Archive for June, 2011
FIRST FIGS
And the seasons begin to cycle as each day brings another spur for vulnerability, another adieu and another resolution to self vis-a-vis composer Paul of the bidirectionality of time in circles.
ONE MAN’S VERDANT PORTICO
Is another man’s mortar: from Hadrian to Maxentius along the Appian Way, frescoed sea-horse becomes filler for an unfinished throne room wall. Our archaeological Virgil through it all (drawings, lacunae-riddled plans, 3D scanners, holes full of dirt and equivocal chunks) enjoying his job exactly as much as one reckons he oughta.
ANIMATE STATUARY
At the Villa Medici: from Paris to the Pincio, perfect coherence of voluptuousness in stone embraced otherwise, alive.
SOFT VORTICISM
Worth the sweltering heat of stone discharged from the arbors of the living, amplifying the rise and fall of expectations to locate any trace of memory of the fratelli Rosselli in this their first burial site: a stone’s throw from Toklas and Stein, a porquoi become genital and mouth of Jacob Epstein’s direct carving softened, [...]
DOUBLE CHANGE
Palmer/Cole/Inglese/Poitrasson/Scappettone, a reading packed even of a sunny Sunday afternoon to the gills of listening, mint green disc cookies as icing.
COLLABORATION BY HAND
Michael Palmer, author of the sacra conversazione, reading from collaborative notebook scrawl with Liliane Giraudon in the city as garden.
ONLY IN PARIS
On the way from voodoo exhibition to Tamaas seminar in translation: passionate bisous for philosophers.
HUNGRY CITY: ROME
The history of Rome traced through food and its conduits, followed by Fritz’s gorgeous installations of aperitifs & dinner in roof tiles moving the crowd from orto to cortile, lit by a chandelier of twig & leaf, Mona finally sitting down to eat with us: and having through it all to come face to face [...]
PUREE & CODECRACKING OF THE DAY
Eggplant and mint, we taste, so much more exquisite than is photographable—overseen by as-ever enthralling epitaphs glimpsed anew in this quotidian dream that taunt us with the desire to know more and more language, and with the need for time, insatiable.
INSIDE THE FOUNTAIN
Scoping it out at a press conference overlooking the whole city: the space we’ll perform in (Exit 43 with the Difforme Ensemble) before bidding goodbye to the site of Rome’s preGothic sustenance and our ravishment.
ETERNAL/EPHEMERAL
In the lurid purple apparition of the Ponte Rotto and cherished summer passeggiata schmaltz, resisting the surreptitious yet certain sense of possibilities clamping down with the passage of the weeks and the neighbors, even if the morning, recall pixelessly, among the myriad possible pixeless lessons of the year of explosive potential in love with the [...]
FLAG
In advance of “La Mama SpoletOpen” at the 54th Festival of Two Worlds, my poem to be carbonized: FLAG PIETRA PER PIETRA roso CHIODO PER CHIODO oso FILO PER FILO [...]
LIVED, SPOKEN WORD, SICILIANU
And as we were schooled by the friend of a friend in the tradition of theater/recitation/storytelling called cunto siciliano, possible heir to Greek bardic traditions, the bank too is distinguished by its vernacular fold, improvised.
TEXTURE
For the moment, in sandstone: and a circle commemorating the full lunar eclipse and the changefulness toward the pain and toward the bright unknown it brings.
DIRECT DEMOCRACY
First vote in this country: 4 yeses supported by more than 95% of voters: no to privatizing water, letting powerful criminals loose, development of nuclear power. “And yet the wind still breathes….”: rundown of how to vote last weekend posted on the door for a social club of old men wearing derbys at dusk in [...]
REMAINS/CHANGE
“Se vogliamo che tutto rimanga come è, bisogna che tutto cambi.” “If we want everything to remain as it is, everything must change.” Citation (Il gattopardo) ringing in consciousness departing from Sicily, trumpets of flora over the 16th-century ramparts. A friendly, yet most aware pair of landlords, now, the proprietaria denim-vested.
PIAZZA AS WUZ
Occupying the ruins now framing a deejay set ranging from Volare to hiphop all’italiano and the hospitality of Earthquake Jack: scene of palpably postwar pregentrification Palermo.
BY DESIGN
Nature once again reflecting culture, making its own vertigo and mask for a friend in what remains of the ingeniously experimental Greek baths.
DEVASTATION AS MONUMENT
Before the famed memorials designed by Eisenmann and Lin, in 1985-89, rose Alberto Burri’s high concrete sacks of a citywide Cretto: grey foundations as petrifaction and geometrical shroud for the rubble of the town of Gibellina—Gibbiddina in Sicilian, from the Arabic Gebel Zghir (“small mountain/height”)—medieval in aspect, though founded before the Greek settlements of Magna [...]
TOWN PRIDE
“Non ci passa una lira,” says the lady we meet surveying her high plaza with diamond facade from the waist up, and who justifies our afternoon chocolates by identifying us as her “children” to a daughter several minutes later. Not a cent passes through here yet everywhere—pizzerias, baseball caps, banks—is the immense unidentified Hellenistic goddess [...]
MEMORY
“I have turned from the castellaccio / so its…medieval shadow…/ does not leave uneven edges,” word by word infiltrating the idle mind even in beginning to walk toward the door of the dig house toward ascent of a town turning on a dream. Rubble of feudalism still operative as rubble and as resistance in the [...]
NOTES TOWARD A NORTON LECTURE
In the new departing friend’s studio full at his facture of charcoal and bodies and blinking streaking green otherworldly light made grainy by lack in the archive machine.