D of an I U e m n s a i c g v r i e 1 4 i n r p a s t r i i y t o y n s 5 O c t o b e r 9 4 "I am made only of gravity now, no longer of love...." A late mantra made apparent only by way of a so-called Modern thought, yet despite a now fashionable trend towards proclaiming 'our'-'selves' post-this- Modern, a much adhered to philosophy (invisibility is one thing, absence is another). Measure is love. Language and meaning in measure is commitment. --The As-Of-Yet Undescribed Student Nebula again on tREASON when you are so ever right, all you are sure, only when i am open, their remains the object of inquiry, unbounded whip por will when the irresistable force meets the immovable object what fails or minds abstraction you can always find a judge, feet first you need to witness S ubject / yes, yes i tabletop style or even more and only --MC Incrementalism I scold others on email because I want to be scolded myself or the possibility that all of us could die any second to occupy a privileged place in consciousness and this could be a formal concern as audience is always a formal concern maybe the 'godfather' of moral concerns with all its James Brown Lou Reed mafia connotations snug within the realm of the masculine symbolic only the eccentric I mean sophisticated I mean traditional initiated Lacanians in the vulgate will care to dare to SMACK EACH OTHER ON THE BACK IN THE BAR.... Do you need it? I wish I could ask everyone I know that right now and I'd call it a party though you could call it an experiment and you of course never experiment though you do go to parties---I mean the kind of parties where you're more likely to be the producer than the consumer and all those consumers out there well you could live without them because you do it for yourself And so I say I do it for myself So the shit hits the fan instead of me Because I am shit I mean flesh "In Love, In sorrow..." But I don't do away with words and thus don't do away with producers and consumers as if they're tracks etched permanently in a perpetual care cemetary that's never overgrown... "Often I am permitted to return to a perpetual care cemetary." Cynical, but he's got a point there... The need for extremes is more theatrical in reflective moods Or the contemplative parts of moods Since I wanna work in words right now A desire more recursive than infinite AS IF THE ONLY INFINITY IS REGRESS and the fear of floating off into space you like to think language can stave off is not assuaged by what it seems to motivate you towards. You as a checker in a world of political/apolitical poses only the audience can see unless of course you have to have a blindspot to see and a transcendental self could work that bug out of the system so surely it would click shut like a box, a coffin I'd never pay for, though that doesn't mean I won't let you at least it gives me something to scold for and on email (to boot) --DE The Academy is now for the most part a trade school. The entire heritage of scientific research has been sold to business (and sold cheaply). It trains engineers, M.B.A.'s, and lawyers whose job it is to translate agreements among criminals into language proper to the courts. The remaining function of the traditional university has been so brutalized by the viciousness of the political and religious right, which every day seems to pervade public life more densely (the stench is almost unbearable) that a defense seems in order. The weak-kneed liberals and Marxists of academe are learned, to be sure, and perhaps even genuinely commitment to social justice as something more than the rhetoric of their conferences and journals. In the face of the vicious creeps who have captured the media and spew their poison directly into minds of the masses daily, I or I want to honor them. Sadly, the Academy of so-called disinterested research and the mad-dog right are playing out the last entropic moves of a dying culture. There is a bumper sticker that says, "Jesus--Don't leave home without Him." The followers of Harold Bloom try to respond, but there are too many names in the canon, too many empty polysyllables in their vocabularies, too little time to read books. You can't fit the message on a bumper sticker, and undergraduates go to sleep in class. "This is the way the world ends," etc. The Imaginary University is a a virus, but unlike software viruses that simplistically recur and destroy the difference between themselves and their hosts (like mass media), it generates consciousness, distinction, and structures of meaningful action. Software viruses are perversive; the IU virus is subversive. --Thus, Albert or Hubert A dark ice across which feathers are strewn A dark ink Each bespeaks One they said scripture Landmark glyph returns island A wanted soaring fallen as if shot A grief-stricken angel as mother as Earth as ifas if Pouring from a sky in Bethlehem The secret of all loss embedded The seed the secret the soul and ageless Ambiguous talking across all words Across all words a blood but hands But handles and nails, nets, harrassment says Interpretation says Says so So what And I lie. But the politics And a body sworn in silence to be held to earth He wants to fly He wants to exit what's left of hate A planet and a dissappeared tradition And the ghosts of a discourse Sworn in silence to be held Sworn dreamt word invisible edge Nest in temporary rest An author of absence --Scope Readlist, The Last Days of the White Race Radio Free North America, October 5 1994 Audre Lorde / "From the House of Yemanja" / *The Black Unicorn* Jayne Cortez / "I See Chano Pozo" / *Coagulations* Ntozake Shange / "okra to greens" / *A Daughter's Geography* Thulani Davis / "C.T's variation" / *Playing The Changes* Elba Rosario Sanchez / "She-Wolf" / *Tallos de luna/Moon Shoots* Harryette Mullen / "SHUDDERING" / *TREE TALL WOMAN* I am the sun and moon and forever hungry the sharpened edge where day and night shall meet and not be one. --AL A very fine tree stump of drones a very fine shuffle of shrines a very fine turn of the head a very fine tissue of skin a very fine smack of the lips a very fine pulse a very fine encuentro very fine very fine very fine --JC it's ten years later/ & the changes are transcribed --NS visionary women letting pigeons loose on unsettled skies --TD It is an echoing that lingers in the wind restless stirring in the night --ERS My skeleton wants to dance in and out of midnight --HM Minute Manifesto In so far as it models how things fit together, either in nature or in society, art is as much a stimulus to contemporary behaviour as it its reflection. When, in the streets, we find warring confrontations, mindless violence or despairing acquiescence in homelessness and unemployment, we should remember that art may be as much the cause of events as their expression or representation. The objects and artifices of galleries and museums individually may or may not be potent or powerful, but the sum of cultural attitudes and social values of which they are a part, from which they come and to which they lead, and which even by their silence they support, can concretely effect the real world. Art can kill. Art provides the clearest expression of a society's will, and its capacity for construction or destruction. It not only articulates that will, it sharpens its resolve by identifying, clarifying, and invigorating the essential issues. Even under the guise of supporting its oppositions and respecting its resistance (with exhibitions, publications and honours bestowed on its "radical" and "dissident" artists) the state will always ultimately reinforce its ideologies with the culture it protects. In the creation of such culture, universities and academies have much to answer for. Even their ivory tower indifference is political. They have consistently valued, supported and promulgated the cult of self expression over collaborative construction, of analysis over synthesis, of specialisation over integration. We are now paying the price of that. We have a society deeply divided, lacking all coherence; and a culture which is solipsistic, self regarding and utterly numb to violence and strife in the world. Indeed to apply the very concept of "caring" to the post modernist aesthetic would evoke only the most hollow and contemptuous laughter. With their uncritical assumption of privileged authority, most cultural and educational institutions have treated knowledge as something to be handed down, to be given out, to be inculcated and absorbed, a largely one-way process of reinforcing the status quo. Interactivity at any level is regarded with caution and suspicion. Criticism is encouraged as long as it does not lead to action. Except where public scandal hits, the learning organism itself is rarely subject to profound scrutiny. Whilst management, fiscal manipulation and the corporate plan are constantly revised, new ideas of community, self-creation or radical re-construction are rarely evoked. But in the new sciences, whether quantum, cognitive or genetic, the view increasingly is taken that reality is no longer given, pre-defined and pre- ordained, but instead is to be constructed, bottom up, such that definition and evolution of nature and our own human identity are progressively subject to our technological intervention. Art too is becoming less and less concerned merely to represent or express. The will to rethink, reconstruct and build new realities is emerging. Art in the academies classically fails to promulgate the three axes of our humanity: connectivity, construction and love. It is precisely at the convergence of these desires that we must look for significance in the new sciences, technologies and in the emergent art of interactivity which exploits the transformative potential of new technological and post biological systems. To counter the instability and uncertainty which appear to threaten our future, it is not simply a matter of creating new jobs, new tools or new investments. Political tinkering from left or right cannot halt our social sclerosis. It is a matter of creating new interfaces to the world, new organisms of learning and production, which will allow us to actively participate in our own evolution. The arts concerned with interactivity and transformation, those which are, for the most part, grounded in digital systems, can provide models of being, of collaboration and production, which may bring new thinking and vision to our spiritual stagnation and economic decline. --RA what's going on wrpi 91.5 fm troy ny 29 september 94 0900-1204 The Wailers--Catch a Fire (entire) Maleem Mahmoud Ghania w/Pharoah Sanders--"La Allah Moulenah"/ The Trance of Seven Colors Glenn Spearman Double Trio--"Operation at the Level of the Phrase"/ Smokehouse - Bill Dixon--"Anamorphosis"/Vade Mecum Ann Magnuson--"Men Are Dogs"/A Far Cry Andrew Cyrille--"X Man"/X Man Cassandra Wilson--"Redbone"/After the Beginning Again Oliver Lake Quartet--"Shiffs"/Edge-ing - De Duo--"Whisper"/A Far Cry Maleem Mahmoud Ghania w/Pharoah Sanders--"Peace In Essaouria (for Sonny Sharrock)"/The Trance of Seven Colors Marilyn Crispell--"America"/A Concert in Berlin Sinead O'Connor--"All Apologies"/Universal Mother Bill Dixon--"Twice Upon a Time"/Vade Mecum Glenn Spearman Double Trio--"Painted With Lightning"/Smokehouse + (D)escriptions of an (I)maginary (U)niversity + c/o Ellogico'snowflakes y we: cf2785@albnyvms.bitnet