Male-ifide

From the Feminist Dictionary of Words:

"mal-e-ifide or mal-e-ified [mah-l-e-eefee-de or mah-l-e-fied; Eng. mey-l-e ah-fah-dee or mey-l-e ah-feed]
adj.
contraction of terms.
feminine ablative of malus, bad + fid, declination from french, feminized form of mal;
ablative of fids, faith;
from Latin masculus, diminutive of ms, male;

used to indicate the false pretense of women in contemporary society who have taken on male role patterns and masculine, aggressive behavior to seek assimilation and acceptance from existing, conservative male elites.

"She is a real bitch. She always aggressively cuts people short, clamors above every one else to be heard, and tries to make jokes all the time. She is an archetype of the male-ified woman."

Les Pensées

Artaud believed that those very matters, which made him often feel so good, could in fact never be right for him and should be considered inappropriate, but he was nevertheless incapable to ever feel bad about them.

Daytime TV

The branches curled and lifted, contorting themselves into horribly human shapes against the window and he half expected them to knock against the glass, crash through or at least point him out knowingly. Inside all was bright. The studio lights spat individual pools beneath which young girls in hoodies and headphones were rushing, checking light levels with meters and notepads and being nodded at by older men who sat half slumped against their cameras as though each were his own private bar.
One of the young girls appeared then at the door to the green room. Latte Mr Clarke? It wasn't a latte he wanted. Yes he said. She took two long strides across the room and placed the cardboard cup dramatically upon the plastic table-top as if laying rare jewels at the feet of a king. We'll be ready to go in 4 minutes yeah? He nodded and she left. He could see two boys stood awkwardly on the studio floor. New interns he thought. Someone was marching across to scream at them. Do they get paid for this? You pay them in experience he thought. Ignoring the latte he took a long swig on the bottle of JB he kept in the makeup draw.
He walked out onto the set and noticed people looking desperately busy, their eyes fixed on some minor last minute detail, real or imagined. It doesn't require a shit load of intellect to work as part of a television production team he thought. Two minutes Mr Clarke. And then he tried to think of other jobs that required intellect. Real learning. Science and.. One minute Mr Clarke... You know today's issues don't you? today's issues? Someone handed him a sheet of paper. He nodded as he skim read over the large emboldened type. It's on the auto-cue anyway. A hand patted his shoulder. And then they began to count backwards from ten and when they got the three the room fell silent and he watched the camera operator mouth three-two-one and saw a glimer of hope or excitement flash upon audience's eyes. Just then the wind was raised for a moment and he was aware of the branches curled and lifted, contorting themselves into horribly human shapes against the window and he half expected them to knock against the glass, crash through or at least point him out knowingly.

The Trilogy of the Father (3): The Self

Halia was humming lines from 'If I was a man for a day'. She walked firmly down the crowded street on the beat of her heels clicking to the pavement like automatic gun fire. She answered the occasional glance from a boy with flattered indifference, responding to the jealous stare from a girl with a friendly face of glass. 'I turn it on, I turn it off, why? cause I can.'
A high beep vibrated in her black jacket's pocket. She let it go over twice more before answering. 'Riding to Bear Mountain on Sunday with our bikes? Yeah, I am down! Sign me up,' She decisively replied. Halia had just traded her old motorcycle for a new Kawasaki Ninja and was dying to race it. She was perhaps a skinny and petite Asian girl, and made a fragile, cute first impression, but in fact she could stand up to any man on the asphalt, being more fearless than most of the boys and more than ready to burn her rubber.
Today though, although it was Saturday, she was off to a business meeting. She had just incorporated her own startup, having received substantial funding for the first six months, and without hesitation, she had quit her daytime job as business analyst for a top financial firm, and jumped into the pool of entrepreneurs that formed the powerful heartbeat of New York. Today was the first presentation to a board of advisors and she was going to push hard to step to the plate.
Success came like a hard blow and she was set to throw the punches. And as she thought hard about success, parading with a soldier's step, she did not forget why men love bitches.

Les Pensées

He had always avoided making eye contact with strangers in public, but once he looked at them, Artaud knew he had never realized before, the intense river of loneliness that streamed out of people's eyes, and scared by what he saw he quickly scurried along.

Inspiration: Guillaume Apollinaire

BS: trash vagina love splash

Music and Melody

Listen, somewhere drums are playing or if not drums then the heels of shoes against the pavement beneath your window or perhaps it's the group of men gathered and shouting and erecting scaffolding across the street. A car crash could be a percussion solo. But is that enough? The drone of static from the television offers something in the way of accompaniment, a discordant hum that could be from a bagpipe or accordion. But can you really call that a song? Try humming one of your favorite tunes to a friend. No, wait! Don't pick out the melody, hum something else instead, the partenership of hi-hat and snare perhaps or the bass progression. Do they recognize it? No? Hmm... Well look, what if against the backdrop of all this noise, the banging of scaffolding and things, you are expected to produce something in the way of melody? After all, how else can you expect others to understand that you exist? And that daily pottering and meandering from room to room, fetching a coffee here and tidying a bed there won't be enough either. No, you'll need to make a more definite noise I think, and quickly too, before the television leans into his solo and steals everyone's attention.

Faces (11)

(11) His spiky Asian hair was carefully aimed into random directions, the color balanced by the black framed eye glasses, as the corners of his dry lips hang downward, adding a melancholic but not sad expression to his saggy face.

Faces (9-10)

(9) A halo of sprayed, blond-reddish hair, pale, freckled bony cheeks, under the cover of silver-blue eye-shadow, a black glitter shirt sliding off her round shoulder, legs, and the seductive hard lines of black, five-inch pumps, touched the asphalt, and stepped out of the yellow frame, at the moment the photographer on the pavement captured her on the cab's back seat. (10) Her black cheeks were full and round, like her double D breasts resting against the table top's side, on her round but small nose rested the black frame of oval shaped glasses, while the back of her relaxed hair curled in a wide curve around her neck.

The Trilogy of the Father (2): The Father

"Why?" the little girl asked, sitting on her father's lap. The father placed his firm hand on her little, brisk shoulder and certain of the persuasion of his answer, he replied with a deep, soft voice that that's simply how things were. Back then, such an assurance by her father proved sufficient to solve her little worries. But somehow, now that her life seemed to have become so much more complicated, her adult mind struggled to accept any longer such matter of fact evidence. Maybe the questions in her life had become too complex to be solved by a fatherly hand on the shoulder, her life seemed mingled in a web of abstractions, or maybe her mind had become too demanding to settle for the simplicity of a child's answers, real concerns requiring concrete solutions. Her father was still alive, living a few hours away from the city, but for some reason the effect of her father's assurances, that still echoed that same paternal simplicity, that's simply how things are, sounded too distant to be audible any longer, drowned by the boisterous voices of practical concerns. What's is the matter with me? Am I not attractive? Am I too demanding? Are men afraid of a strong, independent woman, who holds the strings of her life in her own hands? Her father on the other hand had cried of pride when she had graduated from law school. He had never told her directly, but her mother spoke to her about how he told everyone that she was a lawyer in New York now, with her own mid-town office and with important clients working on deals worth hundreds of millions of dollars. But to Halia, it was not she who lived in an ivory tower disconnected from the world of ordinary mediocrity, to her it was her father who was the one on the pedestal, whom she respected more than anyone, for his strong will, his determination, having come to America as a hard working immigrant, sacrificing everything to be able to send his daughter to the best schools in the country, working mornings to evenings, to sacrifice himself to advance his children. Was it too much too ask then, to just want to be loved?

The Trilogy of the Father (1): The Son

Halia was intelligent, successful and beautiful, and did not need any man to look after her. Still, men played an important role in her life. It seemed that she suffered not alone from a wider disease of her time that affected mostly big-city professional women, and which had been diagnosed so strikingly in the television hit Sex and the City. Men on the other hand, of all walks of life, class and race, remained immune for this epidemic, or as Halia saw it, they rather leeched off of this disease of women to feed their egos, although technically leeches were hermaphrodites, but like leeches men eat their prey whole. And thus, when it came to men, Halia felt sucked dry. Asked if she would ever sacrifice her career and ambitions to sooth a man to devote himself to her, she answered resolutely no, absolutely not. But at the same time, there was nothing she craved more than a man to worship her, and she wondered if she had sacrificed herself already being without a man who loved her more than he loved himself. She thought of the goddess worship of Cybele in Ephesos, where Halia had vacationed last summer. Later, in early Christianity , the widespread goddess worship was replaced by the cult of Maria as the mother of Christ at the Council of Ephesos. What had happened in three thousand years that she now lived under the firmly established autocracy of men? In this patriarchal status quo, it apparently was too much a loss of face for men to love a woman beyond themselves. Is that what Gogol meant in his story The Nose? Do men really think that a loss of power threatens their success with women? Then how was it possible that all women with power were still single? Halia did not need a man to take care of her, but she did need a man to love her. Yet, she was intelligent, successful and beautiful.

Les Pensées

Artaud looked at the only lighted window in the facade across the street and watched the tiny colored silhouette. The girl in the window was in a way very familiar, but she remained also very distant.

Cityscape: PS1 Warm Up 2010

PS1 Warm Up 2010

Bournemouth, September 2010

Les Pensées

Artaud couldn't help but overhear the conversation of a couple at the next table. She was thrilled and he was excited, they held hands and observed each other obsessively. Artaud was shocked to see so much happiness from such horrific platitudes and felt sad.

Ode to Joy or Is This Madness?

The ninth symphony from Beethoven started playing with a short cacophony that abruptly ended, which I recognized as the Ode to Joy. I entered, drunk with fire. An expression of madness had hardened on my face, unable to crack its stiffness. And in this madness, I jumped on top of her, and as if we were connected by an elastic, she bounced off me in fear, equally mad. And in this madness, everything was colored purple, as if we had stamped our feet wildly in the grape press, the juices splattering her skin, pale like a ghost, and mine, fiercely red from crazy blood. My hands fumbled her fleshy tits, she felt extra soft from the flowered cotton that covered her still, while my pelvis sank between her thighs, which by my weight spread apart. I felt her legs kicking, jerking along my legs that pressed her to the ground, as my drunken wet lips pressed firmly against her neck, I nibbled her nose, out of which she breathed like a wild bull. Although she was screaming, I only heard the rustling of the madness pumping the same crazy blood through my head, and all I saw was the grotesque hollow opening of her mouth. My insanity only increased, her eyes were fire sparkling into the air and waves of sea water rushing ashore, both intoxicating me with an earthly force that I believe was a sensation of happiness. Oneness with the world, oneness with her, I had for the first time in my life, made contact with another human being. I pulled her skirt up, felt her naked thighs, soft fat flesh squeezing against my hard and bony hips. I spit in her mouth, which closed in a quick jerk, as she tried to spit but could only swallow. Her fists still beating against the back of my head, which felt numb. I felt a strong urge to drink, grabbed the wine on the table, and as I in the same, one movement reached for the bottle, I pushed my erection in her vagina, and pushed against the opening of her uterus. Into the sanctuary of this heavenly daughter. Her breasts were now rocking like dead plasma up and down over her chest, her hands strangled me without force. I wondered if this was madness.

Islands

There was a time when living in Manchester he had woken gripped with fear and a sense of loss. Who am I? He had asked. What have I lost? He had hurried into the kitchen and drunk straight from the tap, slurping water from his hand before rubbing it accross his face. The coolness of the laminate floor against his feet and the suddenness of the water soothed him. He filled the sink and contorting his body into some unnatural pose plunged his face in. He stood on tip toes, his chest pressed hard against the outer edge of the sink.

He hadn't liked the sky up there. She'd said, I don't know, you can lose yourself in a sky as grey as that, all those layers of cloud to sift through,it helps me think. But don't you miss the water he'd said, don't you forget we're on an island? What water? She said.

The Infinite Loop of Commonplaces

I am so happy for you! The mother hugs the child as they say their farewells at the entrance of the child's dormitory. Of course the mother is not happy at all. She has only just recovered from a depression. The father stands aside, still struggling to overcome his sadness for the loss of their child. They will go home now to an empty house without life, without purpose, soon it will be autumn, then winter.
At home in autumn in an empty house, the wife asks the husband: and how do you feel? In a monotonous voice he replies that it is tough, that he misses their conversations. But many more will follow, conversations between two adults. Of course. Both uphold a face of coping strength.
During breakfast it remains quiet. While scraping his scrambled egg to his plate's edge, the father asks what they should do for dinner. They laugh cause they're only midway during breakfast.
The mother says love is unselfish and good, but that dependency is selfish and bad. She read a book by an eastern philosopher and thought this was very true. He nods. Any plans for the weekend? They change the subject of their conversation.

Faces (7-8)

(7) Before him lay an open notebook with black cover and lines written in black ink and a cursive, steady handwriting. His hands with widespread fingers, a slight laugh on his lips, and slow movements of his head, emphasized only the calm of his mind. (8) Her straight hair was bleached and reached her shoulders. The bags under her eyes, her reddish tanned skin, her stretched flat lips, and her coarse, boisterous voice revealed an inclination for addiction.

Les Pensées

Artaud turned left at Saks Fifth Avenue, the area they called euphemistically hedge fund alley, here the rich made and spent their fortunes, and entered the lobby of Rockefeller Center. There he was stunned and admired the mural by Diego Rivera called Man At The Crossroads.

Deja Vu of the Meaning of Life

I am a bit in between. In between what I don't exactly know. But I will soon figure it out and escape it. Every little observation I get trapped between one and the other, but I don't seem to be able to be in perfect sync with what it is that I am observing. This constant feeling of deja vu of the ordinary, the constant thought that everything is happening twice. All that I see for the first time, has a dusty layer of familiarity. The odd sensation that everything has happened already, that I am just an old witness, as if staring at the rerun of an old tv series. The worst of it all is that nothing of it makes any sense. I am staring at it as if I don't understand it. Of course there's nothing to understand. There's nothing to think of what is happening. The old white woman with her black untailored shirt and pants, the young black woman with her distinguished eyes whose toes point toward another, the small groups of New York police academy cadets that cross the street, the yellow cabs that color the road, it all just takes place without a particular meaning.

Inspiration: Interview with Anne Carson

"The form hasn't emerged yet of the thing I'm working on."
- Anne Carson

Anne Carson is a poet, essayist, and scholar of classics who lives in Montreal.



Wikipedia: Anne Carson

The Village Post Office

Can't complain she said, her voice barely audible above the ruckus of stapling and clicking from behind the office window. Of course there is my back. The Post Master slowed his stamping. To ignore the comment would bring minutes of blissful silence, to show interest would be nothing less than slow death. But sometimes, he thought, staring death in the face is perhaps preferable to passing your days with nothing but stamp books and the dull clunk of a second hand for company. Others have sports cars and roller coasters he surmised, I have old women. Oh yes, and what's wrong with your back?

Old Friends

Herman hugged his goat as they drove off in the back of the trailer. Bob had Korsakoff disease, he couldn't remember much, he didn't even know what had happened. Herman moved for the tenth time, his last resort was Salvation Army, but he preferred sleeping in his car. When Hermann saw Ben come around the corner he lost his temper and flew at him, his fists taking relentless punches at his face. Jan rambled on about his broken marriage, his sixth, he forgave her, but could not stop accusing her. She never loved him. Jos picked up his guitar and begun singing. Jos had been rejected numerous times by most record companies. Bob died of a heart attack. His wife Hermien had moved back to Jan several months after they had broken up. Hermien was sick, Jan took care of her. She drank. A month later he was arrested. It was around that time that Jos and Jan heard about Bob's death. Herman had started a business in second hand goods, but was closed down after welfare found out he was using his money to run his business. Jos earned money playing Jewish music at weddings, during the day he drove the taxi for senior citizens. Jan was released and lost a lot of weight. Herman lived with a decent woman for a few months. Jos realized he never knew his friends. Jan cried when Hermien called him and told him she missed him. All I could think was that these are real fucking people.

Thought Soup 090610

My CD collection is a mess. No case contains its partnering CD and so listening to music becomes a perpetual game of lucky dip. This stressed me at first but now I'm actually starting to come round to it. So long as I know beforehand that I have no control over my aural landscape it feels good to just throw myself against it. Dazzle Ships, I keep coming back to Dazzle Ships for some reason. Vorticist artist Edward Wadsworth moved on from creating Vorticist woodcuts to painting dazzle camouflage for allied ships during the first world war. The figured that since no ship could be hidden entirely at sea it would be better to make their camouflage patterns as confusing as possible. Silence is either horror or happiness but very rarely something in between I think. It is surprising how horrific the Freudian Uncanny can be. Returning home is something like diving head first into a deep pool of uncanny. Everything becomes the same but different, you see yourself at 16 years old walking down the same streets you wandered along at 18 and then again at 28. To double the horror, try putting all of your new clothing to wash and having to wear whatever still fits from your teenage years. The Gothic boy who worked at our local corner store is still there but now he has cut his long hair, is going bald and has grown a beard. he looks like a very respectable 40 year old man but he can only be 22 at most.

The Unhappy Patient

Felix Krull lived on Roebling street in South Williamsburg. He was an artist. That is, many people believed he was. He made post-Rauschenberg assemblages, which sold fairly well, not enough to make a name for himself, but enough to make a living as an artist, and of course he was a photographer like everyone else. His most acclaimed work, which even was featured in an obscure art magazine published in Oklahoma by an independent small publisher whom he had found through the listing in the 2009 Writer's Market and later had spoken over the phone for a long-distance interview, was a guitar assemblage of a M249 toy water gun that served as the neck and a speaker box integrated into the iron cover of an old land mower. Of course, most of his shows had been black and white photographs of his neighborhood and portraits of people whom he met at art gallery openings, exhibited at anonymous cafes and a few bars that he would frequent. The biggest question that lately had occupied Felix was 'Is unhappiness a physical illness?', a question which had not found its way yet into representation in his photographs, and to which he had not found a definitive question yet, but he fore felt that it would occupy a central place in his next series of assemblages.

Faces (1-6)

(1) Her eyes were fully hidden behind her mirrored Ray Ban sunglasses, her flat nose and her pouching lips, crunched into the shape of a fist's clasp, as if she was trying to grab my attention, her perfectly dark olive skin gave her a warm reception, but her boxer's face punched right back in your guts. (2) A white bearded man with a scruffy ball of hair extending to his neck, wearing a baseball cap walked with a stiff torso, but his mousy eyes jittering back and forth, nervously changing and never locking down on any fixed point, seemed to tell me he wasn't very at ease in the city, but he really was never given the choice, and it was kind of too late now. (3) A table down, a pale woman with tanned sunglasses, with shabby upper arms and scattered sunspots, tears a piece of transparent tape off and tapes another receipt on a letter format blanc sheet of paper, dotting down a note, which she encircles. (4) An Hispanic with dark muscled arms, covered with tribal tattoos, swings his shoulders and hips, hustler style, super fly manner, wearing a small hat with a narrow brim, and in the band sticks a gray feather, while his head marked by a hawk's nose and wide nostrils, rotates scanning the periphery of his proxemics to catch people noticing his presence. (5) A lanky Chinaman, with a Vietnamese expression, and greasy hair combed backward, his dark blue checkered shirt hanging down to this knees, leans forward to balance the weight of the shiny trash bag on his back. (6) Her dark eyes looked like soft candy rolling down her reddish, girly cheeks, as she bit her thin lips with her canine teeth, and while she straightened her plain red summer dress, I almost melted for her kind impression, until her voice spoke in a deliberate intention and her straight laughter revealed only a shallow confidence, and I deeply disliked her.

Les Pensées

Artaud woke up in the middle of night, somewhere in the grid of the city in a stranger's bed. In a state of half sleep, he ran through the floor labyrinth of Reims, looking for the virgin at the end of the labyrinth, the woman whore, the vagina dentata that would swallow him, devour him, and liberate man.