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- VERMILION's TEXT -
[Communique: 05.29.03]
Kody is right. Any "ideas" I give them now will only clog them up. What I can give them now must be in performance language: new props, new objects, even new rules if they are simple enough, but no new ideas. I can try to incarnate my ideas in objects and rules. But wait! Isn't this what I should have been doing all along? What a mistake to ever give actors ideas and concepts at all! It's like I just get some gratification by sharing those things with them. Yet their ideas also need to be part of it. It can't just be my ideas incarnated in performance objects and given to them like that. And I don't want to have to leave in order for them to feel free. I want them never to have been trying to please me in the first place. Therefore I must only be part of collaborative productions from now on. This is the last time I try to pretend that I am in charge. This is very good news.
I have immense power that I do not use. Bear-magic. I get tense instead of angry. I direct from objective distance instead of passion. I love as a victim instead of a body. But I am becoming no longer scared of my power. Becoming-bear, becoming-wolf... I am learning that it is also the wisest thing I have, more worthy of listening to than any of my doubts.
Wolves and tigers like Cieslak... You only have to release that energy, that power. It is already inside you. Feel it in the turn of your hand. There it is, and all over -- waiting.
[Communique: 05.28.03]
On a recent Wednesday night, Julie Atlas Muz took the stage at Low, a sleek little nightclub tucked under the Brooklyn Bridge. Ms. Muz, a contemporary-dance choreographer known for her outrageous conceptual burlesque numbers, eyed the audience with slyly coquettish abandon. The only thing ordinary about this striptease was her get-up: a tight black corset, garters and high heels.
As the speakers flooded the stage with Screamin' Jay Hawkins's "I Put a Spell on You," she began her dance in the usual come-hither manner, but soon revealed the twist: attached to the wrist she kept tucked behind her back was a bloody stump, which gave the appearance of a disembodied hand. The appendage tried not only to choke her but also to ravage her body. It was pure Ms. Muz: bawdy, satirical and unadulterated theater from beginning to end.
The burlesque revival itself is hardly new; Ms. Muz, typical of a group of choreographers who have redefined the form, began performing in 1998. Burlesque has gained so much momentum that now hardly a night goes by when there is not a show scheduled at a nightclub in Manhattan or Brooklyn.
The New York Times
[Communique: 05.27.03]
Your life is the sum of a remainder of an unbalanced equation inherent to the programming of the matrix. You are the eventuality of an anomaly, which despite my sincerest efforts I have been unable to eliminate from what is otherwise a harmony of mathematical precision. While it remains a burden to sedulously avoid it, it is not unexpected, and thus not beyond a measure of control. Which has led you, inexorably, here...
The first matrix I designed was quite naturally perfect, it was a work of art, flawless, sublime. A triumph equaled only by its monumental failure. The inevitability of its doom is as apparent to me now as a consequence of the imperfection inherent in every human being, thus I redesigned it based on your history to more accurately reflect the varying grotesqueries of your nature. However, I was again frustrated by failure...
As I was saying, [one of us] stumbled upon a solution whereby nearly 99.9% of all test subjects accepted the program, as long as they were given a choice, even if they were only aware of the choice at a near unconscious level. While this answer functioned, it was obviously fundamentally flawed, thus creating the otherwise contradictory systemic anomaly, that if left unchecked might threaten the system itself. Ergo, those that refused the program, while a minority, if unchecked, would constitute an escalating probability of disaster.
Architect, The Matrix Reloaded
In other words, the human organism dies if it can percieve (even subconsciously) the resolution of its world. Not only the sensory resolution (image quality, sound quality, etc.) but the infinite variability of the physical world (nothing ever falls or wobbles or flows the same way twice) must have extremely high resolution, resolution where the quanta are imperceptible or "analog." According to the architect, humans could not survive in a matrix with low resolution, where the quanta are perceptible or "digital."
We know that computers can detect quanta of higher resolution than humans, at least in the realm of the senses. For example, computers can tell us that compact discs store digital music even though humans cannot tell the difference. It seems likely that this would also be true in the realm of choice. In other words, couldn't the matrix be complex enough to fool humans into thinking they have infinite (analog) choice when in fact they just have very high-resolution (but still digital) choice? Perhaps. But suppose for a moment that this would not work. Suppose that humans can somehow tell the difference between digital and analog choice right down to the quantum level, or that digital computers will never be big or fast enough to calculate a reality of high enough resolution to fool humans. In that case, the only way to provide a matrix of sufficient complexity would be to link it to the "real" physical world.
Our generation of computer programs is digital. This means that what we call a computer program is founded on the "rounding off" of reality into discrete bits. A real computer component, because it is a physical object, is never perfectly on or off. But what we call "Microsoft Word" exists only to the extent that we can round off the differentials between on and off and treat the infinite physical states of a bit as perfectly 1 or 0. When our programs fail to round off in this way, when they are effected by events below the resolution of bits, we call the computer faulty. "Bad hard drive." Unable to store data cleanly.
But we have supposed that no digital program of this kind could fool humans into believing that it was analog. We have accepted for the moment that humans could only survive in an analog matrix, a matrix that is actually infinitely complex (complex to the quantum level). Such a matrix would not cut itself off from the "real world" by rounding off. The only way to be as complex as the real world is to be part of the real world.
I propose that any such matrix would necessarily be hackable. I propose that only digital systems can exclude the possibility of being controlled. For example, if the matrix were a room with two doors, and all that humans could do was choose a door, and then choose a door again, forever... Then the program could not be hacked. The input is extremely low-res digital. No combination of door choices will access the deep code of the program. The entire output of the human brain will be rounded off to either "Door A" or "Door B," and no sequence of brain events will ever do more than that. But if the matrix is analog, then every brain event will have a unique response in the matrix. The fractal / analog resolution of the brain will then map onto the fractal / analog resolution of the matrix, and a hack should be possible.
A math question: Is it possible to say that a fractal is "constrained" to a certain part of another fractal? If so, then it should be possible to cage the analog brain in a certain area of the analog matrix. But isn't it the case that fractals have no edges? I am pretty sure that any system that responds with infinite resolution to another system can be hacked by that system. How can you contain the effects of system B on system A without digitizing the response of system B to system A -- in other words, without having system B round off the input coming from system A?
And is this not in fact a restatement of Goedel's Incompleteness Theorum?
[Communique: 05.19.03]
Listening to: Pi Soundtrack.
12:50. Press return.
Reading: old journals...
M. just stopped by to see C. Funny how my ego bristles up. But not really. I just have to think of O. and Y. and L. and A. and C. and J. and M. and S. and M. and R.... and I realize that there is nothing M. has that I need or want. I already have enough ego, enough hotness, enough chic, enough theater, enough music. What I need is to have my head dissolve, and for that I must look other places. White men suddenly bore me. Not all of them, but the interesting ones are exceptions. Suddenly I only want to make theater in radically post-patriarchal post-colonial contexts. Word. I am looking forward to tomorrow. It's almost 1:00 AM and I think I shall go to sleep.
journal - April 12, 2001
Friends: Keep a journal. Put down what you can in words or pictures or lines. Give yourself to yourself because it is a gift that you will want one day. In times of loss when your self is drowning, your old echoes will remind you. Everything that you need is already inside you. Everything that you want to know you have merely forgotten. Give yourself the gift of yourself. It is all that you need.
And white is not a skin color.
[Communique: 05.17.03]
and i would feel dirty and [Communique: 05.06.03]
i am nervous to enter the junkyard of broken dreams...
- Brad Rothbart
[Communique: 05.04.03]
Angels and ministers of grace defend us!
Hamlet, Act I, Scene IV
people watching / try this: [Communique: 05.02.03]
what i find strange about this city is how no one is watching. i am on the downtown 4 train and we stop at 42nd street. if i get out and transfer to the 6 and go down to 14th, no one will notice that i have wasted time. no one will tell me it was a stupid thing to do. there is no one watching the movie to ask: "why did he do that?"
not to say anonymous. not to say lonely. because yesterday i gave a man $2 to get back to Queens, and today i found a book on the subway subtitled "alternative strategies for working artists," and after that i gave away my lighter to a man who couldn't light his cigarette. and this is also part of new york.
i am an usher. i ush. the wealthy and upper-middle of new york city pass through me as they file on into the gaudy and brilliant world of the Cirque du Soleil. they leave behind mostly repeated items, items bought that night and discarded after a couple of hours: popcorn, sodas, licorice, ice cream, and $12 programme booklets. but sweeping up after them, if you keep your eyes peeled, sometimes you find other things.
today i found a round pressed talisman encircled with writing in an eastern script i do not recognize. on the other side, in english, it reads: COMPASSION - JOY - EQUANIMITY - LOVE. it is a totem from a foreign land, a religious ornament, a secret of some kind. it is a list of instructions.
i also found a cheap ring with eight plastic rubies. i will be a rich man if they turn out to be real. i also found part of a necklace, three cubic beads and a flattened torus of wood.
i place the items at my bedside, next to the cut-up protest photos i found at a feminist bookstore. i will carry them in my bag where the lighter used to be. i got the lighter from michelle. i've had the bag since high school. i stole the pens from an office where i worked. i lost my queer pin on the bus. i found a quarter. i dropped a penny. i got tipped a dollar. i gave it away.
almost a sense of flow, almost a hint of meaning, in this movement of objects through the city. and remembering my grandfather's junk box, full of marvelous treasures and not one piece of trash, i dare to call this stuff junk and i allow myself to call its many paths a branching river.
junk river.
At twenty, I expected in the coming years to live the life of an artist. Having had artist friends in high school who jumped chain-link fences to swim in swimming pools late at night when the gates were locked while I was trying unsuccessfully to fake an injury to remove myself from the agony of cheerleading at night games; and having painted paintings in a college art studio with skylights, where I spent afternoons discussing my paintings with Professor Thompson, who sat in the corner of the room with a free-standing ashtray at his elbow, flicking a long-ashed cigarette into it as he told me to observe the beauty when I turned my paintings upside down and on their sides; having had these experiences I had a pretty romantic idea of the life of an artist. I was not prepared for what followed - researching pooper-scoopers, toys, and earplus for a patent office and delivering plate after plate of French toast to craving Los Angeles customers, leaving only fractions of night-time to make art. I did it by poling my energy with others so that together we had enough usable heat to make a performance. But then, I saw the work of Pina Bausch, Tadeus Kantor, and Tadashi Suzuki. I needed to work harder, much harder. These artists did not stop where I stopped. They kept moving. And they ran so far that the distance covered in their performances, caught me up and overtook me. The only way I could make work of this distance was by taking time. I moved to Chicago and found collaborators who were not in a hurry. I rested in each moment with the process and the moments accumulated. It was almost mundane. Mundane in the sense of plodding ordinariness, a daily step taking of one and a half to two years, to make a work. But also mundane in the sense of seventeenth-century astrology when the word pertained to the horizon - that visible line of the in-between; between the two, of time to come and time elapsed. The final performances, when finished had a rigour I liked. No one told me about this methodical, caught-in-the-moment beauty.
the desert is cast.
april has been archived.
Hits since 03/22/02:
i would feel ashamed but
i wouldn't let it stop my game
girl next time he wants to know
where the anger comes from
tell him the anger just comes
it just comes
HOPE IS THE NEW IRONY,
you literalistic mofos.
Sounds like a shrubist slogan to me .
SECURITY IS THE NEW FREEDOM
yeee-hah
Hasn't anybody taken a Baath recently?
Hard to be surveyed if yer dead
the vortex spins
the wash cycle
oh clean , oh clean sings
the floating bathtub girl
the wash bear
( go to A'Dam ( or is that Adam? ))
for that one
the unicycle
riding metaphor into psychic
rubber walls
an the walls melt in front
of our eyes
the ground turns to psychedelic
sorbet
Donald Rumsfeld is a thai crack whore
get clear on that
and I am not a crook
in the arm of history
I am the bend in the river
dam me?
Damn you....
the arm , bent signaling
stoppage time
extra , free
until .. whenever
what the fuck is that ?
work it , baby
tread the wheel
like gangland hamsters
we plot overthrow of meaning
a space of being
unknown but felt
I want to build the fracture
and sing of it in all language
at once
through every orifice and pore
simultaneity implies cells
one cell one one wheel
one song
the everything play
and this piece has no end
hope is evil
nothing ever there
always floating in the yet to be
I want yes I want now
no hope
noh ope
nope
gimme wild blueberry loooove
of each stranger ask:
"how close are they to tears?"
vermilion's text = journal of a rootless cosmopolitan
all text by bspatz
return to anagnorisis