Akram Zaatari, The Uneasy Subject / MUAC Mexico

The Uneasy Subject / MUAC Mexico from akram zaatari on Vimeo.

Tom Leonard on Language and social status

'The City' Constantine P. Cavafy (1910), translations

You said: “I’ll go to another country, go to another shore,

find another city better than this one.

Whatever I try to do is fated to turn out wrong

and my heart lies buried as though it were something dead.

How long can I let my mind moulder in this place?

Wherever I turn, wherever I happen to look,

I see the black ruins of my life, here,

where I’ve spent so many years, wasted them, destroyed them totally.”

You won’t find a new country, won’t find another shore.

This city will always pursue you. You will walk

the same streets, grow old in the same neighborhoods,

will turn gray in these same houses.

You will always end up in this city. Don’t hope for things elsewhere:

there is no ship for you, there is no road.

As you’ve wasted your life here, in this small corner,

you’ve destroyed it everywhere else in the world.

Translated by Edmund Keeley/Philip Sherrard

You tell yourself: I'll be gone
To some other land, some other sea,
To a city lovelier far than this
Could ever have been or hoped to be -
Where every step now tightens the noose:
A heart in a body buried and out of use:
How long, how long must I be here
Confined among these dreary purlieus
Of the common mind? Wherever now I look
Black ruins of my life rise into view.
So many years have I been here
Spending and squandering, and nothing gained.
There's no new land, my friend, no
New sea; for the city will follow you,
In the same streets you'll wander endlessly,
The same mental suburbs slip from youth to age,
In the same house go white at last -
The city is a cage.
No other places, always this
Your earthly landfall, and no ship exists
To take you from yourself.
Ah! don't you see
Just as you've ruined your life in this
One plot of ground you've ruined its worth
Everywhere now - over the whole earth?

Translated by Lawrence Durrell (in the novel Justine)

Wenn Ich Ens Nit Mih Existiere (cultural identity)

Wenn ich ens nit mih existiere,
wenn ich die Auge zojedonn.
Wenn ich mich bovve präsentiere,
janz hoch am Himmelspöötzje stonn.
Dann soll d'r Petrus dat schon maache,
hä sök d'r schönste Platz mir us.
Hä weiß et jitt dann jet ze laache:
ich bin en Kölle am Ring zehus

When I am gone

When I close my eyes.

When I present myself at heaven's gates

St Peter will find for me the holiest place.

Don't laugh at me, it's true

Because I was from Cologne.

la memoire dure (memory resists)- Rossella Ragazzi

Ibrahim lived with his uncle in the woods in Mali, for a few days he attended Koran school. Alpha comes from Liberia, and during the war his family was dispersed. Nawel lived in Algeria where his large family was forced to have him adopted and taken to France. All these children attended the same preparation class for learning French in a compulsory school in Paris that is aimed at inserting them as soon as possible in normal primary school classes. For 9 months, the film director filmed these children, showing how they were received in France and the relationship established between teachers and pupils. The children learn not only the language but also the values of their host society.

Research Project- يما مويل الهوا

يما مويل الهوا يما مويليا

Oh Mother the sad song …oh mother is my song

(It is a preface usually said to express how much pain the speaker has)

ضرب الخناجر ولا حكم النذل فيا

Hitting by daggers but not being ruled by rascal

ومشيت تحت الشتا والشتا رواني

And I walked under the rain ,and the rain wets me

والصيف لما أتى ولع من نيراني

And when the summer had come , he was burned by my fires

بيضل عمري انفدى ندر للحرية

My life will stay ransom and vow for the freedom

يما مويل الهوا يما مويليا

Oh Mother the sad song …oh mother is my song

يا ليل صاح الندى يشهد على جراحي

Oh night.. the dew hollers and witness on my wounds

وانسل جيش العدا من كل النواحي

And the enemy army attacked from all directions

والليل شاف الردى عم يتعلم بيا

And the night was witness on what the death had done to me

يما مويل الهوا يما مويليا

Oh Mother the sad song …oh mother is my song

بارودة الجبل أعلى من العالي

The mountain rifle is best of the best

مفتح درب الأمل والأمل برجالي

Key of the hope path and the hope depends on the men

يا شعبنا يا بطل أفديك بعينيا

Oh our people oh heroes … my eyes are ransom for you

يما مويل الهوا يما مويليا

Oh Mother the sad song …oh mother is my song

(special thanks to the person who translated this for me)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gmq-AO1306A&feature=related

There is a Happy Land

There is a happy land down in duke street jail,

Where all the prisoners stand hangin fae a nail,

Ham and eggs you never see,

Dirty water for your tea.

There you live and there you dee,

God save the Queen.

Then the corporation came wae a great new plan,

build multi-storey flats on the happy land,

Now there's rows a hooses there,

Mind you step gon up the stair,

Ghosts'll come and pull your hair,

God save the Queen.

Why Orthodox Jews May Have the Hottest Sex Lives, 2011

Secular Israeli man in his late 20s, reciting from a text by an American Orthodox Jewish woman.
Made in Jerusalem.

Alan Currall: Encyclopaedia

Two years before Wikipedia re-defined the nature of the encyclopaedic work of reference, transforming it from a compendium of expert views into a repository of collective wisdom, Alan Currall produced this endearingly quixotic People’s Almanac, assembled from ordinary people’s individual contributions. The people in question are recruited from Currall’s immediate circle of family and friends, and the answers they give offer a disarmingly local, if palpably limited and partial, perspective on the attempted elucidation of a diverse range of subjects (aspidistra, air, Abyssinia etc). Persistently confronted by their doubts and failings, displaying a tendency to falter or digress, the participants’ definitions highlight the inherent absurdity of universalising schemes of classification, and undercut the overweening will-to-order that sustains the pursuit of systematic knowledge.

Released as a CD-Rom (a format as passé as a morocco-bound multi-volume edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica), the piece’s homemade graphic style exhibits a deliberately earnest retro quality (that felt oddly antiquated even at the time). Commissioned in conjunction with Potteries Museum and Art Gallery in Stoke-on-Trent (Currall’s home town), ‘Encyclopaedia’ draws on his roots in this now relatively unsung, and increasingly marginalised part of Middle England to project an engaging, inclusive sense of commonality, in which the so-called ‘common people’ demonstrate the virtues, and the limits, of what passes for common knowledge.

A Film and Video Umbrella Touring Exhibition. Curated and produced by Film and Video Umbrella, Stills and Potteries Museum and Art Gallery.

Supported by the National Touring Programme of the Arts Council of England.

Rives- Kite

Kite


I mistook a garbage truck for thunder.

The morning after the first night we made love,
I dreamt thunder was chasing rain
through your neighborhood,
flooding the streets and keeping the two of us
indoors for days or even weeks,
until some old prophet could drop, by in an ark,
to take us and the rest of the paired-up animals
to a very high place, or an island maybe,
where we could just
sleep naked for a living.

But the thunder was a garbage truck.
And when my eyes woke up
a note on your pillow said:
"Good morning, Sparkle Boy!
I'll be back around noon.
You--make yourself at home."
And so I did.

Maybe.

I'm saying maybe I put on your slippers,
which were as comfortable as bunnies
because they were bunnies,
and then shuffled over my new favorite
hardwood floor to the bathroom
where maybe I took a bubble bath,
which is not something I can do at my place
because, frankly, my tub is way too skanky
to ever sit my bare ass down in.
And then maybe I got so caught up in the romance of the suds
I started quoting old Latin poetry from my college days
like: "fulsere quondam candidi tibi soles..."
You know: "Verily a bright sun does favor me this morning...muthafucka!"

And then maybe I...played with myself.
But it’s not what you’re thinking--
I’m saying possibly I just sorta
stuck my hand up from the water, going:

hand!(HERE I HOLD MY HAND UP LIKE A SOCK PUPPET
hand!WITHOUT THE SOCK AND MY HAND TEASES ME
hand!IN A HIGH, SMUTTY VOICE):

HAND: "Somebody got laid last night!
Ha-ha-haaaa!
It was youuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu!!!"

Or whatever.

And then maybe I...played with myself,
and it's exactly what you're thinking.
But if I did, it was only to put
the mental motion picture of our naked night together
on replay and replay and replay
so touching myself was just like...
Tivo in a way.

And yes, I was still wet when I borrowed your bathrobe.
And yes, I baked apples in your oven
and then ate them with your honey, honey.
And yes, I scared the birds away from your balcony
with my antics, dancing full-blast
to your old Prince CD's--
but please let’s just keep that my little secret,
because nothing is as private as a solitary dance
unless--maybe--it's standing in front of a full-length mirror
in a borrowed pair of bunny slippers,
slipping off a bathrobe and then wishing to a lightbulb
that my name, or my game, or my whatever were bigger,
wondering: "What kind of woman wants this skinny kid for her warrior?"

And so I made for you a kite, enormous,
out of coat hangers, brown paper bags
and the masking tape from that drawer in your kitchen,
and I hung it in the hallway
where you couldn’t hardly miss it,
and I tagged that kite with my words,
I wrote:

Just so you know--

My weird mind wanders and my brave heart breaks.
I've nailed some milestones, but I've made mistakes,
Cuz I got more faults than a map of California earthquakes.

I am taking a nap beneath your covers.
Wake me if you like me.
Wake me if you want me
Wake me if you need another poem.

Your once and future lover
has made himself at home.

Tuli Kupferberg: I Am an Artist for Arts Sake

R.I.P

Protest Songbook A project by Big Hope: Miklós Erhardt & Dominic Hislop | Radio Broadcast

CLICK HERE

My Father is a Certain Kind of Man, December 2010 (Israel)

My father is a certain kind of man.

A few years ago we were in Greece together. He sat on a bench with another man. And they understood each other.

Their Language was their cigarettes,

Their ears grown large with age,

Their noses red from good times and bad times,

What a life we’ve had

Their hands ingrained with dirt from long ago

My father’s a certain kind of man.

And I sometimes wish I was too

(accompanying music: Mrs McGrath: The Sergeant Said)

J G Ballard 'What I Believe'

“I believe in the power of the imagination to remake the world, to release the truth within us, to hold back the night, to transcend death, to charm motorways, to ingratiate ourselves with birds, to enlist the confidences of madmen.

I believe in my own obsessions, in the beauty of the car crash, in the peace of the submerged forest, in the excitements of the deserted holiday beach, in the elegance of automobile graveyards, in the mystery of multi-storey car parks, in the poetry of abandoned hotels.

I believe in the forgotten runways of Wake Island, pointing towards the Pacifics of our imaginations.

I believe in the mysterious beauty of Margaret Thatcher, in the arch of her nostrils and the sheen on her lower lip; in the melancholy of wounded Argentine conscripts; in the haunted smiles of filling station personnel; in my dream of Margaret Thatcher caressed by that young Argentine soldier in a forgotten motel watched by a tubercular filling station attendant.

I believe in the beauty of all women, in the treachery of their imaginations, so close to my heart; in the junction of their disenchanted bodies with the enchanted chromium rails of supermarket counters; in their warm tolerance of my perversions.

I believe in the death of tomorrow, in the exhaustion of time, in our search for a new time within the smiles of auto-route waitresses and the tired eyes of air-traffic controllers at out-of-season airports.

I believe in the genital organs of great men and women, in the body postures of Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and Princess Di, in the sweet odors emanating from their lips as they regard the cameras of the entire world.

I believe in madness, in the truth of the inexplicable, in the common sense of stones, in the lunacy of flowers, in the disease stored up for the human race by the Apollo astronauts.

I believe in nothing.

I believe in Max Ernst, Delvaux, Dali, Titian, Goya, Leonardo, Vermeer, Chirico, Magritte, Redon, Duerer, Tanguy, the Facteur Cheval, the Watts Towers, Boecklin, Francis Bacon, and all the invisible artists within the psychiatric institutions of the planet.

I believe in the impossibility of existence, in the humor of mountains, in the absurdity of electromagnetism, in the farce of geometry, in the cruelty of arithmetic, in the murderous intent of logic.

I believe in adolescent women, in their corruption by their own leg stances, in the purity of their disheveled bodies, in the traces of their pudenda left in the bathrooms of shabby motels.

I believe in flight, in the beauty of the wing, and in the beauty of everything that has ever flown, in the stone thrown by a small child that carries with it the wisdom of statesmen and midwives.

I believe in the gentleness of the surgeon’s knife, in the limitless geometry of the cinema screen, in the hidden universe within supermarkets, in the loneliness of the sun, in the garrulousness of planets, in the repetitiveness or ourselves, in the inexistence of the universe and the boredom of the atom.

I believe in the light cast by video-recorders in department store windows, in the messianic insights of the radiator grilles of showroom automobiles, in the elegance of the oil stains on the engine nacelles of 747s parked on airport tarmacs.

I believe in the non-existence of the past, in the death of the future, and the infinite possibilities of the present.

I believe in the derangement of the senses: in Rimbaud, William Burroughs, Huysmans, Genet, Celine, Swift, Defoe, Carroll, Coleridge, Kafka.

I believe in the designers of the Pyramids, the Empire State Building, the Berlin Fuehrerbunker, the Wake Island runways.

I believe in the body odors of Princess Di.

I believe in the next five minutes.

I believe in the history of my feet.

I believe in migraines, the boredom of afternoons, the fear of calendars, the treachery of clocks.

I believe in anxiety, psychosis and despair.

I believe in the perversions, in the infatuations with trees, princesses, prime ministers, derelict filling stations (more beautiful than the Taj Mahal), clouds and birds.

I believe in the death of the emotions and the triumph of the imagination.

I believe in Tokyo, Benidorm, La Grande Motte, Wake Island, Eniwetok, Dealey Plaza.

I believe in alcoholism, venereal disease, fever and exhaustion. I believe in pain. I believe in despair. I believe in all children.

I believe in maps, diagrams, codes, chess-games, puzzles, airline timetables, airport indicator signs. I believe all excuses.

I believe all reasons.

I believe all hallucinations.

I believe all anger.

I believe all mythologies, memories, lies, fantasies, evasions.

I believe in the mystery and melancholy of a hand, in the kindness of trees, in the wisdom of light.”

Mick Broderick

Donald was a piper
Dick Barton, Special Agent

TS Eliot: Choruses from 'the Rock'

'dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good.'

words (concepts) and their meanings

words (concepts) and their meanings:

sociology

anthropology

enthnology

hegemony

paradigm

esoteric(esotericism)

idiosyncratic

individual

socialization

marlene dumas | images and words

marlene dumas

marlene dumas | images and words

audio arts:online

audio arts:online

if your lonely, martin creed

If you're lonely...

by martin creed(to avoid confusion)

Work... this is work. This is hard work. Talking about work is work.
Thinking is work. Words are work. Words are things, shapes. It's hard
to compose them, to put them in any kind of order. Words don't add up.
Numbers add up! Things are everywhere. Everything is something,
everything has something, but not everyone has someone. It's hard to
distinguish between things, to separate things. I'm in a soup of
thoughts, feelings and things, and words. Actually, it's more like a
purée... or thick and stiff, like a paté. I'm in a paté and it's hard
to move. It needs a lot of work to get out of it — or to separate it
and find something in it. Thoughts, thoughts, sometimes I want to stop
them, but it's hard to stop them. It's work. Dealing with thoughts,
that's work.
Thoughts, thoughts, don't come! Stop! Please! When you're going to
sleep and you can't stop thinking, thoughts queueing up, that's when
you need drugs — or a notebook.

I want something to ease the pain. I want to get out of my head.

Smoking used to help. For a long time smoking made my life bearable. I
gave up smoking because I couldn't do it enough. I couldn't smoke
enough. It was never enough. I wanted to smoke all the time, to breathe
in all the time, but I couldn't, not in the shower, not when I was
talking, not when I was eating. I wanted something I could do all the
time. Not smoking, that was something I could do all the time.
I am an addict in search of drugs.

Maybe working is trying, and work — the result of work — is everything
that one tries to do. Trying... looking for excitement, or trying to
handle it and use it to get out of the paté. Trying to do things;
talking. Or maybe testing is a good way of putting it: testing things
out. Testing things out by putting things about, and all the time
trying, hoping to be excited, wanting. Wanting is what makes me work:
excitement, desire for something.

Sometimes people say: 'What the fuck do you think you're doing? That's
not art.'
I say: 'Fuck off, assholes!'

Assholes... they are something to get excited about, something to work
for.
Work is a fight against loneliness, against low self esteem, against
depression, and against staying in bed. Sometimes my self esteem is so
low that I cannot reach it even when I'm feeling down.

I want to be on my own, but I don't want to be alone.

Work is everything, I think. Everything is work. Everything that
involves energy, mental or physical. So... everything, apart from being
dead. Living...

I don't know how anyone can do it.
How can anyone get through it?
I can see why people hide.
I can see why people commit suicide.

If you're lonely,
If you're sad,
If you're lovely,
If you're mad,

Then this is for you.


© Martin Creed 2005

Work #470