Shapeshifter
by Travis Jeppesen on April 11, 2012
They asked me why I ran away so often, I told them no idea. I was lying, of course, but the reasons why were pretty obvious to all but the most disinterested spectator. My function was limited: I was a noun in a room without a narrative to follow (or be followed by.) I was along for the ride, and the ride was pulling my body in a trillion directions at once.
Wonder and sawdust. That’s the stuff most memories’re made of. Voice came through the intercom, I have an important announcement to make. Something about baby snow lions in the zoo. The part of me I knew least about went mountain-climbing. Voices surrounding promise imminence, though we’re not buying this week. Salty and demoted, I could only chance to moan.
The one of me that is a cripple entertained the rest of us with his dubious song-and-dance routine. There were countries I was never even a part of in that song! Ghost chorus accompanied us on the refrain:
shhhhh-eeeeeeeeeeeeee!
sss-ahhhhhhhh!
wo-yaaaaaaaaaaahh!
ig-dbaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!
Everyone sat on the thermometers that had sprouted from the floor throughout the aforementioned. Brains and their sisters sighed in a rugged unison that belied the sensus communis we might’ve once dreamed to attain. I’m usually not the type of moose to go prancing across the ceiling, BUT…
Are you gay enough to fall in love with what you used to be? I taped a sign to my abdomen inviting the masses to abandon me. Devoid of all emotional content, we start to resemble prunes. The rustling sound in the garden was the copernican revolution.
During that period when I was an object, I found I could be inhabited quite readily. Then I became pure substance — what a drag. Substance almost always entails incorporation. It’s like there were magnets on the ceiling, I couldn’t walk anywhere. Nothing less to do than seek solace in the ill-definable.
“World” equals shiny metal object. And I wasn’t feeling so great myselves. Singular function had been reduced to produce, vegetative scramble for egg edge pure in molty permanence. I donned my protest outfit and stood outside the House of Common Law, screaming admittance. Much to my chagrin, they allowed us inside. The entrance hall was shaped like a tunnel, so we automatically morphed into sperm in order to serve this metaphor. Judges and gods put on goggles to protect themselves from our mutant wrath.
Next year you’ll feel the same, I assured one of the oldsters, whose wig had been irreparably damaged in the peril. He never felt more certain, though, than when he watched the back of my hand melt into his face.
Outside, there were houses, houses everywhere. The mass media was said to live in most of them. The question was, could we move past them without being pierced by their electronic arrows? That’s a question we still find ourselves asking, made wily by the stasis.
And so that seems to leave us exactly where we started off, haunting beneath the skyless enclave. The seasons were everything that year. And I, well, I of course happened to change again. In the absence of global conflict, I began to feel as though I were falling in love with the soundness of the moment. It was an awful feeling, and so I threw all my trash away and knelt down in front of the transport center, reclaiming the hole through the method.
Commissioned by Wilkinson Gallery for the upcoming exhibition by Pennacchio Argentato, opening April 26th in London.
Gerhard Richter
by Travis Jeppesen on March 2, 2012
Gerhard Richter was never close to his father. Then again, most aren’t. Still, it’s something Gerhard Richter would come to regret later in life, that hour when the alligators come to feed on what’s left of your substrata. All those pieces left unresolved, and yet no will to resolve them. Just little bits left with which to feed those creatures that never go away, but that we previously had the fire to fend off.
Much of the strain can undoubtedly be attributed to Gerhard Richter’s decision, at a young age, to devote his energies to music. This was a decision Gerhard Richter’s father could never understand. If you’re going to devote yourself to one of the higher art forms, why not television, pornography, magic. Music, Gerhard Richter’s father believed, was the lowest of the arts, and he didn’t see any sense in his son’s abiding passion. Keep it as a hobby, he had once told his son, but to avail: Just as an architect once stood upon a hill above a dilapidated city and saw before him an entire century, so Gerhard Richter had closed his eyes one night at the dinner table as his parents prattled on about the flaws and merits of the lightbulb recently installed above them, listened intently to his body’s inner processes as his food was being digested, and discovered a symphony yearning to be replicated out there in the world he so often willed himself absent from.
Odd choice, because, in all honesty, Gerhard Richter didn’t like music all that much while growing up. As a child, he was much more interested in soil.
He composed his first symphony at the age of fourteen. He couldn’t read music at the time, so he had to come up with his own notational system for translating the sounds he heard in his brain to the page and beyond the page until the actual. The actual is like a disease, though he managed to do it, nonetheless. The marks on the page resembled Egyptian hieroglyphs, dotted out beneath labels attributed to the required instruments: mandolin; steel drum; string bass; trombone; banjo.
I always knew my art would speak to the masses, Gerhard Richter once said. It’s just that I had difficulty locating them.
Every small village in that part of the world has its types, Gerhard Richter was fond of saying later in life. There is the village explainer. The village idiot. The village philosopher. The village gossip. The village drunk. My father was the village bore.
The father could usually be found after working hours at the village pub, serenading those unlucky enough to be seated at his table with his endless digressions late into the night, until all those around him were deep in slumber. He himself hardly seemed to notice the profound ennui that his so-called stories inevitably provoked, or if he did, then he met it with a morose indifference that his son would come to struggle with in his own life.
Gerhard Richter’s parents were illiterate by choice. As he would later explain, You have to understand, they grew up speaking several languages — Hungarian, because they were Hungarian; Romanian, because they lived so close to the border; German, because of the Empire. So when it came time to teach them to read and write, their parents couldn’t decide what language to go with. It’s a decision they never really reached.
Then again, literacy wasn’t a requirement of the sort of life Gerhard Richter was brought up in, where the menial tasks of running a farm were the order of the day.
Gerhard Richter finished last in his class at the music conservatory and settled into small town life by marrying the first woman he ever made love to on a cold spring day in 19__. His father had blessed the ceremony by dying of a severe stroke the day before. The other occupants of the pub suddenly noticed he had stopped talking at a certain point. He was just sitting there at the table, staring straight ahead, his mouth wide open, not breathing, reminisced one of his acquaintances.
Gerhard Richter composed symphony after symphony, keeping them all in his desk drawer up in the attic, where he preferred to work alongside an old barrel organ whose handle he would turn whenever he found himself slapped by a dearth of inspiration.
When his wife announced one day that she was pregnant, Gerhard Richter gleefully handed over the sum required by the town abortionist. The following day, his wife returned with the fetus in a glass jar: a boy. Gerhard Richter gave the child the name of his father (not necessarily Gerhard Richter), and sat the jar above his writing desk in the attic, beaming his gaze upon it as the hidden music seeped out of his pores and on to the page.
Eventually, the money ran out and Gerhard Richter was forced to go to work to support his wife and son. He found employment as music teacher at the town’s primary school, where he was much loved by his students and colleagues alike.
One day, when he was nice and old, it came time for Gerhard Richter to leave behind this world and go on to another. As he lay on his deathbed shivering, he held his wife’s hand and informed her that he wished for his remains to be mummified.
Sometimes a secret doesn’t become known until after its possessor passes on. In his last will, it was revealed that Gerhard Richter had a family fortune stashed away in a Liechtensteinian bank account that he had never told his wife about. The money was to be used to start a charitable institution whose mission would be dedicated to fighting hair loss through music. Gerhard Richter’s son would oversee the daily operations of the organization through the formaldehyde and glass of the jar that held him. He would also get to watch Brad Pitt play his father in the movie they made of his life. It was called Gerhard Richter: Struggles of an Ordinary Man.
Artforum Accident by Ondrej Brody & Kristofer Paetau
by Travis Jeppesen on December 2, 2011
1 tub goat milk
1 whole goat
1 packet spearmint-flavored chewing gum
7 medium-sized eggs
8 ounces strawberry ice cream
2 cans minced clams and juice
½ carafe red wine (sweet)
½ cup mustard
3 cups corn meal
½ cup chopped parsley
1 bottle tequila
Garlic powder
7 strips of bacon
3 fluid ounces frog sperm
5 fluid ounces olive paste
1 dozen leeches
12 ounces green pine needles
Vinegar
Cherry tomatoes
10 pounds iguana intestines
White wine
Hot pink daisies
12½ fluid ounces pale yellow food coloring
Boil the goat in a vat of its own milk. Chew entire packet of gum for five minutes, then spit it into the vat. Stir well into gum is melted. Allow the mixture to cool.
Preheat oven to 400 degrees Celsius.
In separate pan, beat three of the medium-sized eggs mercilessly with a spatula. Add strawberry ice cream. Allow ice cream to melt. Without stirring mixture, pour liquid in to large baking pan. Cook in oven at 350 degrees for 15 minutes.
Scramble well two eggs over medium heat. Right when they are on the verge of burning, douse with the minced clams and juice. Stir mixture until bubbling simmers down. Remove from heat. Drain mixture and transfer to bowl. Add red wine, mustard, corn meal, and chopped parsley. Don’t stir too well.
Pour tequila into large shot glass; add a shake or two of garlic powder; ingest. Repeat infrequently throughout the remainder of the cooking process.
Fry bacon to desired crispness; save bacon fat in separate jar.
Remove egg-and-ice-cream mixture from oven. Allow to cool. Cut into ravioli-sized pieces.
Mix frog sperm and olive paste in separate bowl. Break up bacon into bite-size morsels and scatter haphazardly across the mixture.
Boil leeches in bacon fat, adding liberal doses of salt. When finished, spoon leeches into ravioli noodles and knead into perfectly round pouches.
Spread frog sperm olive paste mixture on to thinly cut slices of toasted Italian baguette or brown bread. Serve to guests as appetizer.
Douse green pine needles in vinegar, adding cherry tomatoes. Spread on to a large flat surface. Spread the milkgoat mixture evenly on to the salad bed and serve.
Place salted leech ravioli noodles into blender or food processor. Mix to a fine dust; freeze.
Using sushi knife, slice iguana intestines into thick white cuts, which should resemble sharkfins. With a smaller knife, remove any insects or fecal matter one comes across. Rinse well. In a sanitized frying pan, cook intestines in a dry white wine on low heat. The intestines should be cooked for a very short time; they taste best when half raw.
Slather intestines with the lumpy sauce made of sweet red wine, minced clams, scrambled eggs, mustard, corn meal, and chopped parsley.
Remove salted leech ravioli dust from freezer, cutting it into slices approximately four inches in width. Garnish with two raw eggs and hot pink daisies. Splatter conservatively with pale yellow food coloring and serve as a side dish.
Makes a single solitary serving.
This meal is best served with a vintage port and an assortment of cheese, crackers, and fruit.
James Benning’s 13 Lakes: a novel
by Travis Jeppesen on November 24, 2011
1. Jackson Lake
Dawn had me looking. I think the indifference well suited. Not too many tropes, though, it is true. More a type of sizzling, that ripple. Pink light on the mountains over yonder. Daddy tells us it’s too cold to swim. You let the sound of the ripples sway you. The way the light goes further down the crag as time wears on. Will we get to see it reach the water (does it reach the water?) I don’t have to see my reflection, I am not in this. It is a lake because you can see the other side.
2. Moosehead Lake
Through a haze. Shadows keep moving. Water and sky made from the same stuff. Bubbling noise somehow makes it real. Certain days I look at myself and I think I’m so unreal. Could it be that my life is there beyond that tree. I think that’s the other side of the lake. Those four clusters. Or is that an island. What sort of land are we divorcing. Is that a question that a lake asks itself. I don’t know what I am. Throng moves through me like a ghost. It begins to clear, I think I can see the shore. Maybe I’m standing on it. I’ve swam through much more hostile waters than this. Some forms of hostility leave stains. On the consciousness, I mean. But I’m removed from that image. I’m sort of like the clouds up there. If you stare at the clouds long enough. How they move. Makes you feel like you’re moving. And you are. The land. It shifts and it revolves. We’re never in the same place even when we stand absolutely still. All ground is liquid. All time a mutilated reminder. The water is still. And still it happens through us. I keep reminding myself of no energy. Like the lakes it seems we’re dodging. My god that cloud how it suffocates. It looks as though it’s rising from the earth. From the other side of the lake. That that distant land is somehow the source of the cloud. Or it’s not clouds, it is one cloud, singular, one great one. Engulfing the great mass that is the sky. Threatening to overtake us all. Put us back into that sardonic wasteland we had imagined we had escaped from. We’re all lost in the movement so alert.
3. Salton Sea
Boats cut lines through the paths our newness. Somehow feels invasive and yet the water belongs to them, the boaters. Does that take possession of it. Just as though a skater might own a frozen lake as she makes her way across it. Cutting lines. A painting out of water. Those dusty hills are the backdrop. A mousy mist in the foreground that can scarcely compete. My reaction is static, savior. Boat makes the water float toward us. The changes that occur need science to measure them. One of us gets mad at the boat for being so meddlesome. Consider your reaction. Now waves. More violence prophetic jetski. Those aren’t hills, they’re crags. Imagine when the water was much higher. The sky was meant to be swallowed. Boats will be up in the sky. Too bad there aren’t any shadows. I don’t know why. The skyscape lakescape empty of birds. Nothing alive that cannot put the lake in a place of comment. Water escapes to contract afar. I am no longer vibrating. This is something other from calm.
4. Lake Superior
Something seethes beneath the ice it’s alive. Am I Alaska? Frozen tundra stars in this show. All gamy, molten tender and erupted. Waves wanting to break beneath it all. But can’t get the momentum going. Can’t go up up. Oil tanker crawls slowly toward us. Lighthouse nods its approval. The grind of being there. There must be men upon that ship that swells. I am the whale that eats the iceberg. I eat everything I smell. I can taste what I’m not made of. The ship is going away, another shore. The children that drown here will be perfectly preserved. Awaiting discovery by another seabed. Here comes the reminder what I was going after. The line that drops down any minute now. The great beyond gone fishing. But now it’s gone. No more patience with this interference. Very little movement within the tundra. The stillness comes, all the amalgamates start to break, my fears have returned. It could all erupt any minute now. Where would that lead; breaking…Flies toward me, allows my perspective to protect it. Maybe I myself will go ashore. Where does everyone else go.
5. Lake Winnebago
Seems ambiguity just arrived to rescue us. One of those few mornings I was awake to see. A delicate lapping. You can stick your big toe inside. Nothing will bite it. Birds coo their precious melody. I laugh at it, dreaming. Dreaming to be wide-awake is asleep. Purple and gray two colors that look the same. Announce the crystal clear. Or is that the sky singing its yellow heartache emptiness. A glimmer on the other side that can’t be seen. Perhaps the knife of the neighbors being reflected. In the early morning glow of sleet. I’ve gone through different phases.
6. Lake Okeechobee
Springtime greenery allows us to take it all in. This more like a pond. The cloud sculptures in the sky are trophies. Somehow the rocks jutting out of the shallow water resonate with the shapes in the sky. One of them, the rocks, could be a hippopotamus head. Or perhaps an alligator. Mining its prey…But it doesn’t move. Dead head. Rooms of lush green on the other side, swim over there give the foliage a hug, that’s what it deserves. Not this something else of the nearby train. The land would have to stand still long enough for us to erect a train track across the ocean. Instead we have the lakes to bear our burdens. Humanity’s firetraps. We set what’s around the lake on fire. Springtime my tragic reverie. Bored at a time of lost indulgences. Light comes to clean out the ellipse. I think I’ll turn this into a painting to cancel out all movement within the frame. It subtles brusquely. The nerve center of that weed that emerges. A whole family grows on algae. They await a janitor to come and disinter their grounding. Make it out to be false, something to be looked at. The hippo widens on the shoreless repose. I’m not the beaver that swims past its mother.
7. Lower Red Lake
Now the clouds have grown so heavy they can’t help but overtake the placidity of the waters they shield. Seems as though they’ll break at any moment, add even more water to our water that’s so calm we don’t want anymore of it. It’s perfect: a glass fixture that moves on past us. Our feet in the shallow water right off the shore. Eyeing the vague greenery of what can be made out on the other side. We don’t want to go there, we don’t want to know it. There’s the thunder that signifies our time is almost…The deep dark blue that masks the horizon’s point. That must be where the planet comes to an end. Don’t bring your ship out there, it’ll fall off the end that’s painted there. Just imagine when the earth was flat, the people who came from the other side were the aliens. We are aliens among ourselves whenever we travel. Birds cut the cross, must want to get to the underworld. Can you imagine? Water thinly covers the layers of orange underneath. Pregnant soil that will soon give birth to a new species of storm. What will we name the first one? For that is our job, as humans: to name things. Our big accomplishment. Flows at the pace of lava. Water moves in cloudhills. They need a rest at this moment in their life, recharge the electricity. I want to break into the sky, buy an apartment in a cloud, though I know I can’t. I’m one of those earthbound rovers. Looking for a chance to be myself. Amongst all this wreckage. Could it be that the sky bleeds a tornado. I don’t think it does. We know when the water thins out it will be our last chance to feel all right with the moon.
8. Lake Pontchartrain
I am god a bridge cut across my face tonight. There are shallow passes the gray water escapes under. A grumbling signifies man’s contribution to the mass. You can hear how angry it is by the way it crashes against the shore unseen. That thrashing arhythmical. It belongs here as much as my teeth the virgin waves jutting down to the unseen beyond. A thick matte gray that allows for no indication of how deep this lake might be or is. Little dashes little dashes in the sky. The overall so colorless, as am I. Once a boat, now a car, makes an appearance from afar. High and rocky but now swayed. Helicopter dissects my left eye. You are your own universe when you lick the sky. We’ve all shattered the yesteryear’s year. Body that rests next to me. I am traveling in those cars over there.
9. Great Salt Lake
And in the morning we came upon a hill. It was looking saintly. As we hadn’t seen any solid surfaces for quite a while. So we stopped the boat. And shared a silent regard. As others whizzed past us. In their velocitous incomprehension. Must have been urbanites. For the birds have no such concern and we are more like them than we are ourselves. At least it looks like that. You stuck your hand in the water. To wash off the fish stink. That had demoted us. Oh but I wasn’t one to be lost at shore. This is most likely autumn, I thought. As I pulled the wool jacket over my shoulders. And stared out in the same direction as you. It was an unlikely sight to stare at. Unlikely because it was no different from everything else nearly we had seen on this long journey. The shapes of the hills, unremarkable. The slightly perturbed state of the water. Still not enough to dispel this overall smoothness. The light smoke rising from the surface. As though to infer the temporary burning of its waves. But you didn’t have to struggle very hard to cool down. Yes, these are all matters for the stupid diving geologists. Unlike them, we have nothing to take. We’re only drifters with various recording devices. Like the birds, we search for a home.
10. Lake Iliamna
Unseen cloud nefarious seems to be sucking up all the energy from this sea. A battle is being fought between two forces, each lacking a sexual base of control. Not unlike what happens in that transitional moment you see when nature’s absurdity bashes equilibrium in the face till it bleeds. The blood that doesn’t wash away gets eaten by the insects that dwell in the holes of this machine. Light cascades forebear. Hidden microphone picks up all that sucking away. Feels so threatened. And yet the spectator still clings to neutrality, oh, how unfair it seems. Beyond this hazy hue, an inference of blue. Right in front of those hills…A land mass that is most definitely inhabited. By what tribe, no one can name. Grayblue gray. White green gray blue gray white bluegray. White gray. Darkgreen blue gray white bluegray. White green darkgreen blue. Gray white bluegray. Greenblue.
11. Lake Powell
Is there some functionality out there on the mesa? Water so strongly resembles blue silk, it cannot be trusted. And the egyptian brown desert that surrounds it: this must be manmade, all of it: nature doesn’t come like this. I was born to be surrounded. Eerily devoided of non-mineral life, well, that means no life at all. Unless blue silk can live through its shimmering. A helicopter once dropped a man and it was so deep, it swallowed him right up. Never seen or heard from again. It’s a comfort, to be so coveted. To live on top of that hill and look out and say, This all mine! Faint figures on the shore, can’t make out what they’re doing. Thought approaches them. Oh no, that’s a boat. And so what they’re on must be a peninsula, couldn’t see the water behind them. Sorry for all the misinformation, shout out. They cannot hear. They are on the other side of this world. Not in the one I inhabit. Could be it’s not a lake at all but a particularly wide section of the Colorado. I don’t know. All I know that it is strong-willed enough, deep enough perhaps, to have ignored any influence of sediment. No substance brave enough to breathe in these vast waters. Can you blame us for wanting more all the time?
12. Crater Lake
Here we are before the country had been discovered. The perfect laughter of the birds. Everything still. Could almost be a fantasy: a nineteenth century american landscape. Erosion on that hill looks like a cross; our protestant forebears. Clouds don’t move, water doesn’t speculate. The hills so beautiful in their bruised nakedness. We’re in a place where there is no change of seasons. (Perhaps.) All so beautiful, one can’t help but hear shooting in the nearby. The shooting continues but we can’t hear the screams of what’s being killed. Perhaps the prey has been disgraced in another place. I have been more than once. But what am I. A less sophisticated animal. This is a national park our natural heritage. Whoever this our is supposed to be. That collective unity the birds see from a distance. If we stare long enough, forms bleed into one another: a reflection of the hill and the lake becomes the hill itself, lake disappears, gunshots ring out. Lake’s been reduced to a utilitarian device. All things that reflect are the only things that’re real. I’ll try standing still as possible. Because I want to become one with this. Yes…I don’t care about getting shot.
13. Lake Oneida
It seems the waves rushing toward us with such urgency because they have a message to convey. But they don’t know how to say it, so they continue rushing. Daylight sets off an alarm clock. It is morning. And we will rush through this day. I won’t be a rider on this stormlessness. I love how the sky is painted so low. It is a curtain that is about to come down on all of this. The water that is slow. The water absent from all time. No shadows, no steam. Just a chance to pop out. And be what’s yours. There’s something humane about not seeing another human for so long. About not being one, either. No one sails here. A dark private trespass. Typically too cold to swim, could be a eulogy. The type of water one goes to dump one’s ashes. I’m sure it must be full of them. But then there are others who offer to save us. Keep what remains on their shelves. A whole life condensed to a souvenir. I won’t swim in that ocean, but I will try to stand beside you for as long as I can. Until the waves overtake us. And we give up on our longing. And just give in to the ripples that the sky has promised.
Poem at the Museum Ludwig
by Travis Jeppesen on November 13, 2011
We all knew
Kippenberger
was a fag
but we liked
him anyway.
Certain others
thought Woodstock
was the way
to go.
Not me.
My boats
were enchanted
before
they even
docked.
I fell down
satisfied
with my
relapses.
Dog in the kennel
barked out
at me.
We’re almost
happening,
dear,
just one hour
too late.
When I hear
you’re calm,
I get so
excited.
Make
these thoughts
belong
to someone
I once knew.
Or
maybe
they are yours
again
after all.
The Art of Deception: Lazlo Pearlman & Fake Orgasm
by Travis Jeppesen on October 30, 2011
It’s like Deleuze and Guattari put it in the opening pages of Anti-Oedipus – it eats, it shits, it fucks, it’s everywhere – you can’t avoid it, and yet you’re taught to both embrace and avoid it. They were talking about desire, but I mean to talk about something else entirely. Definitionality. The ways that language confines us into being certain things. The angsty energy behind every act, every gesture, that is a refutation of the ever-scary not-knowing that we all are, at a certain point, unable to own up to.
A new film by Jo Sol, Fake Orgasm, serves as a portrait of Lazlo Pearlman, body and performance artist. When I say “portrait,” I mean it in the classic, painterly sense – that is, somewhere between truth and fiction. You can’t call it a mockumentary, as a mockumentary is a form that, while blurring the lines between truth and fiction, ultimately does it towards a final end – to poke fun at the documentary medium, and, by extension, every audience’s questing for truth whenever they enter the cinema scenario. No, this Fake Orgasm is something else entirely – a truth posing as a lie, a lie that is true to most.
I haven’t seen any of Jo Sol’s previous films, but according to Lazlo, who I’ve had the pleasure of speaking to on at least two occasions, he has the reputation of being something of an anarchist in the world of Spanish cinema. Lazlo credits Sol with bringing him round to anarchism during the making of Fake Orgasm – which, in the end, very much turned out to be a collaborative effort between the director and the artist. Just as in Deleuze and Guattari’s work, it is probably impossible to determine whose contribution is whose; and of course, this refutation of ownership is very much in line with anarchist tradition.
Spoiler alert. Fake Orgasm is ultimately a meditation on passing, and as such, is structured as a revelation of layered truths; an onion: you can never get to the core, there is none. The truth is in the layers. Lazlo is in a Barcelona nightclub, a charming American dude hosting a “fake orgasm” contest for a hetero crowd in their 20s and 30s. Feels so risky and outré for them, getting up on stage and feigning climax into a microphone – who will fake it best? The evening is divided into three parts: first, the women; a break; then, the men. What will be the third part? The announcement of a winner? Now it’s time for the host to present himself as the biggest “faker” of all. Sultry music comes on, he does a slow striptease, the audience is mildly amused, what’s going on here anyway? Lazlo turns around, faces his audience, completely naked. The music stops. There is total silence. An unnerving silence. He exits the stage. The silence endures; no applause. He has a cunt. Omigod. He wins.
After the silence sparked by this revelation, the audience is taken into another room, where they find Lazlo, naked and covered in white paint, perched naked on a bed. They are allowed to circle the bed, interrogator-style, and ask him any question they want. They ask all the wrong questions, questions that you would normally not ask a human being. It’s okay in this situation; “he,” this thing, has deceived them. He is no longer worthy of the moniker human, so we can ask him/her/it anything we want. Are you happy being…that way? Don’t you want a dick? What do you date, men or women? Clearly there is something wrong with him. Her. It.
Certain questions don’t deserve an answer. If anything, Lazlo can at least teach them this. When asked which gender he is attracted to, he responds, “Why do you want to know? Do you want to date me?” When asked if he is happy, he quips, “Yes. I have reached nirvana.”
Eventually Lazlo gets a job in a sex club, doing his striptease thing. He thinks that the only way to teach people is by challenging, confronting them. And it works, for a while. Until the day when he suddenly becomes The Man With The Pussy, a freak show phenomenon. And he realizes this onstage – it is no longer a surprise, a confrontation, because word has spread and the people have come knowing exactly what they are about to see. They have been told ahead of time. They are just there to confirm it, to make sure it is possible, to see that it is true.
Lazlo always leaves. He admits this in the film. The only way for him to survive is to pursue a constant line of flight. This puts him very much in league with a whole tradition of artists and visionaries whose bodies always had difficult relationships with place, whose bodies became a sort of moving landscape, individuals for whom a refutation of stasis was an intrinsic part of the whole project of becoming. You’re not running away from the truth; you’re running away from other people’s versions of truth that threaten to imprison the self between parenthetical brackets. Lazlo’s dowry is his ability to evade the prison of definitionality. His body, then, is for him a convenient metaphor, a tool he can work with in forging that pathway out of a scenario he himself has created.
Elsewhere in the film, Lazlo spends some time with fellow Barcelona expat Lydia Lunch, who suggests that orgasm is boring. Why, she asks, do we place so much importance on this thing, this momentary release? So fleeting! And maybe half the time, faked!
She’s right. And I believe this can be taken even further. Sex is boring. Dicks are boring, pussies are boring. Gender is, at best, insignificant, or at least should be. Isn’t that what we’re all working towards, some of us at a faster rate than others? Maybe it isn’t all that radical to take a step back and consider the possibility that all those things we believe to be so goddamn important are, in fact, boring. That doesn’t mean we should stop having sex and orgasms, but we should recognize that the categories that currently mold our perception of human beings are worthless and should be set on fire. Until that happens, the living work of Lazlo Pearlman suggests, we’ll be faking it to the grave.
Abendland: A film by Nikolaus Geyrhalter
by Travis Jeppesen on October 27, 2011
The visibility is good today but there’s no one out there. Security camera is like a video game. He manipulates his own footage within the frame of the film, Security Man in a Van. In a vacant field. Europa, my friend, you seem so lonely by nightfall.
Here, we have news of the displacement. The bulldozers come tomorrow, don’t forget. You will go with yr family into the mountains. Next night’s ruins can already be smelt.
Civilization is a destitute place these years. The underweight baby holds on for dear life. How dear life is, some might opine. We see the nurse handling that redness, the dearness of life is her job, she carries out her duties with a sullen grace that still allows her to speak gently. Monolithic waterfalls. Parliament is empty.
In Parliament, a swirl of languages, all sounding similar, spoken simultaneously, rocks us half-dead babies to sleep.
In Bavaria, Lederhosen, roast chicken, and Robbie Williams round out the drunken Oktoberfestivities. Now they celebrate Europe. But she has been carried out of the Biergarten on a stretcher and placed in an ambulance. That’s my girlfriend! someone shouts.
Lederhosen in the emergency room. Fat drunken brain damage vomiting into a bin.
More monitors. This is for your protection, people. I see you watching. Man watching has bags under his eyes from all that endless seeing. Zeroes in on a suspicious-looking nigger…Make no mistake, it is people, not scenes, they are watching.
Oh look, it’s the pope.
Burberry and refugees. We can send the adults back, but not the children. The catwalk at London Fashion Week.
Dark ones do the nightshift at the post office: the future of Europe is non-European.
France. Germany. Spain. Singapore. Return to sender. Montenegro. Italy. Germany. Norway. Belgium. Return to sender.
Dutch suicide hotline clock reads 12:41. Sometimes they just need a voice on the other end. But I cannot provide you safety from this distance…You are afraid of Papa and Mama. Don’t worry. The police will shoot them. Our society takes care of its victims. It’s the least we can do for producing them.
Copper in the green room just got shot. Wild west whore saloon. Look, it’s someone else’s fantasy. Now a medieval dungeon, kitsch. Hidden cameras capture the fucking (desperate fat cellulite.) The whore is ready to get the slob off of her. She holds up a sign: Call me, I speak English. It’s always what some people want. There’s no reason to be ashamed.
Old orderly has mod prim earring. He cleans the rails so perfunctorily. This ward is near empty. Frau Richter not dead yet. I would like to change her sleeping position.
Airplane near the Deutsche Bahn. Train arrives under it in perfect synchronicity, crash like waves. Protests all over the rails. Cops don’t dance to techno. Drugged-out occupiers pushed away by self-appointed protectors of the night. Cops stand in line waiting to remove them from the forest. The next day, forest itself will be removed. Train with its chemicals is allowed to proceed.
Ninety-nine percent of all refugees applying for asylum are turned down. You can’t live in denial of the realities of the rest of the world. The people who run this one wish to believe otherwise.
Europa in the twenty-first century.
Empty terminal middle of the night. The people who get to clean it’re all white. German voice designates smoking area. A whole bunch of wooden caskets to choose from.
Europe is a muslim atheist country. Future. The corpses are all reduced to ashes. Thousands of sweaty kids on bad drugs in a stadium. They’re the only ones to acknowledge the camera.
Lucrecia Martel’s La mujer sin cabeza
by Travis Jeppesen on October 18, 2011
A woman driving down a dirt road runs over something. At first, she thinks it is “only” a dog (this only is always negligible; one of the points of the film), but later, after the fact, she decides in her mind that it was in fact a child. Nobody can convince her otherwise.
A woman hits something in her car and becomes free from rational existence. It is the sort of freedom she doesn’t want. She wanders through the film in an amnesiacal daze. She is surrounded by people. It is hard to tell how each character is related to her — particularly the men. Is he her brother? her lover? her husband? Is the horny teenage lesbian with hepatitis her niece or the daughter of a friend? We can’t tell because the woman doesn’t know anymore. She has lost her head. She has to dye her hair to cope with it all, to become a new person.
You can watch this film several times and still not “get” what’s going on. John Waters sums it up best in one of his quintessential one-liners, selecting La mujer sin cabeza as one of the best films of 2009 in December’s Artforum:
“Bleached hair, hit-and-run accidents, in-laws with hepatitis? Huh? I didn’t get it, but I sure did love it!”
This ambiguity is precisely what makes it worthwhile as an endeavor in narrative art. All over the Internet, people are publishing their theories of what the film means; this implies that it’s already become a sort of cult hit. I wish more writers would study this film. Like all great novels, La mujer sin cabeza is fundamentally not “about” anything. It is anti-about. Rather, it seeks to investigate a phenomenon that is so specific and personal that it winds up encompassing larger societal issues — such as class in Latin America — almost despite itself. The main theme, however, is easy to decipher. La mujer sin cabeza is a film that tackles the weighty philosophic issue of disappearance. The headless woman is suddenly confronted with an awareness that not everyone’s life is perceived to be worth the same. The child she thinks she ran over might as well be a dog; she is wealthy and educated, the child was one of the poor masses. She cannot deal with this sudden knowledge; dissociation becomes the answer.
In the end, she gets her head back, in a way. She is reassured by all those around her — both people she knows personally and those she has encountered but doesn’t know — that none of the events she experienced actually happened. In finally allowing herself to believe them, she is allowed to wear her head once more, even though it may be empty of all its contents. This is one version of freedom, perhaps.
Spiritual Voices: A film by Aleksandr Sokurov
by Travis Jeppesen on October 17, 2011
I.
Olivier Messiaen.
Figure in an empty landscape,
snow, siberia, sokurov.
The feeling of being out
there, all exposed to the
elements, and yet the music
makes you feel as though
you are alone in
an empty room.
Chords. Black metal is
built on them, riffs, and
yet you can make them
on the piano, an instrument
not ideal for repetition.
Mozart rapes Messiaen.
Give up the landscape.
Discordancy ascribes its
own value.
Negate the assertion.
Re-locate Miami to France.
There is a feeling that
Europe’s history is all
one big opera, a transference
of states and status.
How harsh the ideals fall
when dropped careless
from the palace windows.
II.
Tufts of a forgotten sentiment, ride pink tank towards dream. I am thirsty, filmmaker says. Everything is pink, shot through a pink lens, in another film, he’ll use an old woman as a chance to go meet the enemy, feed the similarities. Pink haze, pink landscape, pink heat, pink lens, all a fleshy pink to mark the transition, a snowy landscape to searing Tajikistan in the apex of summer, hell can take many forms. Not even Siberia’s cold salvation. He transports us there, we see the cute Russian soldiers, Sokurov notes their age – twenty-two, twenty-three, he guesses – and they all could be ambushed at any minute, the filmmaker dying with them, and yet he continues on the journey, what, after all, is his wisdom next to their promise of youth?
Rimbaud wrote that poem about soldiers’ cocks, was it all a deep fantasy? He has a thing for Japanese composers, now it is possible that that country will be largely no more – can a culture continue to thrive without a Heimat? I think
No one can predict the combined wreckage that the 21st century is destined to bring down on us, perhaps there will be no more cultures. Atomic wastoid, I look in my cat’s eyes and see beauty: He is a European cat and he has seen/knows culture.
I will walk my way through
to the other side of this world
knowing
yr doubt
is greater
than the highest risk
I might take
to secure it.
No one loves me greater
than you at this moment,
through yr hatred.
Yr hatred of me is legendary, I can taste it in my soup.
I am too timid to consume you, to consume most, yet I continue to fantasize fornication, o Europa, yr abortion flecked stationary across the horizonless
surmise.
I wear you out, I know, you are so thin, you tell yr friends everything we talk about.
They form their opinions on me this way, hardened variables. A sailor
cums inside us, Messiaen has a fit, shits all over the piano,
a glass of water, food
coloring for the emotions –
such an American idea
to distort all symptoms
of entropy.
Oh and the calm meditation on death I thought about that too, I will not date you, I am only drinking.
Come over here let me whisper something into yr glass eye, whenever I am at home I am never separate from the source of yr empowerment, actually I hate this raunchy domesticity, give me a lamb and I’ll call it a cat.
Aleksandr Sokurov was born to a family of peasants. Actually I know nothing about him, I should wikipedia his legacy. Now, I hear, he is making a movie of Faust. Faust is the one course I failed in college, I wasn’t patient enough to sit through the exam.
I heard you’re a smoker now.
Such a bad choice, you’ll
end up like the wolf
outside of heaven.
The evening massacre.
Maybe it’s something in
the cold tundra
that allows one to
stay spiritual.
III.
It is because of the vastness that we cannot be protected.
The silence in the hollows.
“Our surroundings blend into the dust”; sepia tones.
The clouds are yellow in a blue sky.
Rain on the rioters outside my window.
The tireless protractment of her empire. Soldier’s smile. They look like corpses in their sleep. The clouds at night can somehow be seen. A different color, however. Darkness has a way of.
Drowned in a river of silence.
IV.
Shells in the landscape, a
sultry day to appear.
One finger too fast to
learn, clothing hangs out
to dry. Young soldier stares
at knee, horsehung, dayglo
tomorrow. I am not on top
the embattlements.
The crackling of food,
somewhere near death.
V.
About Russia, I don’t know, I’ve never been. Let this all be here please. The soldiers. I want an archenemy, too, masturbating. The gentle fade. Soldier in the landscape, rest on elbows. Elbows have lots of hair on them. I don’t know why I’m honest. Boy asks what time it is; a stone in the soil. It’s naïve to think all these wars. He stares them all down with his camera, one by one, trying to find an answer.
VI.
Maybe he wants more than he knows, how to communicate. I am not unlike the others.
They cry: New Year’s Eve, an absent friend, the war. We are all mortal. A Russian sentiment. The hard kernel that designates deference, lived. Today the oscillation varies. And now we imitate wind among the gunshots.
VII.
Those soldiers they eat. No one wants to talk. It’s only Tuesday. Today is Sunday. Cat on my lap watching them, I’ve lost track of time. Too much salt…I’ve heard his first film is set in an insane asylum.
He likes them, it seems, because they fight to keep what it means to be Russian alive.
His forehead the river.
blip drip
by Travis Jeppesen on October 16, 2011
The Lisbon-based musician/sound artist Motile has turned the poem “Blip Drip,” from my 2006 collection Poems I Wrote While Watching TV, into a song.
flip the want to get us through lack of sensate
warmth stare at artificial stars to ponder alone
no remorse for sacrifices inevitable to the stream
“no way out” but laughter the remembrance of
things not said not bother writing them down
