Archive for May, 2011
HOUSING SOLUTION IN ROME
Among the only feasible options in the historical center: just outside the Borgo, or the area of the Vatican, adjacent to the hospital set up for pilgrims: bright & with a view for as long as they’ll allow it (law banning mobile homes on the Janiculum in momentum).
WRITING AS DRAWING
And drawing as writing in the work of William Kentridge: the potential, I surmise in listening to this brilliant lecture and conversation, to reintroduce provisionality to a stultifying historical record, just as it’s constantly introduced to the Johannesburg landscape of burnt felt (charcoal terrain that draws itself) and mounds of hollow-fallout in crusades for gold: [...]
NOW THAT’S DIALOGUE
Paul Rudy and Aparna Keshaviah’s “Kinetic Play” tapping into the ground I can’t see for the crowd through a sensing of native American beats plus Bharatanatyam gestures and bells as poetic text: a double language that’s not European, though born of six months’ back-and-forth in the heart of European civilization, our revised Rome. So expressive [...]
WORLD CITY (HENDRIK ANDERSEN, ARDOR)
Henry James ardently to the friend (lover?) Hendrik Christian Andersen, coaxing his companion toward specific lived experiences and places, expressing doubt regarding “any use on all the made earth … for a ready-made city, made-while-one-waits, as they say, & which is the more preposterous & the more delirious, the more elaborate & the more ‘complete’ [...]
GO THOU TO ROME
Oh, immortal verbiage, lasting specters of romance in the face of ephemeral objectual us: Peace, peace! he is not dead, he doth not sleep, He hath awaken’d from the dream of life; ‘Tis we, who lost in stormy visions, keep With phantoms an unprofitable strife, And in mad trance, strike with our spirit’s knife Invulnerable [...]
SCENES FROM OPEN STUDIOS @ AAR
Round two: for comrades & neighbors. 6 minutes per space: good thing we eat together! Hollows of Trajan (Radical Craft); refusal of time (Kentridge); hole logics and languages (Oppenheimer); synthetic fragment of the quotidian, syncretic reflection in passing windows (Blair); dilation and rupture of narrative poetry (Yasinsky); anatomy of cultural salvage (Rush); cinematic paintings of [...]
X LOCUS (ABLUVION)
“For those who submitted to disorientation, it was a success.” “Submit,” says Tom: “that’s the perfect word.” An old archaeologist friend, alongside whom I worked at my first and only dig, two decades ago, veering over the hole listening for voices. Hearing the unconscious, seeing the strata of history in the strata of bricks above [...]
OPEN STUDIOS @ THE AMERICAN ACADEMY IN ROME
Come see X Locus (Abluvion), a collaborative installation by Jennifer Scappettone (text/sound design), Paul Rudy (sound design), and Agency Architecture (environmental media), at the Open Studios event at the American Academy in Rome Wednesday, 25 May, 2011. Il consiglio di amministrazione dell’American Academy in Rome William B. Hart, Presidente del consiglio di amministrazione Adele Chatfield-Taylor, [...]
L’ACQUA NON SI VENDE/WATER IS PUBLIC
A sticker bedecking the she-wolf-head fountains around town. Once Massimo Cacciari started getting on the bandwagon, they began to call the tap water in Venice “the mayor’s water.” Don’t sell it: vote for public water on the referendum of 12-13 June. In Rome, where providing water to the public is a glorious tradition, a friend [...]
TRAGEDIA DELL’ASCOLTO/TRAGEDY OF LISTENING
“Now that’s quite a responsibility,” says Kathleen, deathly serious from the Piazza San Cosimato, as I tell her of the site of the sound piece in progress. All day spent in the dark tavern carving bypasses of voices from the literal underground. Carving from the blindness resulting from the hegemony of vision in this culture, [...]
IL CAFFÉ,…DOLCE, AMARO, INDOMABILE SERPENTE
Delighted to find a poem by the counter of the Casa del Caffé in the Campus Martius—a tradition in Italy, it seems—so that even the hairdresser’s business card is full of rhymes— “Coffee, it rustles my soul, like wind on the mount that breaks in amongst the oaks and loosens and agitates the limbs, sweetbitter, [...]
CROSS-SPECIES COMMUNICATION, ITALIAN STYLE
Michele uses his excellent skills as translator, poet, and Italian (c.f. Bruno Munari’s dictionary of Italian gestures) to communicate with a cat atop the castle complex who is fond of quizzical self-exposure.
THE HOUSE EXPOSED E DOPO
How the writing of Marco Giovenale and other current Italian “poetry of research” can and has to be distinguished from Flarf, with which it identifies (to a certain extent): history. (fou / fenêtre) Glockenspiel – e nel freddo nel pieno è che il freddo è nel pieno della schiena: sulle scapole sulla spina per agosto [...]
JANICULUM/LIMITLESSNESS
“YOU…SPACE WITHOUT LIMITS” Sensing exactly what the vandal means, gazing out beyond the cordoned Villas, cordoning Cupola and its arcade embrace, at this pastel haze in company.
NO GESTURE IS COMPARABLE TO THE LOVE I HAVE FOR YOU
Is the message on the aqueduct that has become bench, carpet, stadium seat for these Romans. Thinking it in retrospect & somewhat belatedly true.
POPPIES AND AQUEDUCTS
The Acqua Claudia, highest aqueduct of all, serving thus each quarter high and low of Rome, now backdrop straight out of Pasolini for the starring poppies & weekend runners of Cinecittà and Centocelle.
USCITA 43/EXIT 43
The introduction to our performance at Corto Circuito tonight, in Italian: Queste partiture “pop-up” fanno parte di un progetto in corso, intitolato Uscita 43, che è composto di elementi poetici, visivi, e sonori. Lo descrivo come un’archeologia di paesaggi tossici e afflitti, e un’operetta di cori “pop-up” (prendendo il termine usato per le finestre “pop-up” [...]
SKYLINE SQUAT
“New York City” and its scrapings of sky seen from the perspective of its underbelly, the swollen dump mounds shrouded in plastics.
EXIT 43 WITH DIFFORME ENSEMBLE: SATURDAY NIGHT
Performing pop-up choruses surrounding postpastoral landscapes from Exit 43/Uscita 43 with the Difforme Ensemble (Marco Ariano, Renato Ciunfrini, Roberto Fega) and with Ersela Kripa & Karen Yasinsky this Saturday night at the Centro Sociale Corto Circuito in Cinecittà: be there/ sii lì!
WALL-ROSE
Came home to a lecture on building in—as—time, concept so floral for would-be tragic Venice-of-water, and to walls—of taverns and cities—made conceptually permeable via their blooming, ground as cherries.
FINANCE IN STONE (OR LEAD-COATED REPLICAS)
Puzzled indeed to find neoclassicism masking another paradox in the pediment sculpture of the core of global speculation: Integrity Protecting the Works of Man, among which bend heavily, here, Agriculture and Mining. It is the work of John Quincy Adams Ward and Paul Wayland Bartlett—carved in marble however by “the Piccirilli brothers.” The NYSE notes [...]
LANDSCAPE WITH CAMOUFLAGE
How would old Rockefeller lurch to learn that the Palisades view he purchased for his Cloisters transported from Saint-Michel-de-Cuxa, Saint-Guilhem-le-Désert, Bonnefont-en-Comminges, Trie-en-Bigorre, and Froville to frame serves also as stageset to the “quiet-zoned” spectacle of bellic muscle for the next century?
HILL AS CACHE, AS INVISIBILITY, AS STRATEGY
At Fresh Kills, double to Mannahatta, with Kathy Westwater, Seung Jae Lee, Leigh Draper, and Raj Kottamasu, gearing up toward our residency for PARK, a view of the East Mound of solid waste becoming laboriously yet strategically a mountain by way of 280 gas extraction wells and plastic and other geosynthetic, permanent or impermanent impermeabilities: [...]