Like I need to take a shit, or to get this out of me. A couple of weeks ago I thought I was going to collapse in my bathroom, it was hot and I was writhing in stomach pain, I called Z and he came over so fast and gave me pepto-bismol and immediately after I empted myself of everything inside of me. For the following week I was extremely constipated, blocked up, but eventually things began moving again.

I realized I shouldn't do ketamine off of my art, at least not off of the UV prints, because when I rack up the powder with my credit card, I also scratch off cured resin. Something something aura mechanical reproduction cutting k cutting.

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Excrement 2:

This feels like a good place to (re-)start. Last night J was talking about a new type of toilet that should be invented after J2 was talking about a man who built a building while leaving room for a circular elevator which had yet to be invented. He was making an assumption about the technologies of the future — in a sense, these are the men who are rewarded by Art, posthumously of course. Joyce dying in poverty while writing the enclyopedic novel, full of references for the American academy to bloat over. See Cyril Connolly on Literary Ambition in relation to Literary Career Ambition. And in turn Artistic Ambition in relation to Artistic Career Ambition. Ba Ba Black Sheep Have You Any Wool and all the unread Velveteen Rabbits bobbing to see the screen and read subtitles in a theater with a flat floor. What makes a room a theater?

After the screening, the room ceased to be re(a)d. On the way down the elevator (rectangular) I spoke with B and S about fantasy football team names referencing a line of Joyce which I in turn realized were referencing a translation Pound made of The Beautiful Toilet. From "Blue, blue is the grass about the river" to "Blew. Blue bloom is on the.
Gore-pinnacled hair." to some lost string of text referencing Frank Gore and Alfred Blue (found: Ajayi Gore A. Blue Allen The; but not found entirely). This game of references. Building the arcade, is the game. I messaged B:
"Fenollossa makes the green blue so Pound blue blues and Joyce blew blue blooms
making the green blue..." and then a link to Future Racks Blue. He replied quoting "fuck envy, ends in tragedy" and then I thought "longevity, car from italy" and thought of the Berenson quote about Ford and Plato that I failed to quote that previous night drunk at the bar. The prostheticization of memory - it was up in the cloud.

August 19, 1932
Men are unable to resist the attraction of machines. If an automobile could have been presented to Plato, Plato would have become Ford.

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Excrement 3:

So often I find the outline to be the death of the text because the outline grows and grows and grows and the text becomes impossible to write. A web that realizes its place within larger webs and is swallowed. At the bar I was talking to B about the greatest 20th century works of American Philosophy and I found myself vying that it was Lyotard's Pacific Wall. We talked about Minima Moralia and the cars and the craziness and then the next day I sent him a pdf of it and some screenshots of my highlights from before:

FOURTH GROUP
European Visiting Professors on campus are Greck tutors: slaves, freed slaves, dependents, wards of Rome, mercenaries of an Amerikapital that worries about its border arcas.

For at the impossible center of Empire (a center that's not a center but instead one of the foci of an ellipse that keeps stretching westward) there isn't a supreme authority. There's a joining up of surfaces- -white, ephemeral, labyrinthine, useless. Rome isn't a locatable space in spite of what it owns. Los Angeles is capital of the world because it isn't a European or East Coast-type city. It's not a city with an appearance of unity around some ecclesiastical, administrative, or economic center. It's a checkers game, along whose highways and 40-mile-long boulevards squares are marked off that can always only temporarily be occupied-just like in games. This checkerboard isn't a heraldic female body (including orifices) but a skin that, being white woman, is strict and aleatory contiguousness.

The blank white of this woman skin is light-since all colors (cultures) are mixed together there. The blindness of cars in the maze of streets that's LA is nothing other than a sightlessness of derelicts feeling their way along expanses of hips, shoulders, and groins. The white body isn't an organism. Headless and sexless, can it claim it's a sex and a head. a capital city and a cold act of love, capital? That's what it is, in a sense- just as only in certain ways is a body a unity, an entity, and only in certain ways does it belong to this or that sex: if it's located through a set of coordinates. LA, in contrast, shows what was lost to more ancient capitals one after the other through choice or through fated acceptance of legitimation namely, that the location of a capital can't be located, that it hasn't a center, and that at the center of Empire there's a migratory white belly. So that the location of the agitated pan that is LA must be continuously replotted.

And then I brought up a text I couldn't finish. Or that in my sense I failed to start. It remained an outline. A string of associations. something like diderot --> les bijoux indiscrets --> a softcore film of the same name directed by arielle dombasle for french television --> pacific wall --> ed weston & the white female nude among a swath of other texts and the connections / montage of the text are not linear but rather all dancing together and that it wasn't just about starting or finishing but that it was Impossible. And about how if Mohamed Atta had read Lyotard perhaps 9/11 would have ended differently. We were drinking on 9/11 and the lights were on, the ones that beamed into the sky. The next day @tifzab would post a picture tagging Paul Myoda who designed them. He teaches at Brown. We were talking about Brown and the Modern Media and Cultures PhD program and a couple weeks ago J2 was talking about Atta because she saw a truck on the street that had a keffiyah on it and the truck company was something Twins, i can't remember the something but there were Twins, and she thought it was a 9/11 reference and brought up how Atta was an architect and on 9/11 we were talking about 9/11 I talked about ketamine and Yeat and Up 2 Me on the 20th anniversary of it and we talked about the failure of it and I talked about how the Twin Towers were designed by a Japanese Architect and now there's a connection between Hiroshima and Nagasaki and 9/11 that seems far-fetched and then I might as well jump to Mike Pollard's painting shown at Graham Vunderink Gallery titled: Are Today's German's Morally Responsible? which depicts the Holocaust Memorial and on the website of Peter Eisenman who designed the Memorial is a picture from the angle of the ground point up at the sky, of a person jumping between the blocks of the memorial, and I show it to B the next time I see him and he points out how the person resembles a swastika

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Excrement 4:

There is a question of working forward or backward. But that isn't it actually, it's the matter of working linearly. Which is the problem, the problem I've been having, the linearity of text, of writing, of movement. I mention this to B about why that prior text became impossible, accompanied with a quote from Peleschian about montage from his wikipedia:

"It's about what I'm striving for, what we're all striving for - every person, humanity [.] the wishes and desires of the people to ascend, to transcend [.] I was thinking of everything. It's not specifically the seasons of the year or of people: it's everything […..]Eisenstein's montage was linear, like a chain. Distance montage creates a magnetic field around the film [...] Sometimes I don't call my method 'montage'. I'm involved in a process of creating unity. In a sense I've eliminated montage: by creating the film through montage, I have destroyed montage. In the totality, in the wholeness of one of my films, there is no montage, no collision, so as a result montage has been destroyed. In Eisenstein every element means something. For me the individual fragments don't mean anything anymore. Only the whole film has the meaning [...] For me, distance montage opens up the mysteries of the movement of the universe. I can feel how everything is made and put together; I can sense its rhythmic movement."

But of course I cannot write like that here. It's linear. I remember a thing and I forgot a thing and then it pops in later and perhaps I can ammend an earlier point but the text flows left to right top to bottom, it is not like a show, where the eyes can move around and though there are still certain hierarchies that tell people how to look and how they move about the room and it's like Derrida and Eisenman discussing in Chora L. Works, Derrida talking about how the building does not suggest the illusion of the beginning or the end in the way that the book does, and the show functions similarly.

But there is the matter of site, which I map onto every show. Context, context, context. In this case, Kunsthalle Der Licht is on the 7th or 8th floor of a walk-up at 252 Broome Street in the Lower East Side which is a couple blocks from where 47 Orchard used to be and there used to be so many other galleries here too but 47 Orchard sticks in my head because it's the one that's been canonized in specific niches for its limited approach to temporality. A 2 year lease, intentionally done. A large group of artist working together to curate, which is difficult. And I make the loose suggestion to J when we start planning our show about a reference of sorts in the press release or the poster but I'm not sure what yet and he brings up how L, who we initially asked to write the text, was part of the Orchard scene, and then I start going through their website once I'm back at my place and find a show that he curated with Caroline Busta titled "Detourism" but I can't find any images of the show. The press release references Barthes and Stanley Brouwn, specifically a de Bruyn essay which I found impactful about 2 years ago and my mind jumps to maps and This Way Brouwn and his approach to measurement and documentation and the reason why there are no images of the show to be found on Orchard's site but I decide to hunt because the same way Trisha Donnelly is particular about her documentation in order to create the oral there are still images of certain shows on flickr and twitter and instagram and probably many old blogs, the internet littered with this hard-to-find detritus that is unauthorized, the same way I found this video that violates Stanley Brouwn, filming his exhibition at the Stedelijk.

My mind flips Detourism into Retourism and then starts to play with the meanings. The French pun, the idea of returning. Re: tourism, in respect to the tourists of the Lower East Side, the simulacra chinatown, the simulacra Le Dive, and my tourism with Asian-ness, the Kozo paper, and that urbanomic book about Tourism. And then the reference to Orchard, to that show. Of it continuing on. In the hunt for the images of Detourism I find an article that mentions Art Club 2000 and connect that to Artschooltop. When watching the early Chinese documentary propaganda films I find myself wondering what CHinese proto-cinema for peasants would've been — not theater, but ones that play with light, like Japanese shadow puppet theater. I ask the question and then realize the next day: Fireworks. Light and Time. But then I think, what to do with this great realization, what does this connection give me. The chinese name for fireworks is two symbols which translated to "smoke and fire". I send it to B who replies "Real and flying lanterns"

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Excrement 5:

On instagram Mahfuz Sultan, who went to Uchicago and then Harvard GSD and now works in some sort of creative capacity for Drake and used to work in finance and posts contemporary art and architecture related things on his story in a large volume almost everyday, posts an image of a poster for a show at John Daniels Gallery titled "Plastics". The gallery was ran by Dan(iel) Graham and another partner named John and another who didn't want his name in it and they started it in their early 20s uptown and it reminded me of finding about the curatorial project Jason Alexander, ran by Jason Matthew Lee and Alex Schulan, which I recently tapped into b/c J texted me about realizing that Jason was E's boyfriend, who I work with, but in day job capacity that's unrelated to our respective roles and social positions in the "New York City Art World" by which I really mean "The Metropolis Art World" as these things are really Global and not Local, or that the Local exists somewhere amorphous, the unlocatable capital of Empire, what Lyotard said above, it went west of Los Angeles up into the clouds and down into the sea, into the cables on the seafloor connecting the world.

After Jason Alexander and John Daniels I look up Connect the Dots and then look up Portmanteau, which I'd been thinking about earlier, but now I scroll through the wiki for the etymology and see that it was coined by Lewis Carroll and there's a quote from The Hunting of the Snark and I think where I have I heard this word before and I recall Colin in Out 1 saying "Snark snark" and I think of myself and I think of him on this search for all of these clues and connections, playing connect the dots to unravel some grand conspiracy, the conspiracy of art, like Baudrillard said, and now the PDF is open in another tab for me to download and possibly read.

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Excrement 6:

Before I thought of Connect the Dots I thought of Bingo and then I thought of Chinese Bingo but I then found out that Bingo was a game largely relegated to the Anglosphere. Art is a game that was relegated to the West that recently began to be played in the East. Gwangju Biennial curated by Bourriaud. The Chinese Art Market and the X Museum and the gallerists in Los Angeles who go to UCLA and then sell work to their circles. I bring up Chinese Bingo and someone tells me to get into Mahjong. I still haven't gotten into Go. On the cooper bench, B say he wishes the art world was more attached to Art and O tells him not to say lame shit like that and I make a joke about academy being more attached to academe. There couldn't have been an academy without slaves. Lyotard again. O2 talks about Nietzche's relationship to Wagner, comparing it to O's relation to J. We laugh. At MOMA I wish I spoke cantonese so I could drink and smoke with Johnnie To. And invent Chinese Bingo with him.