap, our movements intersect; always, we are one another’s perpetual blind spots.


*


THESE ACTIVITIES LEAVE THE BODY DULL & THE BRAIN STUPEFIED.


*


These conspiracies are in plain sight, right in front of our eyes.

There is no need to dig around the archive, or beyond the archive, into classified documents and rescinded texts.

You will not find the evidence in grainy footage, building blueprints, subtle discrepancies.

It is much more transparent than that. In fact, it is completely transparent. It is all around you. It is in the mirror.

Who do you see when you look in the mirror?

Everything, everyone, everywhere—all of it is a vast Inside Job.

This conspiracy operates with complete transparency. It reveals itself more and more with each unfolding. Only the shadows that it casts are opaque, and these find their source in the light from your own gaze. You stare beyond the object at the shadow that the reflected light from your own eyes casts. You search there for evidence of hidden motives. But nothing is hidden, all is laid out in plain view. This conspiracy is clear and visible at every moment.

So, who creates it? Who deploys it? Who manifests it?

You think that there will be a way out. You think that a moment of enlightenment will free you. You think that a time will come when you will have the ability to fully realize your self and actualize your desires for freedom. You move through space hyperaware of your alienation, your isolation, but convinced that at some point, you will find other ways of being, seeing, interacting, and you will be able to put them into practice in your own life. This group. That ideology. These beliefs. Those tactics. Spiritual leaders, revolutionist screeds, rock music, fashion, communal gatherings, the
aesthetics of the avant-garde . You walk through the city from one site to another, seeing, gathering, accumulating, discarding. I do not drive. I only buy food at the farmer’s market. I don’t eat any animal products. I compost. I ride a bicycle. I make/sew/brew/assemble/publish my own __________________. I have an organic garden. I advocate for prisoners' rights. I screen films. I forward text messages about state-terrorist raids on undocumented communities. I document the resistant practices of my people. I record the sounds of those who have lost their ability to properly function in, and successfully navigate, the parameters of city space. I tag the city with subversive graffiti. I tag cyberspace with virtual text. I distribute anti-state literature. I vote. I don’t vote. I live out the tangled performance of a multitude of contradictions. I talk about evading surveillance detection as I move through an intricate, vastly complicated system of ubiquitous cameras and other recording devices.

You do all of these things, you do nothing. You buy things, you go to meetings, you create art, you host parties, you strum your jarana, you stomp your feet, you run into people, you get on the bus, you get off the bus—none of it, none of it will get you anywhere.

Because there is no escape, there is no way out.

It is all alienation, it is all the violence of isolated, desensitized bodies bouncing ruthlessly off one another.

None of it will get you anywhere.

None of it will get you anywhere.

All that you can do now is walk, keep walking, oscillate between the one and the zero, first one foot, then the other foot, propel yourself on the flicker, tightrope it above the void, don’t look up, and do not stop.

Because there is no way out, but there may be mutations here.

There may not be mutations.

But there may be mutations.





. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
references

WINCHESTER MYSTERY HOUSE

LIGHT IN AUGUST


UNNATURAL FORMATIONS: CHILDREN OF THE DARK HOUSE

MICHEL FOUCAULT: “OF OTHER SPACES”

MICHEL DE CERTEAU: “WALKING IN THE CITY” (THE PRACTICE OF EVERYDAY LIFE)

BLADE RUNNER

7.2.08

ARE fundraiser for undocumented students

from a listserve posting by ARE (Association of Raza Educators):


<<

Association of Raza Educators Undocumented Student Scholarship Fund

Last year, a group of caring educators decided that the best way to assist their undocumented (non-U.S. citizen) students with college and financial aid information was to establish the Association of Raza Educators Scholarship Fund. These Educators recognized that many of their brightest students were not eligible for federal financial aid or many scholarships because of their citizenship status. They realized the need to provide funding and more scholarship opportunities for some of their students; regardless of their citizenship status.

The Association of Raza Educators (ARE) believes that all students deserve an opportunity to attend college without discrimination of any kind. The ARE Scholarship Fund will assist students realize their dreams of a college education. In our first year, we provided over $10,000 in scholarships. This year we hope to double last year’s goal and raise $20,000.

Latinos are the largest ethnic minority in the United States and the fastest growing segment of the population. Yet, Latinos rank among the lowest in high school graduation rates and among the lowest in attending four year universities. Regardless of how much federal and state financial aid Latino students receive, a large segment of the Latino community will not be able to receive the financial assistance that they need due to their undocumented status.

Given these facts, the Association of Raza Educators hopes you and/or your company can assist us in our endeavor of providing scholarship opportunities to the best and the brightest students the Latino community can offer.

Please join our efforts by sponsoring and/or attending our first fundraiser of the year. Ticket Prices and Sponsorship opportunities are provided at the ARE website link below.

What: ARE Scholarship Dinner and Awards presentation
When: March 1st, 2006 from 6:00pm to 8:00pm
Where: UTLA Building 2nd Floor
3303 Wilshire Blvd. Los Angeles, CA 90010

For more information please contact ARE at razaeducators@aol.com
or call Miguel Zavala at (626) 617-0401 or Jose Lara at (714) 864-0543