Conceptual Film: Critical Focal Acuity 2 (Shot / Unshot) In A Can
Series of found film cuts as the camera racks out of focus / or shoots unfocused footage
(Asynchronous sound: random and obtuse observations)
Series of stills from said shots
(Asynchronous sound: mundane observations)
Series of cuts of shots slowly resolved into focus
(Random aural cut-ups chosen via chance operation)
Fade in / Fade outs to black leave 2-3 sec black between shots
(Tank tracks grinding as Exit Music)
What I’m Reading:
“In order to reproduce the colors of nature in our films, we have painted nature black and white. Startle the cuttlefish. Harvest the sepia. The literal color of fear.”
“We now understand that race doesn’t actually exist — it is not a biological fact — and humans share all but 1 per cent of our DNA. Our differences are not scientific but due to other factors such as the environment. But race is a lived experience, therefore it is enormously consequential. Understanding the fiction of race doesn’t mean that we can dispense with the categories, not yet.”
— Bernadine Evaristo / Manifesto: On Never Giving Up
Instead of changing my shirt I changed my mind and requested a reverse baptism. Get the father son and the Laszlo Moholy Ghost outta’ my body. Get ‘em all outta’ my soul. Forthwith.
Can’t look back, won’t look back. Ozymandius Motors for all your autonomic pleas. Automatism at 350 horsepower ////// Wayside shangri-las and all the disjecta ejected in your superego moods during our President’s Day Sale!
You get rid of meaning by getting rid of meaning.
Start with Rasputin and work your way out from there. The peach cream turns bitter so allow me to lie down under your steamroller. Play me “Steamroller Blues” through your tinny transistor speaker and do your worst. Go.
Docket your trash—use pincers and gloves. Keep me at arm’s distance for I’ve seen a handkerchief of clouds (tzara-cumuli).
Keep me at a distance—I’ve heard a talking •Hugo Ball• head singing:
gadji beri bimba … tuffum I zimbra.
“Get rid of meaning. Your mind is a nightmare that has been eating you: now eat your mind.”
There were erasures to make. He made the erasures. There were no complaints. The work was done. He moved on. When more erasures were required, he made those; and in this manner his work was accomplished, and he continued erasing. This is how it was to be alive then. This is what it meant to finish. Whatever you take from this—you must know this—this was only one of many ways of moving through life. There were alternative ways of working, and of moving through life. That much is assumed. That much is certain. When he needed more erasures, he did this:
“He had an almost overwhelming temptation to shout a string of filthy words at the top of his voice. Or to bang his head against the wall, to kick over the table and hurl the inkpot through the window—to do any violent or noisy or painful thing that might black out the memory that was tormenting him. Your worst enemy, he reflected, was your own nervous system.”
She had grown red and corpse-like below the Danish authority standard issue yellow canopy—beyond the dune and deadwood. Nearby, crusted and congealed, many rats in hazel frozen a on twig.
Bleating, and she a sheep, that sand crackled and raised in the wool course of the afternoon. The wife to pooling streaks of curly substances. I’m pre-litigating the issues glued to highlighted clauses and codicils.
A lining of corn is what I picked out—in far arcs instead of center nodules. I notice dried mud and qualities of contractual clouds of condensed water on all sides of the windows.
I sawed the far central branches—and what of the ears?
Those?
In an increasing density at the left of the central smoke bone, she said: “what an attractive calumny as the stumble chooses. What did he choose?”
I chose. Her. Intently. There.
We dove tumble blind. The rocks (later chosen) over the chin into what we consider sticking faux yellow moves in air.
Did she?
You, who watched living rings in our mouths—a technology unsparing and compared those to wire geologic plates—radioactive, venous, glowing red and white.
You found that sort of liminal feature—a leaf glowing dizzy in the eddy of a creek.
“Half light, half ideology. Each of us is impressed as pixels into an ad for democracy. Give the people what they want, says the TV. A powerful suction effect? Extraextra-cheese?”
i jump off the bed— cold granito floor judders my core— legs & spine ablaze lower brain doused in fire.
i dread the conflagration in my head as i peck away at my dreams like one conditioned inside an arcade game box.
slot a quarter in the box & the turntable i stand upon spins— a hatch opens where i peck at feed.
to eat & not to eat.
so long since anyone’s come by & i had a grain or two. don’t pass me by / i say with shopworn eyes. don’t walk by / i will u to slot a coin.
i haven’t fed in three days— slot some money / honey provender’s behind the door. be a hun / i may be your child’s nugget some day. walk by that pinball game straight into my heart.
“I don’t write out of what I know; I write out of what I wonder. I think most artists create art in order to explore, not to give the answers. Poetry and art are not about answers to me; they are about questions.”
You can’t see your backhand tumescence. You ridge an indemnity to a mild occlusion. You shiv gambler smocks and spectator gallantry. You sing and tinge without specie or varicose effluvia. You spree on tremor-free fibulae. What are you playing at—speaking in tools?
You speak in a larch I can understand—a riot of the auspicious. You cast about probability roadsides in magical viridian. You are the vitrine of souvenir permaculture—a solution to ponder. You wave at ticker and sunroof parades simulcast in wispy simulacra. You walk in topaz somnambulist shades.
“It’s not where you take things from – it’s where you take them to.”