Susan Seddon Boulet
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- VERMILION's TEXT -
[Communique: 12.31.02]
"Marcos is gay in San Francisco, black in South Africa, an Asian in Europe, a Chicano in San Ysidro, an anarchist in Spain, a Palestinian in Israel, a Mayan Indian in the streets of San Cristobal, a Jew in Germany, a Gypsy in Poland, a Mohawk in Quebec, a pacifist in Bosnia, a single woman on the Metro at 10 pm, a peasant without land, a gang member in the slums, an unemployed worker, an unhappy student and, of course, a Zapatista in the mountains."
... Though there is no confirmation of Marcos's real identity, the most repeated legend that surrounds him goes like this: an urban Marxist intellectual and activist, Marcos was wanted by the state and was no longer safe in the cities. He fled to the mountains of Chiapas in southeast Mexico filled with revolutionary rhetoric and certainty, there to convert the poor indigenous masses to the cause of armed proletarian revolution against the bourgeoisie. He said the workers of the world must unite, and the Mayans just stared at him. They said they weren't workers and, besides, land wasn't property but the heart of their communities. Having failed as a Marxist missionary, Marcos immersed himself in Mayan culture. The more he learned, the less he knew.
Out of this process, a new kind of army emerged, the EZLN defined itself in terms of not being controlled by an elite of guerrilla commanders but by the communities themselves, through clandestine councils and open assemblies. 'Our army', says Marcos, 'became scandalously Indian.' That meant that he wasn't a commander barking orders, but a subcomandante, a conduit for the will of the councils. His first words said in the new persona were: '[t]hrough me speaks the will of the Zapatista National Liberation Army.'
It's tempting to dismiss the Zapatista model as only being applicable to Indigenous struggles, but that is to miss the point entirely. The reason why there are there are now 45,000 Zapatista-related websites, why Marcos's communiquŽs are available in at least 14 languages, and why 22 Zapatista books have been written and 12 documentaries made, is that there is something about the theory of Zapatismo that reaches far beyond Chiapas. It has to do, I think, with the very definition of revolution -- and where power should truly rest. A few years ago, the idea of the Zapatista command travelling to Mexico City to address the congress would have been impossible to imagine. The prospect of masked guerrillas (even masked guerrillas who have left their arms at home) entering a hall of political power signals one thing: revolution. But when the Zapatistas travelled to Mexico City in March 2001, they weren't interested in overthrowing the state or naming their leader as president. In fact, when they finally gained entrance to the Congress, they left Marcos outside.
- Naomi Klein on Subcomandante Marcos Coming up: NYC mini-
Social Forum, January 11, 2003.
[Communique: 12.29.02]
I have found myself, in the last few years of my life, in the most difficult place I have ever been in my writing, because my personal life has been more of a struggle, my relationship with my partner has been very difficult, and I think that the persona that I chose to live through in my music way back in the day was somewhat more heroic than I can really muster now. So my writing now, it's still very personal, but its much more difficult to show oneself in shame or in regret or in confusion or contradiction or all of these things that I now find I have to write about...
When I began to write songs, the inherent feminism and the inherent heroism of that young woman writing, it was about reconstructing my life through song and through work. And I found that the first verse is "what happened," the second verse is "what I did," and the third verse is "what I'm going to do next time." And now I find I can write a whole song without ever having a heroic moment, or a transcendence, and there's a new voice that I'm struggling to use, which is "this is what happened again, this is what I did again, and this is how dark it makes me feel..."
- Ani Difranco on ABC News
"It was about reconstructing my life through song and through work..." This has to be the central criterion of the artist's work. It is not enough to want to create a powerful cultural product; the process of creation must be integral to the artist's life. One does not live, love, and then make art about it. The art must be a form of life, a form of love. You don't travel and then make work about it; you travel through the work, with the work, because of the work. You don't learn and then teach; you learn by teaching. In this way your life's work is tied to the work of your life: it is strong while you are strong, it grows alongside you like a longtime companion, and it lives until you die.
To be glib while another is suffering is very shallow... but to let their pain overwhelm you and become your own, that is also a little bit shallow, a little bit not-present. To be really present would free you to continue being yourself -- in a love that can accept difference, a smile that can remember death, a life that can feel the buzz of its own mortality.
I am learning things now that I have never learned before. The teachers are new this time around, but I have been preparing for the past three years. Finally I can remember what the stakes are. Finally I can listen and stop being defensive so much of the time...
I just feel more comfortable, if I'm in an airport, with something on my head that says "I am not with this." I dont know how more specificlaly to say it other than to take days elaborating the shame and the anger I feel at my country and the vehemence that I feel about fighting the destruction and the violence that my country perpetrates in my name... This airport security theater of turning over every leaf is meaningless when youur government is watering the roots of violence, and putting American lives more and more in danger every day. So having a bunch of people in white shirts at the airport is, ah, I want it to be known that I am not with it.
[Communique: 12.29.02]
"I AM NOT WITH THIS."
[Communique: 12.28.02]
Something happened in me that I no longer wanted to be in a band that wanted to be famous and go on tour. I just wanted to do something that was ours. I guess it was firmly planting myself in the underground, not after some kind of success that my parents would like.
I am thinking of going to Rubulad tonight.
There are two new projects in "development" at junk river...
I can't believe it's almost 2003.
[Communique: 12.23.02]
I find no more constant source of inspiration than Ani Difranco.
"... It seemed like even the good guys were handing out bad contracts. I just decided I didn't need it that bad. It turns out I was right, but I got lucky. I decided it wasn't worth it to me to compromise myself personally or artistically. I didn't want to work with business people in my life."
"... For me it was always a political thing, you know. I just don't like big money capitalism. I don't like big corporations. I think that record companies are there to make money. They could be selling microchips or oil, or whatever. It's just CDs you know. And I'm not interested in partnering up, as you say, with people who have that kind of mentality. It's just big business. And I'm much more interested in art and social movements, and music that's created outside of that corporate structure. I kind of grew up in the folk music world, and there's so much beautiful music that's made without a commercial thought, you know, and that's the way I want to live. And I just felt like there's no way that you can live that way and work on a major label."
"... It was a joke in the beginning. Very theoretical, like 'I have my own record company,' which means that I just put out a tape independently."
Ani is married. What are we?
"... I guess bisexual. I'm so used to that label, but I always call myself queer. I like the word queer, cuz it sounds funny, queer ha-ha. It's a cool word. It means, like, the kind of love I experience is not the kind of love that's on TV."
Liner notes to the first album (RBR-001):
"... I speak without reservation from what I know and who I am. I do so with the understanding that all people should have the right to offer their voice to the chorus whether the result is harmony or dissonance, the worldsong is a colorless dirge without the differences which distinguish us, and it is that difference which should be celebrated and not condemned. Should any part of my music offend you, please do not close your ears to it. Just take what you can use and go on."
Proposed lineup for the Rolling Thunder Pussy Revue (compare with Lilith Fair): Oumou Sangare, Tribe 8, Lucinda Williams, Salt-N-Pepa, Mary Margaret O'Hara, Queen Latifah, Me'Shell Ndegeocello, Bonnie Raitt, Sheila E...
[Communique: 12.21.02]
- made some theater
It's been a very good week.
[Communique: 12.18.02]
Responsibility and delight can coexist.
- Philip Pullman
12:15 PM - I didn't go to work. Instead I lay gleefully in bed and finished The Amber Spyglass, third and final volume of Philip Pullman's rich SF/Fantasy crossover epic His Dark Materials. Meanwhile my housemate left and came immediately back to report that the L train was not running. Therefore I have the gift of prophecy.
In the books there is a compass-like scrying device known as the alethiometer. At first the girl Lyra can read it intuitively, surpassing all the most aged and venerable scholars and their heavy reference books. But when she grows up, she finds that she has lost this ability. An angel tells her:
You read it by Grace, and you can regain it by work.
So many things we do by grace, and then cry foul when that grace is gone. But we don't start from nowhere; we have a childhood. By the time we can ask who we are, we are already someone. By the time we can travel, we already have a home. The first bit of life we accomplish by grace, and after that comes the work. This is not chronologically true; it is fractal. Every endeavor is begun by grace and completed with work. By the time we know what we are building, the groundwork has already been laid.
The present is a knife-edge between what we have done and what we must yet do. Each moment that we spend finishing one project, we are setting the foundations for the next, although we do not know it.
And then...
"But there's my mother. I've got to go back and look after her. I just left her with Mrs. Cooper, and it's not fair on either of them."
"But it's not fair on you to have to do that."
"No," he said, "But that's a different sort of not fair. That's just like an earthquake or a rainstorm. It might not be fair, but no one's to blame. But if I just leave my mother with an old lady who isn't very well herself, then that's a different kind of not fair. That would be wrong."
I used to call this the difference between sweet pain and bitter pain, but now I know that those words are wrong, for sweet pain is not sweet, and bitter pain not always bitter. The difference matters, though, whatever it may be called. It's all we have to comfort us after the earthquakes, after the rainstorms, after the sickness unto death.
This is for a friend in mourning.
[Communique: 12.18.02]
9:20 AM - Deciding whether to go to work today... There are all kinds of reasons why not to. I don't feel like it; I don't feel well; I might not make any money; I didn't make any money the last day I worked; I made $300 last week; my show is tonight; I want to get there early; I want to bring the video camera myself; I want to finish the book I'm reading...
And why should I go? Only because I want to be supporting myself and I'm not. Because I don't want to set a precedent for laziness. But the most important thing is that if I decide not to go, I have to appreciate the day as a beautiful gift, I can't feel guilty or stressed out. If I'm going to do that, I might as well go. So what's it going to be? Of all the voices in my head, which one transcends the neurosis and speaks the truth?
Lyra and Will are falling in love in the book I'm reading.
I made pancakes this morning with eggs from November. That may have been a mistake.
neverland is tonight. The first of three.
[Communique: 12.14.02]
I was going to write about a version of The Devil and Billy Markham that I saw tonight... I was going to write about a strange solo show called Gloaca Maxima that came on afterwards... I was going to say that I thought it was a work of rough genius, a genuine reconstructive pastiche, a cartoonish expressionististic spasm, a liminal rant, a parade of superheroes on drugs...
But there is bad news from a friend. A death in the family, not yet but fast approaching. The suddenness of the cold wind. The helplessness to help. The words crunching hurting tumbling, love that isn't enough, the bitterness of death. It is not deserved. Sickness... It is not deserved...
[Communique: 12.13.02]
4:47 AM - After rehearsal for love/sad tonight me and Timmy went and saw phone / sex / cancer at the WOW Cafe. And then we stayed on for The Reality Show, which ended around 2 AM. Mmm, dykes...
Me and Timmy are such dykes. Leslie would hate me for saying that but if she wants to complain then she is welcome to write to me. Until then I will continue to actively define and re-define and think of myself as some kind of post-bear soft-butch dyke-boy.
After the show we went out for coffee. Now it is almost five o'clock in the morning, the sun is about the rise, and I am too tired to write about the important thing I remembered Peter Lamborn Wilson saying on Wednesday...
And holy shite! Someone is doing The Devil and Billy Markham at The Space on 14th Street! (And their website has the complete text with illustrations!)
[Communique: 12.13.02]
Vermilion's Text is 1 year old today.
[Communique: 12.10.02]
I sold 14 books of tickets today! Woohoo!
neverland is next week. You are invited.
I saw Peter Lamborn Wilson speak tonight.
- CHAOS DAY REDUX - Spiritual Anarchism: A return to the lost history of spiritualism in anarchism. Anarchism is not a product of the Enlightenment. Anarchism is not post-rational or inherently rationalistic. Anarchism is not a recent idea. We have been cut off from too many ancestors by the Marxist / materialist rejection of spirtualism as a kind of religion.
Do we have a tradition? Where can we find inspiration for a new (green) anarchism? Is there a "genealogy of resistance"? Yes! And if there is a historian of that genealogy, then Peter Lamborn Wilson is it.
Spiritual Anarchism: Topics for Research: Rome destroyed the radical Christians! Stalin destroyed the anarchists! The Lutheran Reformation destroyed the spiritualists! Cromwell destroyed the diggers, the ranters, the levellers, and the antinomians! Everywhere in history it is the same: Revolution becomes hegemony and those who remain radical are purged. They are our ancestors! They are not all lost to us!
Finding anarchism in Christianity... Jesus the army general? Jesus the mushroom! Jesus the anarchist! You can have any Jesus you want!
Between the Greek cynics and the Enlightenment, there is a lost history of Christian anarchists. We need to reread the heretics. Every heresy an spark of anarchism! Thomas Paine writing on Druid Freemasonry. "Upstate New York was the California of the 19th Century New Age."
The problem of gnostic dualism haunts anarchism. In turning away from "religion" there is the danger of falling into the blind worship of science... A kind of asexuality, hypermaterialism, that haunts us. See Adorno on "the cruel instrumentality of reason." Too many of the 19th Century "anarchists" were progressives! As in "progress," i.e. the Conquest of Nature! Atheistic materialism is just as spooky as God-fearing faith! For where is the proof that God does not exist?
Someone in the audience mentions Kurt Goedel's Theorum of Incompleteness. Perhaps there is a kind of mysticism to be found there, in statements that are true but cannot be proven... Yes, of course: Strange loops! And this has not only been pointed out but has been illustrated and analyzed by Hofstadter in Goedel, Escher, Bach. PLW has not read this yet. He should.
"Advertising is relentless, and there is no way to explain it. It is magic." The ad-men and Public Relations people from Goebbels to whoever does Philip Morris, they are the heirs to the magi, the priest who first took power and ceased to be shamans, the wizards who installed puppet kinds. There are powerful sorcerers in the land today. Our little magics are weak against them. McDonalds marches on. What can we do against these imperial spells? We need to understand how this magic is worked. We can't rely on psychology alone to understand how culture shapes society. We need to study HERMETICS!
We need to study heiroglyphics! Walter Benjamin and Brecht and Giordano Bruno. See also Ammon Hannessy's book on spiritual anarchism! See also Harry Smith, hunchback dwarf beatnik surrealism film-maker Bishop. Omar Khaddafi was an anarchist! To cite is not to condone! We are looking for our anarchist ancestors, without judgment. Anarchism is not one thing. Anarchism is not perfect. Anarchism is not a new idea.
All of this spells out mystical humanism, which as I have argued previously can also be described as reconstructive postmodernism. "The world is beautiful."
But I am older now than when I wrote that, and now I would say: The world is both beautiful and ugly. The world is the world. (See also the sound referred to in Siddhartha as the "Om" of all voices and in The Color Purple as the HUMM of "everything.")
[Communique: 12.05.02]
Everybody go see Radiohole at PS122.
None of It: More or Less Hudson's Bay, Again follows two toxic twins as they chase the Aurora Borealis on a dog sled loaded down with Pepsi and compressed medical gasses. Naked and high, they fly across the frozen tundra of Hudson's Bay through the endless night on the road to Utopia.
A junk aesthetic. A wreck of science fiction. Chemical advertisements and folding hospital beds. It starts with a murder. In the last moment before sunset, two girls - Inuit, Canadian, manic - overdose on soda and nitrous oxide in front of a gleaming Pepsi machine as bright as a star. As snow falls and pop music waxes, a man at a desk describes the unhappy lives of the Eskimo people. Plaid kilts, bionic wrists, and thickly-furred hoods... It's all very moving, and it comes with everything you see here.
The resemblance to The Golden Compass is striking. I am not kidding. "The Idea of North..." Schizophrenic daemons abound.
Radiohole is good. They are at the edge. I love it. Especially the end. Afterwards I talked to Eric Dyer about the company, and his words made me very happy. Radiohole has two things that I want, two things I don't know how to find, two things I can hardly bear to think of because my desire is so strong. 1) An ensemble. 2) A space. But Eric told me the ensemble formed out of working together -- they didn't meet in college or at some special workshop -- and that makes sense to me. They did a show together, and it worked, and so they did another, and another. And Eric told me he went door-to-door in Williamsburg looking for a space until luck brought him to a bar with an unused garage.
All things are possible.
Afterwards me and Timmy went to "The 24-Hour Diner" and talked about art. We are planning a dinner there, a sort of conference for artists or something. We are considering possible structures, topics, and generative schemes... Will we produce a manuscript? Could this be the third Mnemosyne project?
Mnemosyne I: The Weave
[Communique: 12.03.02]
Working on the street all day you understand in a new way how cold it is out there. What can I say, except thank fucking god I am not homeless. The cold is brutal, and people kick you out of anywhere warm unless you're buying something. How can it be that we have built a civilization in which some people just don't get to come inside? Today me and Jim went up to the top of the Empire State Building and looked out across New York City. The view up towards midtown was especially surreal: All those buildings with their tiny square lit windows made it look strangely flat, like a computer-generated image. It was even colder up there. When we finally left I felt as though I were plunging down into a new city, entering it in a new way... from above. We live in a city. Sometimes it's hard to understand what that means.
The Golden Compass is perhaps not a great book in the grandest sense of the word, but I am quite enjoying it. It is what they call a page-turner. The most important thing for me so far is the image of the armored bears, or panserbjoerne. One night last year I looked through Leah Abel's deck of animal spirits drawn by Susan Boulet. I was supposed to pick a card at random to find my totem, but I have never liked such methods. Instead I examined the cards one by one until I found the one that spoke to me most profoundly. It was a bear.
"Why do daemons have to settle? I want [mine] to be able to change forever."
"Ah, they always have settled, and they always will. That's part of growing up. There'll come a time when you'll be tired of his changing about, and you'll want a settled kind of form for him... Anyway, there's compensations for a settled form."
"What are they?"
"Knowing what kind of person you are. Take [mine]. She's a seagull, and that means I'm a kind of seagull too. I'm not grand and splendid nor beautiful, but I'm a tough old thing and I can survive anywhere and always find a bit of food and company. That's worth knowing, that is. And when your daemon settles, you'll know the sort of person you are."
"But suppose your daemon settles in a shape you don't like?"
"Well, then, you're discontented, en't you? There's plenty of folks as'd like to have a lion as a daemon and they end up with a poodle. And till they learn to be satisfied with what they are, they're going to be fretful about it. Waste of feeling, that is."
- Philip Pullman
When I was younger I wanted to be a cat. These days my daemon is still in flux, but maybe something is coming clear to me that I could not see or accept before. I am not a skinny tranny boy. I am not a little raver kid or a chick singer. I am not small, but I am warm. I am not crazy, although I do have a wildness in me. I cannot run, but I can walk forever. Today I sold comedy club tickets to a man who is organizing a conference of big hairy gay men, or "bears." I am not one of those either. I am a different kind of bear. I like Susan Boulet's painting a lot.
Elanit Kayne is getting rid of everything she owns. It is all in a big room at 129 West 42nd Street, with history marked on it instead of price tags. You can go and haggle for anything you want. Today I traded her twenty dollars and a complementary viewing of neverland in exchange for a pair of pewter cups and a can-opener. The cups are beautiful, and they have "Elanit" inscribed upon them. One day I hope to drink blood-red wine out of them with a friend, and we will speak of Elanit the way the Knights of the Round Table spoke of the Lady of the Lake -- and wasn't one of that lady's many names Elaine? The can-opener will be more immediately useful, as it will hopefully end a struggle that takes place several times a day in this house: The eternal battle between human and can.
And now it is time to sleep.
[Communique: 12.02.02]
I went to another "Diversalog" at NYU tonight. It was the best one yet, and probably the best thing I've ever been to at NYU. The topic, roughly, was theater and class. The panel members were Jan Cohen-Cruz, Metta Dael, Kamilah Forbes, Paul Griffin, and Marty Pottenger. The audience kicked ass too, except for one guy who royally pissed me off with his idiotic arrogance.
On theater:
When I was young, one day, my mother was depressed -- which was not uncommon. I don't know why, but I put a wastepaper basket on my head and did a little dance around the room. My mom burst out laughing, and I thought to myself: "Wow -- This shit is powerful."
- Marty Pottenger
Someone in the audience asked the panel members to articulate their most radical longings, their most profound desires, their most inspirational visions. I got to thinking about mine, and I came up with an image: a laboratory of meaning, a room where the moment-to-moment transformation of culture is visible. Humans make meaning all the time. The history that I understand is the history of the production of meaning. First you have to wear these clothes, then those clothes, then no clothes at all, and meanwhile we talk about what the clothing signifies, how it should be changed, who should where what, and why... Brought into the laboratory of theater, all of that history is the work of costuming. And every element of theater (shape, story, text, design, dance, song, psychology, imagery, etc.) is the performative study of an aspect of cultural history.
In every kind of theater, there are directors who plunge headlong into the public to develop their work, and directors who hide themselves away to delve deeply into the quest for specific perfections. All the people on this panel are out there making community theater right now. Indeed, when we talk about theater and class, or theater and race, we tend to think about "community theater" of this kind. Alternately, when we think about the isolated work of Grotowski or Brook, we tend to assume that the work is "universal" rather than culturally specific. But is this assumption valid? Certainly there is open, communal work in the public realm that claims to be universal. Could there not also be an isolated, sacred, priestlike order of performance artists who would investigate cultural issues like race, class, and gender?
That is my longing, as deep and radical as I can imagine -- so far.
Oh, and by the way -- I think my daemon is a bear.
"What question would you ask of the Consul of the Witches?"
"I would ask where I could obtain the services of an armored bear."
- Philip Pullman
[Communique: 12.01.02]
... what kind of paradise am i looking for? - Ani / "Grey"
Back home in Brooklyn after Thanksgiving.
Projects for December: This hyperlinked lyrics server is pretty cool.
There will be more to say soon enough. Meanwhile I have to go to sleep. The November text has been archived. I am reading The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman, on my sister's recommendation. It has been a while since I read a novel, let alone sci-fi / fantasy of any kind. But it is quite enjoyable...
I am thinking of a theater that combines the pleasurably romantic emotions of Tolkein and Star Wars with the reality of historical materialism and documentaries about war in the 20th century. A kind of genre-mixing that would be seen as poor taste...
... and every time i blink - Ani / "Grey"
Hits since 03/22/02:
in "Farewell to the 'End of History'"
- got a job interview at DTW
- saw Lord of the Rings
- hung out with Benny
- fell in love
Peter Lamborn Wilson (aka Hakim Bey)
noted / interpreted by Ben Spatz
17th Annual "Chaos Day" Lecture
(at the Brecht Forum)
Mnemosyne II: Jones Room Manifesto
Mnemosyne III: Between 1st & A?
i've got everything i want and still i want more
maybe some tiny shiny key
will wash up on the shore ...
- neverland
- love/sad
- Ross Miller's webpage
- still selling comedy club tix on the street
i have a tiny dream ...
vermilion's text = journal of a rootless cosmopolitan
all text by bspatz
return to anagnorisis