Percutio 2009 Performance Issue [Editions de Titus]

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Percutio 2 0 0 9 n° 3

Titus Books

Numéros parus Percutio 2006 n° 0 Trans-culturel Percutio 2007 n° 1 Moments critiques Percutio 2008 n° 2 Inspiration ou Prétention Percutio 2009 n° 3 En concert

Percutio 2009 n° 3 ISSN Éd Française 1953-1427 Droits de reproduction : Percutio, les auteurs et ayants-droit 2008 Rédacteur en chef : William Direen Dépôt légal : décembre, 2009 Vente au numéro : W. Direen, 67 boulevard Ney 75018 Paris Numéros disponibles sur le web : http://www.crywolfbooks.org/ Edité par Titus Books Catalogue disponible sur http://titus.books.online.fr

Éditorial Having suspended what we do, what we were doing, like a sentence... ... having come to see done, to see made... And, being together (our number indivisibly & infinitely greater than a sum), we wait for the show to begin. o

Ayant suspendu ce que nous faisons, ce que nous faisions, comme une phrase... ...étant venu voir faire, voir se faire... Et, étant rassemblés (en nombre indivisible et infiniment plus grand qu’une somme), nous attendons que le spectacle commence. w.d. [s.b.]















Images Couverture ‘NZ Art Music Montage’ : I.A.F.Goldsmith



1  2  3  4   5 6 7   8  9 10 etc



1. Magic Mushroom 2. James Koia of the film 'Beyond The Silver Shard' ( 2000 ), an experimental electroacoustic film. 3. Guitar player of Children's Hour (NZ band from 1983-84) on tour in April 2005. 4. Singer of the NZ punk band Garage Fodder playing at The Valve 8th April, 2006 in Wellington. 5. Chris Matthews, Children's Hour (April 2005 at Bar Bodega, Wellington NZ). 6. The Gordons (Alister Parker, John Halvorsen, Brent McLaughlan), Christchurch,1981. (Members are connected to groups Skeptics and Bailter Space). 7. Drummer and stand-in bass player Rob, Children's Hour (April 2005, Bar Bodega). 8. Blake's Nemesis swept into oblivion: from a cult science fiction series, which came out after Doctor Who, called Blakes 7. 9. Timothy Leary: Psychedelic drug pioneer. 10. Dave Mitchell: The 3Ds, Ghost Club, Evil, Leather Apron. Dave is also a visual artist. 11. Daniel Mounsey is the Donkey Accordion player, and he painted the image. Daniel used to be seen in his costume in the streets of Dunedin with his instrument. 12. Martin Henderson aka Brother Love (& band of the same name). Martin was also in Space Dust, New Reality Jam Session, Axel Grinders and Scuzzbuckets. 13. The Green Man: a tribute to David Downes - New Zealand electroacoustic musician. 14. 'Mona' by Daniel Mounsey painted on a mirror. Daniel showed this painting to Diana Spencer of the British Royal Family who liked it very much. 15 Galsalome. 16. The Death of a Maiden: The Verlaines, fronted by Graeme Downes. 17. 'Lost In A Forest': a still from 'Everything Comes From Blackness And Silence'. The location is similar to a place of trees where The Chills' Pink Frost video was shot on the Otago Peninsula. 18. Ray Harryhausen skeletons from the legendary 1963 film 'Jason and The Argonauts'. A tribute image for fans. 19. Peter Gutteridge ( Snapper), Chris Heazelwood (King Loser), Gavin Shaw, Todd Knudson (The Chills). Dunedin, 14th December 2007, practice session. 20. Denise Roughan (3Ds, Look Blue Go Purple, The Renderers) drumming with Ghost Club, 7th April 2005 at The Indigo, Wellington, NZ. 21. Jed Town of Fetus Productions ( also Superettes, Features, Bound For Pleasure). Experimental film work was part of his shows. 22. Terence McKenna: a psychedelic drug pioneer. 23. Martin Phillipps: The Chills. 24. Robert Scott, Bill Direen, Hamish Kilgour, David Kilgour of groups The Clean, The Bats, The Bilders and The Magick Heads, The Great Unwashed, The Heavy Eights, Electric Blood... 25. Peter Gutteridge (The Clean, The Great Unwashed, Snapper). 26. Scud. 27. Luke Rowell (Disasteradio, The Human Oscillator). Currently touring the world with his electronic pop music, Luke is from Lower Hutt, NZ. 28. Michael Dooley (The Enemy, Toy Love, Snapper, The Snares). 29. A manipulated Salvador Dali image featured in the experimental film 'Everything Comes From Blackness And Silence' (I.A.F.Goldsmith, unreleased). 30. I.A.F.Goldsmith: The Highly Experimental Projection Agency and creator of this collage. ( Images: 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 10, 12, 13, 17, 19, 20, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 29, 30 © Ian Goldsmith Private Collection) *

Verso (‘Dunedin Poets in Performance’) : I.A.F.Goldsmith 1st row: Peter Olds, Scott Hamilton, Sandra Bell, Nicky Gerard, I.A.F.Goldsmith 2nd row: Scott Hamilton, Richard Reeve, David Eggleton, Bill Direen, Bill Direen / Scott Hamilton 3rd row: Phoebe Smith, Jeanne Bernhardt, Kay McKenzie Cooke, Nicky, Phoebe Smith 4th row: I.A.F.Goldsmith, Larry Matthews, David Kârena-Holmes, Henry Davidson, Sandra Bell *

Mike Jones/Lord (p. 49) & Steve Marsden/The Androidss (p. 51): photographers unknown. Private Collection (Jim Wilson). *

Ben Webb’s artworks (p.62-63) © Ben Webb (2007-2008). Used with permission. Dance of the Autochthones (p 71-72) © Cerian Wagstaff Untitled (p. 73) from an unreleased photographic series © Stuart Shepherd. ‘Live’ photos of Victoria University Gamelan by Budi S. Putra (pp. 75-76) Photos of Juliet O’Brien (pp. 18-19), Rhys Chatham (p. 77), David Watson (p. 83) © W. Direen

Contents/Sommaire Éditorial . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  . . Degradation of the Laurel Wreath Brett Cross . . . . . . . . . . Im zimmer fängt Gunther Dietrich [& tr.] . . . . . . . . . . . . . Ritual Performance of Gold Leaves Ted Jenner . . . . . . . . . . . effondrée du creux au coeur de la note tenue Anne Mounic [& tr.]. . Juliet O’Brien—Performer, Teacher, Playwright  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  . f. Franco Bianciardi [& tr.] . .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  . .  .  . . . . . . Two Poems Will Christie . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Nights at the Nylon Club David L. Brown . . . . . . . . . . . . .  . Les Célèbres Dames de Sigiriya Jacques Coulardeau [& tr.] .  .  .  .  .   Two Poems [& tr.] & thoughts on ‘the text’ William Direen .  .  . . . Two Poems Steve Dean. . . .  .  .  .  .  . .  .  .  .  .  . .  .  .  .  .  . .  .  . . Burning Woman David Eggleton .  .  .  .  .  . . .  .  .  .  .  . . .  .  .  .  . The Moment M. A. Bourke. . . . . . . . . . . .  .  .  .  .  . . .  .  . . Pillars Michael Steven. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  .  .  .  .  .  .  . . Two Poems David Karena-Holmes [& tr.] . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  . Seascape Tim Keane [une traduction d’un poème de Paul Verlaine]. . Balkonstrasse 5 (extrait) Chris Walshaw .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .   .  .  ‘Rest in Peace’ Mike Jones and Steve Marsden Jim Wilson . . . . . . Take the Shell of an Egg K.M.Ross . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Spaceship Arno Loeffler . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Near Mumbai Martin Kovan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Two Images Ben Webb . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . On Hearing of a Solution Grant McDonagh  .  .  .  .  .  .  . . .  .  .  . . Epithalamium Dance of the Authochthones Scott Hamilton . . . . Two New York Art Shows Stuart Shephard .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .   .  .  .  . Gamelan and World Choir Gregory Street . . . . . . . . . . . . . Reviews/Critiques . .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .   .  .  . . .  .  .  .  .   .  .  . . . .  .  .  .  Fast Down Turk a novella by Jeanne Bernhardt NZ Chamber Trio at the NZ Embassy, Paris Six Dunedin Poets at Circadian Rhythm Café, Dunedin Keith Rowe at Bretigny sur Orge, Île de France Three recent Titus Books titles More Bretigny events and David Watson (private concert) Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

3 7 8 10 16    18 20 22 25 26 34 38 39 40 41 42 44 46   48 52 55 61 64 66 71 75 77 78

84

Brett Cross

degradation of the laurel wreath the sun sinks into the green bay lifting fragments of foam to murky sewer amber before folding itself onto the black sand   Orpheus’s lyre trodden in dust by road’s edge where Britannicus used to talk so passionately to Lucan   for a young man about lack of order both death’s and Nero’s in soft poetry in the weeks leading to his poisoning   Agrippa taught Nero on simple Claudius deception and that the clearest liquid infused with water gifts immortality   while three faintly clad muses sup wine with Bacchus in Seneca’s marble garden Nero adrift in the flames of juvenilia   degrades wax tablet after wax table intricately filling them with lifeless prose dead to the world as dull ambition



Gunther Dietrich

im zimmer fängt der vorhang den wind ein der vorwurf des verfehlten lebens weht hinein und durchlässig präsent sind die geschichten von dir und mir morgen ist ein anderer tag gleitet hinüber zum bett in dem du schläfst und ich in meiner existenz weile leise schreibend fünf sterne und ein bett aus rosen im grand hotel de l´orient am bug des tgv zerschellt der immigrant bei 350 sachen das leben der anderen ist etwas anderes, fernes --so weit das auge reicht von klischee zu klischee hinüber gerettet in den schlaf aus dem rausch und zurück in das eigene grab zu lebzeiten untot unter den toten als zeitzeuge überlebt um zu berichten von der sorge des lebendigen körpers der karriere bis zum schluss und nur an dieser karriere entwerfen wir uns als leiche und sind interessant als liebende vor keinem gott gefeit noch ein weiteres urteil erwartend fern des homogenen raums eines universellen vergleichs so verbleiben wir in unserem zimmer und holen noch eine flasche wein... 

G u n t h e r D i e t r i c h [w.d.]

the curtain snatches the window-wind the reproach of a failed life rushes in and the stories of you and of me suffuse this present tomorrow is another day approaching you there in bed asleep while I linger here in my existence writing quietly five stars and a bed of roses in the great eastern railroad hotel the immigrant thinking of 350 different things is smashed to pieces on the bow of the TGV the life of others is something different, something distant --as far-off as the eye can see cliché here to cliché beyond saved in sleep from the frenzy parting and returning in one's own living grave undead among the dead like witnesses of an epoch who survive to file reports about the worries of the living body careering to its end and in this sense only careering we sketch ourselves as cadavers yet are interesting as lovers still unprotected before any god in anticipation of one last verdict far from the flattened space of a universal similitude we remain in our room and draw out another bottle of wine… 

Ted Jenner

Ritual Performance and the Gold Leaves The Gold Leaves are a series of small, thin gold lamellae dating from the late fifth century BC to one in the third AD, which have been discovered in various parts of what used to be the Greek world in tombs (but occasionally in other locations in cases where the tomb has been robbed of its contents). Rectangular or in the shape of ivy or myrtle leaves, sometimes folded into the form of a cylinder, these diminutive tablets were placed on the mouths or hands of dead initiates before burial. The texts inscribed on the leaves give instructions generally in a literary or Homeric verse on what path the soul should take in the afterlife (e.g. 'Petelia', 'Thessaly', texts and translations published in Percutio 2 (2008)), or on what the soul should say to Persephone, goddess of the dead, when confronting her in the Underworld as a suppliant. The emphasis is on purity and/or privilege; the deceased is identified as someone pure enough to belong to the community of the gods; he, very often she (many of these leaves have been found in the tombs of women), has credentials which enable her to drink from 'Memory's Lake' where, presumably, she will achieve total recall of her previous incarnations. Eventually, after a number of re-incarnations, she will join other initiates on their journey to Elysium. A very contentious issue is the nature of the cult and ritual to which these leaves belong. Gunther Zuntz (1971) presented a forceful if biased argument in favour of a Pythagorean cult, based upon key features mentioned in the texts such as crucial distinctions between right and left paths and a spring of Memory and another of Lethe ('oblivion'). His argument, however, was overturned almost overnight by the discovery, at Hipponion in the deep south of Italy, of a gold leaf lying on the chest of a woman who had been buried c. 400 BC in a stone chest covered with stone slabs, i.e. in what is known as a cist-grave. The Hipponion leaf, possibly an ur-version, or something like it, of the so-called B-texts (i.e. those that direct the soul's journey in the Underworld), reads in translation as follows:

This is the leaf of Memory: when at death … to Hades' well-built halls; there is a spring on your right and by it the cypress with its luminous sheen where the souls of the dead descend to slake their thirst. You must not go near this spring or drink its water. Further on you will find cold water flowing from 10

Ted Jenner



Memory's lake; there are guardians standing over it. Shrewdly, in their wisdom, they will ask you why you scour the darkness of Hades the Destroyer. Say: 'I am a son of Earth and starry Heaven. I am parched with thirst and dying: quickly, give me the cool water flowing from Memory's lake.' And the kings of the Underworld will pity you and they will give you water from Memory's lake and then you will pass along the sacred way that other initiates and bacchants tread to their glory.

The Bacchic initiates mentioned in the last line imply ritual and funerary practices with, at their centre, Dionysos as god of rebirth and regeneration. Bacchic rites were associated with Orphic rites by Herodotus (2.81) who, however, went on to say that such rites were really Egyptian and Py­thagorean. But a close connection between Orphism and Bacchic initiation can be illustrated quite graphically by the bone tablets (5th c. BC) found at Olbia, formerly a Greek colony in the Crimea. Some of these tablets carry brief inscriptions, e.g. 'Life. Death. Life. Truth. Dio(nysos). Orphics', and are thought to be tokens of membership in an Orphic cult. Whatever the case, Pythagorean, Orphic, or Bacchic (and the Eleusinian Mysteries associated with Demeter and Persephone should not be left out of account), we are dealing with a mystery cult or cults in which only initiates were believed to achieve redemption and rebirth after death. It is quite possible that different leaves belong to different cults, and Radcliffe Edmonds (2004) has embraced this view. Each group of leaves place a different emphasis on the initiate's credentials: in the so-called 'A-texts' (in which the soul confronts Perse­phone), the stress is on ritual purity; in the 'B-texts' (e.g. 'Petelia', 'Hipponion'), divine lineage; in the leaf from Pelinna in Thessaly (see below), redemption at the hands of Dionysos Lusios ('Dionysos the Redeemer'). Even so, the A- and B-texts share the admonition to take the path to the right, and one of the A-texts and at least one of the B-texts contain, apparently, a reference to Memory's gift; the leaf from Pelinna shares with one of the A-texts the mysteriously resonant formula of the kid, ram or bull 'falling into milk'. 'There are all kinds of problems about these leaves', wrote M.L. West (1983), and here it might seem that I am complicating even further a subject already fraught with complications, but I feel it is necessary to ask if there is any evidence of ritual performance in the texts themselves. The subject is actually a promising field of research for it is quite possible that both the 11

Ted Jenner

A- and B-texts reflect verse dialogues between soul and guardians spoken at initiation ceremonies or at the funerals of members of the cult concerned. We can even speculate where such dialogues might have taken place: at sanctuaries of chthonic gods such as the precinct of Persephone and Demeter at Akragas (modern Agrigento) in Sicily. This complex contains a labyrinthine enclosure where initiands might have experienced (endured?) a journey to Hades' kingdom and the mysteries of death and rebirth. The so-called 'Great Antrum' at Baiae in the Bay of Naples (dated at c. 500 BC) is a striking example of this kind of enclosure. A long passage, over 170 m. in length and oriented east-west, leads to an inner chamber and water tank pointing to the midsummer sunset. Here, at this chamber, initiands might have been presented to an imaginary Persephone, Eukles (Hades) and Eubouleus (Dionysos), declaring, as in the A-texts from Thurii, their purity and consanguinity with the gods, thereupon to be rewarded with a promise of immortality from some hierophantic voice 'offstage' impersonating Persephone. I should mention in this context that not far from Baiae lies Cumae where, in a necropolis apparently reserved for Dionysiac or Orphic initiates, an inscription (c. 450 BC) was found bearing the rubric, 'None but Bakkhoi may be buried here'. Plutarch (fr.178) describes an experience of the Underworld in terms of an initiation, for initiations were often staged as journeys to the world of the dead. In the 19th century, the first of the B-texts to come to the notice of scholars, i.e. 'Petelia', was associated with the oracle of Trophonios at Lebadeia in central Greece. According to Pausanias (ix.39), a man who wanted to consult this oracle had to descend into a chasm, having first taken a draught from the spring of Forgetfulness (Lethe) to obliterate his memory of the past and then another from the spring of Memory to remember what he would see in his descent. When he returned from the innermost cave that he had eventually been drawn into feet first, he was taken to the nearby throne of Memory where he was asked by priests what he had discovered about his future. Apart from the rather superficial point that at Lebadeia the oracle seeker had to drink water from both springs, there is an enormous difference between the two quests in the purpose of the descent and the function of the waters of Memory. At Lebadeia, a living man descends into an Underworld to witness and remember a revelation about the future; in the B-texts, the soul of an initiate descends into the Underworld to remember its past life (or lives). In ritual, and here we are again assuming that the Gold Leaves reflect the practices of initiation, the waters of Memory might 'be used to symbolize the initiate's training in memory or understanding of the cycle of reincarnations and the things she must do in this life to remedy or atone for past lives' (Edmonds, pp.107-08). 12

Ted Jenner

But we can go further with Zuntz and Fritz Graf and detect something of an 'order of service' in at least two leaves where a kind of 'rhythmical prose' (Zuntz) temporarily replaces the verse. One of the leaves from Thurii in the south of Italy was found wrapped up inside a larger leaf placed next to the skull of the deceased (male) who had been cremated in a wooden coffin some time during the 4th century BC. The text reads in translation: When your soul forsakes the light of the sun, take the right [ ] each step with all due care. 'Welcome! after an ordeal you have never been through before. A god you are and mortal no longer. You are the kid that fell into milk. 'Welcome and rejoice! Take the path to the right for the sacred meadows and groves of Persephone.' These lines may lack the stunning imagery of the B-texts, but what is particularly interesting is the way a kind of hieratic prose (line 4) emerges from the dactylic verse in the first two lines and the versified prose formula of the third line. In fact, the most important line in this text, acclaiming the deification of the initiate, is in prose, but a rhythmical prose, for in the Greek the two parallel clauses each consist of nine syllables and three accents. This transition from verse to prose at the most significant point in the text most probably reflects ritual procedure at the funeral or the initiation of a Bakkhos (Bacchic initiate; see next text). At the very least it may echo a formula used in such ritual. Zuntz adduces an intriguing analogy: when the Pythagorean mystic Apollonios of Tyana vanished in a temple in Crete, his followers heard a voice calling, 'go forth from earth, go forth to heaven, go forth.' The Greek announces deification in a 'rhythmical prose' consisting of three parallel clauses. Possibly all the verse and prose formulae on the gold leaves echo ritual. If the leaf from Thurii does, then so too the more recently discovered examples from Pelinna in Thessaly in mainland Greece, which have been dated by numismatic evidence to the end of the 4th century BC. These two lamellae, found on the chest of a female skeleton, are in the shape of ivy leaves; the verse, almost identical on each leaf, mentions Bakkhios (Dionysos) by name as having released the soul of the deceased; while the statuette of a maenad (female votary of Dionysos) was found in the same grave as the skeleton. Ivy, Bakkhios and maenad together spell out Dionysiac mysteries to which these leaves, like those from Hipponion and Thurii, belonged, for the Pelinna leaves return to the 'kid fallen into milk' formula: 13

Ted Jenner

On this day you died, thrice blessed, and came into being. Say to Persephone that the Bakkhios himself released you. A bull you leapt into milk, suddenly you leapt into milk, a ram you fell into milk. You have wine as your mark of good fortune. And the same rewards await you beneath the earth as await the other blessed souls. And once again the text is a combination of dactylic verse and prose with the latter confined to the acclamation of divinity (lines 3-5), this time in three parallel clauses each consisting of eight syllables and three accents. The dactylic verse continues in the last two lines, just as the prose on the Thurii leaf is followed by two lines of verse (trochaic and dactylic). In other words, the prose acclamations in both these texts stand out, as they must have done in an oral performance which would have been liturgical, not literary, in nature (the texts themselves are of course liturgy, not literature). The voice in both the Thurii leaf and the Pelinna leaves has been described by Graf as that of a 'master of ceremonies' who praises the soul at crucial points in the journey through the Underworld and promises it 'future bliss'. Perhaps the voice is imagined to be that of Orpheus himself, but it can also be interpreted as that of a priest at the funeral of an initiate or at an initiation ritual, which was a preparation of the soul for the journey into and through the Underworld to the place of reincarnation or, in the case of the leaves discussed in this paper, to the Elysium that ultimately awaited it. 'Suddenly you leapt into milk.' This is the milk of paradise, of course, but does this phrase stem from a proverbial expression, falling or leaping into milk meaning something like finding oneself in the midst of abundance (Graf)? Or does it refer, if only indirectly, to the rôle of Persephone Kouro­trophos, the goddess who nourishes recently deceased initiates conceived as infants at the breast (Edmonds)? Then again, given the rather distant and obscure connections between these leaves and the Egyptian Book of the Dead, the phrase might have been inspired by the 'milk-yielding tree' of the Egyptian Underworld. Whatever the case, the milk is surely symbolic of the state of paradise into which the initiate has now leapt or fallen like the three animals associated with Dionysos, albeit one (the ram) very tenuously in the evidence at our disposal. By this means, the initiate is indirectly equated with the god via a comparison with one or more of his emblematic animals. Is it any wonder that the image and its purport ('A god you are and mortal no longer') was 14

Ted Jenner

reserved for rhythmical prose? Let Gunther Zuntz have the last word: 'the transition from verse to prose is a uniquely effective means of conveying the significance of a uniquely effective statement. Thus in the canon of the Mass in the Roman Catholic Church, where everything else may be set to music but not the words of Jesus instituting the Eucharist …' (Zuntz, p.342). _______________________

Text of ‘Hipponion’ after Gunther Zuntz Wiener Studien 10 (1976) incorporating emendations proposed by West (line 1), Carratelli & Marcovitch (l. 9), Janko & Carratelli (l. 13), Lupe (l. 15), Merkelbach & Burkert (l. 16). N.B. The second line is a conflation of two lines, and, as a result, it lacks the verb heurêseis (‘you will find’). T.J.

Bibliography

Radcliffe G. Edmonds III, Myths of the Underworld Journey: Plato, Aristophanes, and the 'Orphic' Gold Tablets, Cambridge University Press, 2004 Fritz Graf & Sarah Iles Johnston, Ritual Texts for the Afterlife: Orpheus and the Bacchic Gold Tablets, Routledge: London & New York, 2007 C.G. Hardie, 'The Great Antrum at Baiae', Papers of the British School at Rome 37 (1969), 14-33 M.L. West, The Orphic Poems, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988 Gunther Zuntz, Persephone: Three Essays on Religion and Thought in Magna Graecia, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971

15

Anne Mounic

effondrée du creux au coeur de la note tenue… Il suffit d'écouter un peu sensiblement pour entendre la plainte du monde en sa douleur, la joie, tout près, tapie là, prête à bondir, tandis que les sanglots se heurtent à la clôture d'une existence heureuse, paisible, qui glisse, lente et bonne, savoureuse et tendre. Chacun, paré de son destin, l'unique fardeau, soi-même ou rien, aspire à partager la peine et l'allégresse parmi ses frères humains, son prochain, l'âme qui répond toujours, en secret, sur la gamme mineure des doutes et des résonances… quand l'éclair, tout soudain, brise la langue et frappe la main, ravage un monde en train de se dire, de s'ébaucher dans l'air fluet que retiennent nos lèvres, assidues, obstinées. Cet espace vide qui fut celui que j'aimais, dit-elle, rayonne, froid, par tout l'être mutilé de l'âme des échos, ravie à elle-même, effondrée de creux au coeur de la note tenue… Le temps surgit soudain comme une île noire jadis ensevelie et l'ordinaire, opérant un léger détour, prudent, passe alentour.

16

A n n e M o u n i c [w.d.]

fallen from a crest into the heart of one sustaining note... It's enough to listen with a little sensitivity to hear the cry of the world in its grief, the joy, so close, curled up there, ready to spring at the same moment as sobbing jars the divide that separates it from a pleasant flowing experience, peaceful, slow and good, flavourful and tender. Each person, prepared by her destiny, her unique fardel (to be herself or nothing at all), desires only to share pain and delight with her fellow humans, with her neighbour, and with the one soul who secretly responds upon a minor scale of uncertainty and meaningful associations---when lightning breaks language and impels the hand, upsetting a world in the process of expressing, of sketching itself by means of the frail air that our constant and obstinate lips contain. That empty space I used to love, she says, is shimmering, cold, with everyone who has been wounded by the self-exulting Soul of Echoes fallen from a crest into the heart of one sustaining note... The juncture unexpectedly arises like a long-submerged black island and the everyday, cautious, carrying out a slight detour, avoids it.

17

Juliet O’Brien

Juliet O’Brien—Performer, Teacher, Playwright As part of a personal project to discuss expatriation with New Zealanders who work overseas, I met Juliet O'Brien on a spring morning of May, 2009.  At a table by a window overlooking former 19th century painters’ studios (now converted into more-than-“habitable” apartments), we discussed her career to date. Juliet was educated at St Mary's Convent College and Victoria Uni­ver­ sity of Wellington. Soon after graduating she fulfilled a wish to return to the country she had visited briefly with her parents. She felt immediately at home with the place and with the language. Her decision to live and work in France was really the result of a sequence of attractive options on her part, and was not a decision, as such, to leave New Zealand. It is true that career opportunities existed in French theatre at that time as they do not today, and she extended her social network. Juliet has gained the respect and confidence of theatre practitioners, educationists and critics, to the point where she has the pleasure of seeing her collaborative work L'Écrivain Public performed for a six week season at Le Théâtre Romain Rolland, Villejuif, in September-October, 2009. (A co-production was mounted by Théâtre Romain Rolland, Le Théâtre de Cachan and Théâtre de la Jacquerie in 2008.) The play deals with the emotional experiences of exile, and the ethical matter of concealing of an embarrassing truth “for the good” of someone (in this case the exiled person). The script arose out of interviews with people from poorer countries who were happy to share the circum18

Juliet O’Brien

Stage model for L’Écrivain Public, 2009

stances of life in their homelands, and to relate their experiences about living in a country as rich and powerful as France. It is, quite simply, a play about others. Juliet O’Brien has acted, written and shaped plays, and taught theatre studies at Théâtre Romain Rolland for eight years. And I imagine she must also be an able administrator, capable of dealing with various powers within and outside the “world” of the theatre, some of which may be more interested in investment or in themselves, than in plays about others.

w.d.

Rehearsal shot for L’Écrivain Public, 2008

Stage model for L’Écrivain Public, 2008

19

Franco Bianciardi

f. Cela

qui

écouté s'agissant du son Dans le lien l'écoulement à la mesure Porté - parfois si peu de peau... verbe défait La transmutation (ha ! ha !...) - nous y voilà ! tous Écrivant à tout rompre à l'éclatement net Des tympans – la chair suit dans le chant enchâssé Lui-même traduit veine à veine tel qu'elle- Caressant affleurant l'hallucination (l'oeil É-cervelé...) 101008.

20

gît

Franco Bianciardi [w.d.]

f. That which hears having to do with his “lieth” In the connection the measured flow Carried - occasionally so little skin… verb unmade Transmutation (ha! ha!...) - that’s us! all of us Writing to break with it all to the point of breaking doubtless The inner diaphragms of ears – flesh follows in song set like a jewel Itself translates vein to vein as she is Caressing justifying hallucination (the eye Maddened…) 101008

21

Will Christie

out of order these lines are. Hold the note while it devalues. This is our very best dystopic mess. You concentrate on deformity on the crass curiosities of decay disfigurement, distortion, chaos. The squalor in your spirit is carelessly tended which accelerates your character development. The fingertips are gender positions. Some genes persist by lucky powers and chance and well, here you are. Don't fall for your own charisma though you have, you have to. The struggle convinces you of its necessity like a palm to the cheek, either fast or soft depending on how well you're learning. Ornate terrors await those without real ones. Nobody is starving in our street. Ennui sets the youth reeling. Metaphors attack you in your sleep and you wake thick tongued and blinded with belligerent meanings. All the drugs, the super cool kids on the run from their family mansions make themselves available to the concrete art. The illness, receding, leaves our eyes bright. How crazy were we to think this mode of transport would be effective? You've been finally imperfected. Things that get made in passion stay in the current second, keep getting invented as long as we both shall live. What I miss most is your early work. 22

Will Christie

The Goldest Turn up to our parties and find ten more elegant solutions and a sound excuse to drink. No people has ever gone as fast, as high as this. The mania gives us wings and we batter the glass. You keep coming back to find out why you keep coming back Disinspiration erupts under this popping summer sky like a satellite dish and we sleep under the weather. Some of us are kept. The rest of us are kept away from the lands of coffee and cream by muscular laws and hired guns. The fear appears as a crystal and spreads. Soon it's locked in an irregular tessellation of refracting edges which make it tricky to see straight. The fuck-up is exquisite; you total the ambience with that inappropriate behavior modification. The ground shakes my belief. This wiring is dodgy, anti-climactic, tending towards fascistic absolutes. Subtle repetition shapes us. Some parts of our speech are set into places so secure we don't need to eat or breathe. Take the piss out. My self-destruction is egotistical and your misery is selfish and sugar is a sign of collapse into immediate pleasures that eat the strength out of bones but only after years. 23

Will Christie

Thank god we don't know how to mine earthquakes, to read each others' minds to levitate the weaponry, stay in power forever, command insects Thanks for every weakness that's slowed us down so we're still going. Make a new me out of metal already weathered, lasting longer than meteors, recessions, kittens, sunstroke, these arguments to be found years after being abandoned and turned again to a fresh use. Let sound drip away draining out of your mouth when you sing. It's dangerous, this imaginary spiraling of bodies into some kind of relation, takes a very hot patience brings worlds into existence. The persistent dark stretched over half this planet pours into the window to flood our pristine rooms.

24

David L. Brown

Nights at the Nylon Club The fingernails of the ersatz princess shoot sparks as she reaches to smooth her tights; She gasps; swoons on the counterpane. A casualty of static cling. In the vestry, the catamites are pricking and sipping. The bishop lowers his lorgnette, fingers his favourite and inhales a fine line of powder ground from the cartilage of St Theresa of Avila. The opium smokers seep into chaise longues leaving an oily film which will be scraped up by acolytes, freeze dried and cut into hors d'oeuvres; The archduke discreetly masturbates into a scented handkerchief observed by the cardinal's ape; while on the rink, the Madonna of Knives performs an intelligent figure of eight. Sometimes, in the ballroom, suspended from the chandelier, Zouzou la Twisteuse, the trapeze artiste, dispenses ecstasy with long tongs and the notorious mythomorph, Bianca reclines on a brocade banquette, waiting for her face to set in preparation for her entrance at 4 a.m. via L'Escalier des Étoiles. Some nights, at the Nylon Club it is so cool that you can't breathe. But don't concern yourselves, my dears, don't fret. At the Nylon Club strangulation is de rigueur. 25

Jacques Coulardeau

I long for peace in Sigiriya and Pidurangala As the result of an enduring relationship with the Sigiri Graffiti and the Sigiriya Site where they are, I have collected all descriptive elements of these Famous Ladies of Sigiriya and recomposed them in the following song in English (which has its own musical accompaniment in Sri Lanka) and in French. A project exists to bring together the most striking graffiti into a poetic show with musical and theatrical setting, but it seems to have encountered some resistance (Sri Lanka is not as fashionable as India right now). Furthermore Sri Lanka has been incapacitated by the ongoing struggle for secession conducted violently, and some would say with terrorist means, by the Tamil Tigers. These Ladies of Sigiriya should inspire us to believe that a political solution integrating a Hindu Tamil minority in Sri Lanka is possible. The condition is, naturally, that both sides detach themselves from their narrow nationalistic approaches. Such detachment, which is quite Buddhist in inspiration, can only occur when the weapons of war fall silent. J.C.















Dr Coulardeau’s poem (pp 30-36) was set to music (opposite) by Chamila Maldeniya. The composition was performed by the musical group of which she is a member, in the Sigiriya Village Hotel on Monday, October 24, 2005.

26

Jacques Coulardeau

27

Chamila Maldeniya

Jacques Coulardeau

Les Célèbres Dames de Sigiriya Ton corps à la peau d'or Roses sont tes mains Blancheur nacrée d'un lys Seins tendres et doux Beautés aux cheveux d'encre Lèvres cuivre chaud Graines tout en arcure D'un melon charnu Fines dents de cristal Perles alignées Parade sur ton Nuage vaporeux Envoie-nous passions Désirs rêves envols L'ondée qui nourrit La mousson qui abat La sèche chaleur Du pays de poussière L'amour immédiat Pour ton cœur brasero Aimée aux yeux de biche Ternis le soleil Ton éclat lumineux Brillant éclatant Bras longs et élancés Yeux gazelléens Capture de tes lianes Nos cœurs ingénus Tout à l'entour de toi Darde tes regards La lune afadie Mon aimée aux longs yeux Fronce du sourcil 28

Jacques Coulardeau

Sigiriya's Ladies of Fame Golden-colour'd with rosy hands Lily colour'd with tender breasts Dark lock'd beauties with copper lips Melon seeds and so sweet a smile Rows of pearly and crystal teeth



You strut on your cloud of vapour



You make us dream long and crave for



The cool soft rain shower crushing



The heat of th' dry dusty country



The heat of th' heart instant lovers

Deer-eyed one you blind the sun Radiance luminous brilliant bright Long and slim arms gazellian eyes Trap in y' creepers our hearts so pure Scatter y' looks all around your self



To shame the moon long eyed damsel



With frowns like blue water-lilies 29

Jacques Coulardeau

Tes bleus nénuphars Braque tes deux yeux Deux saphirs indigos Deux lotus d'azur Sapus épanouies Beaux A-ra-li-y(eu) Jaune d'or neige blanche Colliers multicolores Pétales en fleur Opulents Pendentifs Nés de la rosée Brise en lueur lunaire Caresse leur corps Rubis pleine foison Transcendez le Roc Abandonnez leurs mains Du mur descendez Ensorcelez-nous D'un fol amour aveugle Et envoûtez-nous D'un fol amour de sourd Nous nous attardons En abeilles captives Ivres de chansons Hydromel capiteux Endormi rêvant Prisonniers de pétales Des matrones jalouses Des moines sans suc Vous vouent à tous les maux Et vous injurient Vous jettent et balancent En chute de mort Les assassins subtils Et hommes savants L'eau de l'humiliation Servent à plus soif 30

Jacques Coulardeau



Or stares like blue sapphire jewels



And lotus blue sapu flowers



A-ra-li-y white and yellow



Garlands blooming with petals light Pendants budding under the dew Breezelike moonshine caress their skin Gorgeous rubies transcend the Rock Leave their hands from the wall descend



Infatu-at' us with blind love



Enamour us all with deaf love



Like bees entrapp'd linger we there



All drunk with songs drowsy nectar



Asleep adream prison o' petals

Jealous women and dried-up monks Cast their curses and cast your fate Falling hurling you all to death Subtle killers and learned men Choose to give you the water o' shame

31

Jacques Coulardeau

Flottez en plein ciel Nymphes de paradis Les vagues refluent A la mer de beauté Roulant et tanguant Les cygnes qu'elles portent Vos doux seins si purs Etincelants et chastes Repos des nuées Noires d'esprit lunaire Au berceau de son ambre Peintre se déploie Entrelacé de fleurs Peintre ton pinceau Jette sa volonté Formes colorées Nos désirs en déluge L'esprit pensant noie Artiste mon artiste Pétris-nous les chairs Il dit : 'Beaucoup trop Tu envies et désires Vois ta volupté Qui erre grouille afflue Menés par ta chair Sont tes yeux et ton corps Tes plaisirs des sens Ces peintures titillent Bien que l'intention Soit seulement de plaire

32

Jacques Coulardeau



In mid-air float Nymphs from heaven



The waves on your ocean o' beauty



Support the swans rocking an' rolling



Your breasts so pure gorgeous right'ous



Refresh our dark clouds of moon mind

Amber-cradled the painter dreams Flower-laden the painter's brush Casts in colours and shapes his will Our desires will submerge our minds Artist artist you knead our flesh



He says: 'you are craving too much



You see your lust roaming squirming



Your flesh directs eyes and body



The pictures prick sens'ous pleasures



Although they should please you only.'

33

William Direen

Overlooking Maori Head A dog in the shallows His mistress throwing sticks His master brave between rocks and the shore Surfing Where the heart beats hard And the wave is soon done. Surf is a turbulence The guy does well to understand— The swell, clean and long as the flight of a long-necked swan Could break his bones Against the musselled rocks. Within sight of those hardest-to-climb cliffs there A burnt out car shrieks As if it hears the volcano laughing in its sleep.

2009 We have gone from ages of coal and iron To the clacking of doors in faces Faith healers are on the cheap channels promising Gamblers are giving tips Landsnatchers are scratching in the earth for titles And those puritanical doctors are warning us still: Look to your body All crimes against it Will be punished. In the men's room The mirrors of our fathers meet Bodies that grew sick from excess. Our bands have abandoned revolt Our cults have rewritten Revelations And it was a hasty affair — the firesale revolution! The chasm's getting wider And there's no safety net. 34

William Direen [s.b.]

Vue sur Maori Head Un chien dans une nappe d’eau Sa maîtresse lance des bouts de bois Son maître, excellent entre rochers et plage, Fait du surf Où le cœur bat fort Et la crise vite passée. Le surf est un tumulte, Le gars devrait bien le comprendre— L’ onde de la mer, nette et longue comme le vol d’un cygne au long cou, Pourrait briser ses os Sur les roches couvertes de coquillages. À la portée de ces falaises là-bas les plus dures à franchir La carcasse d’une voiture crisse Comme si elle entendait rire le volcan endormi.

2009 Nous sommes passés des âges de fer et de charbon Au claquement de porte au nez Les prêcheurs font des promesses sur les chaines au rabais Les parieurs donnent des tuyaux Ceux qui s’emparent des terres creusent le sol pour un titre de propriété Et ces médecins puritains continuent de nous menacer : Regarde ton corps Tout acte contre lui Sera puni. Au vestiare des hommes Les reflets de nos pères rencontrent Des corps rendus malades par les excès. Nos groupes de rock ont renoncé à la révolte Nos admirateurs ont réécrit l’Apocalypse Et c’était une affaire rondement menée—la révolution liquidée! Le fossé s’élargit Et il n’y a pas de filet de sécurité. 35

William Direen

Poems on curved surfaces and the electronic book Many Egyptian love poems were written on the curved surfaces of ostraca, vessels with handles (See Percutio 2006, pp 32-33). It is attractive to imagine that the ostraca contained wine, and that the words written on them were sung or recited or “remembered”, to accompany the drinking of it. What is less hypothetical is that the words were inscribed by a professional writer from the village near where most of them were discovered—a public writer. Erwin Panofsky (writing of objectification of the subjective, and of the subjective as dependent on the perspective ordained by the object—he is thinking precisely of drawings upon curved surfaces), once argued (in Perspective as Symbolic Form, Zone Books, tr. C.S.Wood, 1997) that linear perspective has become inseparable from the modern popular conception of reality, generated in large part by photography and its descendants film, television, video, newspaper images, architectural representations and graphic images. Linear perspective has so dominated modern conceptions of reality that twice in modern history, scientists and theorists (psychologists and physicists at the end of the nineteenth century and seven­teenth century astronomers and mathematicians) have had to “discover” the curvature of the optical image (the surface of the eye, the movement of the gaze, the retinal image), as they made revolutionary advances in their fields. By contrast, the spherioidal optical world of antiquity in which angle was equally (if not more) important than distance in various forms of imitation or representation did not need to be rediscovered, it was, for those ancients, intuitive. Panofsky points out that “In antique optics and art theory (as well as in philosophy, although here only in the form of analogies) we constantly encounter the observations that straight lines are seen as curved and curved lines as straight.”(p. 34) Using Ernst Cassirer's term “symbolic forms”, he admonishes us “to ask of artistic periods and regions not only whether they have perspective, but also which perspective they have.” (p. 41) The words on the ostraca curve towards or away from the eye, or rather towards/from the two curved eyes (and the effect of this doubling of the subject's optical curvature is also worth considering). Their surface requires that we shift focus far more than we do when reading the gentle curvature of a page. In fact, the text literally disappears from view, in space. The image of the clay, and of the curvature of the surface, cannot but have a huge effect upon our apprehension of the words' meaning. A second influence, and one 36

William Direen

publishers and upon readers is the form of professional writing that we find upon that surface. Writing upon a curved surface, be they ostraca, papyri or medieval parchments, represents both an interruption and a distortion. The best scribe stops the song in writing it. A scribe can not write other than in the manner to which he has been trained. Written words are charged ineradicably with the act of their writing, not only enforcing an interpretation of the words that isolates them from their previous manifestation as oral literature, but doing so in such a way as to terminate the effect of song upon song. In a sense, writing freezes the song in time, in perspective and in space. Wölflin: The effect of picture on picture as a factor in style is much more important than what comes directly from the imitation of nature. It is highly likely, if improvable, that the Egyptian love poems developed from earlier versions, and descended orally (or textually in a manner lost) from Mesopotamian sources (a common hypothesis). In being stored for us they would have been rendered by a scribe who was not a poet, nor one “versed” in poetry. Scribes may well have been versed in law. The death of the book has been announced, and electronic books are now being vaunted as the birth of something new. But the electronic book is the ultimate archive, the ultimate scriptural text. It will be laid-out by scribes with as little interest in poetry as your average Egyptian or medieval monastic scribe. And it may freeze poetry as never before. Wouldn’t it be ironic if the disappearance of the printed book (successor to rolling parchment, to papyrus, to “indestructible” stele and to ostraca), along with dissatisfaction with the electronic book, were to bring about a poetry that moderated the poet’s desire (brought on by writing and, subsequently, by the revolution of printing) for textualisation—a poetry that obviates the intervening scribe or keyboard operator, and one which operates within a sense of perspective that may (for all we know) predate both linear and curved senses of perspective : a poetry invented and refined and remembered by the mind, which finds its ideal form in successful transmission from mind to minds in performance ?

37

Steve Dean

Two poems it’s a long time since eye and pen and word made sense of made a sense of sensing to be ending in just words if possible more without the picture or sculpture being that alone described -=-=-=A figure looks out to sea Oily cloud, chalky surf A picture Watched through a window From a garden On television Sun creaks and cracks Brown dried shoulder Paint brush poised in hand 38

David Eggleton

Burning Woman She be a broke-down Barbie in killer heels; you be riding past your pushbike with trainer wheels. She'll spin your wheels with a lazy motion, getting upside your head with her supersize lies. Burning woman, burning woman, burning woman, smoke blowing through a pipeline dream, like rust that never sleeps, virus that ever creeps. She toss some leaves in oil and squeeze your lemon; pick your pockets' fluff; she's a loose change demon. She's steel-eyed in the mirror of the times; and caught in the press for a vintage crime. Burning woman, burning woman, burning woman smoke blowing through a pipeline dream, like rust that never sleeps, virus that ever creeps. Though she don't dance much like a jinx, she wears a halo for Satan, who burns a syringe. You got heart of plenty; she gives you heart of pain; you got heart of yearning; she gives you heart insane. Burning woman, burning woman, burning woman smoke blowing through a pipeline dream, like rust that never sleeps, virus that ever creeps. Like a song of jubilation down in tin-can alley; she shakes the tintinnabulation of skeleton keys. Don't you chase romantic love among her ruined circuits; you better off to run away and join a three-ring circus. Burning woman, burning woman, burning woman smoke blowing through a pipeline dream, like rust that never sleeps, virus that ever creeps. 39

M. A. Bourke

The Moment The actor is late Skipping make-up As a man, he enters the camera He unscrews the filter Casts it aside He rails at the glass (inaudible) Panning, we get the tropical island, the title The man, in profile, can't resist climbing Out to join the beautiful women “Aren't you forgetting something?” they say “Huh?” Fade to black A speck of light — No — A bright, fuzzy ball bounces Twice It's coming straight for us It plops onto the sand A pure, white, fluffy thing it is Girl: What's this? The man collects himself He offers it

40

Michael Steven







Pillars

i.m. Antonia Pozzi (1912-1938) An intersection lit by rain. The buildings

Anchored now only a child's memory:

& billboards

the storefronts of red brick

in place of gods or direction----

locked together--- the mason's humble

a naked commerce: one of violent hyperbole

initial scratched into the grout.

shadowing the interests



of fear & memory---an economy of influence.

41

David Karena-Holmes

not by bread

1

It is not by bread one lives but by the stars’ imperatives.

2

Not by bread ought one to live but by love’s imperative.



on the shore, listening

Whatever wisdom we might crave from spoken or from written word there’s something other to be heard in cries of that sea-wandering bird and wordless sounds of wind and wave.



ancestry



My mother’s father taught at school and had unruly boys to rule.



On hills the sheep had eaten bare my father made the grass appear.



My mind must school its images to flourish in its wilderness. 42

David Karena-Holmes [s.b.]

pas avec du pain

1

Ce n’est pas avec du pain qu’on vit mais sous les directives des étoiles.

2

On doit vivre non pas avec du pain mais sous la directive de l’amour.



sur le rivage, à l’écoute

Quelque soit la sagesse que nous pourrions implorer des mots parlés où écrits Quelque chose d’autre doit être entendu dans les cris de cet oiseau vagabond des mers et les bruits sans parole du vent et de la vague.



lignée



Le père de ma mère enseignait à l’école et devait contenir des gamins indisciplinés.



Mon père fit naître le gazon sur les collines que les moutons en paissant avaient dénudées.



Mon esprit doit former ses images pour qu’elles fleurissent en son désert. 43

Paul Verlaine [t.k.]

Seascape the sonorous Ocean palpitates under the eye of the mournful Moon and palpitates again, and a lightning flash, savage and ominous, cracks the bistre sky in a long white zigzag, while every wave, with convulsive blasts against the long reefs, goes and comes, shines and raves and high above, the hurricane wanders, and thunder rumbles, rumbling terribly.

44

Paul Verlaine

Marine L' Océan sonore Palpite sous l'oeil De la lune en deuil Et palpite encore, Tandis qu'un éclair Brutal et sinistre Fend le ciel de bistre D'un long zigzag clair, Et que chaque lame, En bonds convulsifs, Le long des récifs, Va, vient, luit et clame, Et qu'au firmament, Où l'ouragan erre, Rugit le tonnerre Formidablement.

45

Chris Walshaw

Extract from Balkonstrasse 5 A collaboration staged at English Theatre Berlin on 2–9 December 2006. The set was part movie, part video montage and part traditional stage-set. Props were minimal. A “Digidada” beamer set each scene, operated from a laptop at the lighting consul. It beamed images from backstage onto a large screen which was the backdrop to the stage. Plot: Erica falls for Nick just when Nick is disengaging himself from his old girlfriend Clare, who has moved into the same building a few floors below. Also at Balkonstrasse 5 is Heidi on the floor below Erica and Bob/Lyle, below her. In this extract Heidi has found out all about Bob/Lyle (a lonely writer of pulp romances) and is determined to experience with him the wild romance found in his most lurid books. He laughs. She doesn't. She is already dreaming her own dream. Heidi And slate floors everywhere… Bob And slate floors everywhere! Heidi And deep-pile cashmere carpets! Bob In both the rooms? Heidi In all the rooms! All thirty of them! Bob You can't have a cottage with thirty rooms! Heidi Bob, you said I could have anything I wanted. And a dishwasher! Bob Er... Heidi Von Siemens! Ich weiß schon welches Modell! Die SE 24 M256! And a fullyfitted Poggenpohl kitchen! And a marble floor in the bathroom! And a jacuzzi! Bob A yakootsy? Heidi... how are we going to afford all this? Heidi With your royalties! Bob is speechless. Heidi is unstoppable. Heidi And a fitness room! And a fondue set! And a state-of-the-art dustsucker! Bob You mean 46

Chris Walshaw

Heidi Von Dyson. Mit immenser Saugleistung. And a ... and a... She snaps her fingers impatiently, struggling to find the words. Bob (weakly, with foreboding) And a...? Heidi Ach, ich sag' es auf Deutsch! Eine Karaoke-Maschine! Und ein RiesenFlachbildfernseher in jedem Zimmer! Und aus der Wiese hinterm Cottage machen wir was ganz besonders: einen Theme Park... deinem Gesamtwerk gewidmet! Nein — ein separates Erlebnisdorf für jeden einzelnen Roman! Oh, ich kann mir schon bildhaft vorstellen, wie wir Illicit Kisses and Tawdry Affair verwirklichen! Das wird ein Publikumsmagnet! Und im Zentrum von (mit Ehrfurcht) LyleLand: ein Einkaufsparadies mit Multiplex-Kino! Dolby SurroundSound! Zwölf Leinwände! Für die Filmfassungen deiner Bücher! Ach Bob, ist es nicht wunderschön? Unser Traum wird schon wahr... Bob ...'Kino'? She is off in her own trance. Heidi Deine Fans strömen dahin! Wie hinreißend! Du hast es geschafft! Du hast es verdient! Und ich hab' mir schon alles ausgedacht — für unser Verlöbnis und die Hochzeitsreise! (she takes out her list and reads excitedly) An engagement tour through Asia; wedding while skydiving — Bob Skydiving?! Heidi — in South Africa; crocodile wrestling on the Amazon; and then there's a never-ending stream of successes in New York, Moscow, Paris and London. And Hollywood! Bob squeaks. Heidi doesn't notice. Heidi I've already nearly finished your next book — Bob You've done what? Bob slips out of bed and hastens to gets dressed. Heidi - and I've plotted another two! You know, ever since I can remember, I've been dreaming about a life together with that someone special, and waiting for the moment when he would walk into my life and sweep me off my feet, and carry me off to conquer the world. And now I've found you. Bob is tiptoeing to the door. 47

Jim Wilson

Rest in Peace Mike Jones and Steve Marsden The week I heard of the deaths of Mike and Steve it was right in the middle of NZ Music Month when it's really not safe to go outside the door anymore for the flag wavers.1 I thought to myself “I'll go home and read 'Inside the Penal Colony' ” as if that would cure everything. In fact it did. I'd known Mike Jones since we were both thirteen and we lived right next to the railway tracks on Wilson's Road, Christchurch. He was a bass guitarist par excellence and of Maori extraction (which he never found out until late in his life). The first band I knew him to be in was Automation and next was Forces of Love. It was with Forces of Love that he began to play the halls: Zone 2, St Chad's, St Theresa's, The Horticultural Society Hall, The Caledonian Hall, The Brake Street Hall, and the Mt Pleasant Community Centre Hall. I often promoted these gigs with Mike in 1968, 1969, and 1970. In 1972, Mike's band Lord (band photo: below right) came second in the national Battle of the Bands. There were the usual disagreements with other band members and then he played in several other bands during the 1970s. Mike probably climbed his greatest heights when he played behind Ken Akroyd. Ken would have to have been one of the top two or three guitarists produced in Christchurch. I remember a sterling nightclub down Colombo Street called the 'Velvet Glove' which was run by 'Oz' Armstrong and Russell King. Mike's band was resident. Then in 1976 and 1977 (after later closing hours for hotels opened up possibilities for bands)2, Mike's bands played at the Valley Inn at Heathcote and at the Cave Rock Hotel in Sumner. Mike stayed vital until the day he died in late 2008 of liver cancer. His career took him to all the usual nooks and crannies of the music business: jail, the Hep C3 clinic, the dole queue, the methadone clinic4 etc.....and so at the end of all that, the man had some wisdom. His bass playing was such that you could have hit him with a rock and not a difference would it make. His contribution to Christchurch Music was outstanding and he never was invited to the NZ Music Awards.5 48

Jim Wilson

49

Jim Wilson

Steve Marsden was a member of one of Christchurch's most infectious6 bands, The Androidss (band photo: below right). The Androidss were a group of playmates who decided to make music. This was, near as I can remember, in the late 1970s. If I am confused about the date, it’s because I went to some of their parties. I think it's fair to say that The Androidss learnt as they went along. Their first gig was at the British Hotel in Lyttelton and at that stage they featured the wonderful Arthur Manawatu on vocals. It was impossible not to like The Androidss, because of their sheer sense of play. In many ways they defied all the logic of conventional music and they took every listener to a place where only happiness existed. Many tried to fight this, of course, but in the end the sheer wildness of the band won out. They were a pleasant and friendly virus. Steve was one of the main guys and a chap of incredible energy. He was a cheeky and likeable devil and I don't think we’re going to see the likes of him again.

== R.I.P. ==

_____________________________ 1

This a reference to a sort of hysteria of national pride stimulated every year by promotion for New Zealand Music. 2 Before the law change c. 1971, premises licensed to sell alcohol closed at 6pm in New Zealand. 3 Hepatitis C treatment centre. 4 Treatment centre for opiate drug addiction. 5 NZ Music Awards are heavily sponsored national prize-giving ceremonies honouring established musicians. As in most countries, the prize-winners are usually not living on the edge of society but assimilated into the social network of the music industry. 6 Infectious is a friendly and positive term used in New Zealand to describe the “sound” of a band. It means “catchy”, like a pop song, but with an underground significance — the catchiness is experienced by initiates. [notes : Éd]

50

Jim Wilson

51

K. M. Ross

Take the Shell of an Egg What is the purpose of a human? Commerce? No, let's be serious. The act. Then this is it, friends and neighbours. Aexchel in his Performance Dos and Don'ts says, What struggle there is is not on the stage, but in your mind. and Since time is never a point but a universality, the moment that seems so exposing can be generalised to all moments, any moment. and Practice, more than rote, is a habituation to the exemplary mind-set: that is, execution in a state of self-forgetfulness. Struggle, and time, and practice. Standing on a frame outside myself, I see the keys are a softened white approaching yellow. The black ones are only divisions. A rustle of voices, and some hanging overtone in that huge space of air, like a tuning fork that can never be absolutely still. Anyone out there I know? No no, get a grip, boy. This is the one place you're not allowed to be aware of your environment. Where it's all supposed to happen under anaesthetic. That is, for personality 'a'…. But am I right in calling myself that, the yin? or could I be 'b', the yang…? At this point, any writer would naturally insert the words of the evening's master of ceremonies. But you can easily imagine them yourself. In any case it wouldn't be the truth, because at this point I'm unaware of words or meanings, I can only feel the floodgates of passing time, the bleeding away of all those moments that are universal. To the last, where there's nowhere to run. There's a tension strung in wires from eye to eye, the presence of all those others poised to judge. I feel like chucking up. But doctor it down with those peculiar medicines, my mantras. Think through the opening bars. Concentration and confidence; the two Cs. And now. - NOW! Becoming somehow as I do it the medium for towering grandeurs conceived in some other mind in a different century I sit here singing apart from myself like a bird on a wire, but it's those wires that cut into me the beading of alien intellects so remember can you 52

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remember It cannot be disputed that what you can do in practice you can do equally well on a stage. This is something you must remain aware of without consciously thinking it. Be aware of it, but don't think it. Aware of it. Think of it…. Fuck. As a boy I remember learning the word objective. It gave me a picture of a framework of struts in space, absolutely blank space, myself crawling out on one of them. That was the distance from all of it from everything. So now here I was inching slowly along a girder on the outermost limit of the frame and looking outwards inwards to nothing, nothing that is but a dark meeting of three angular bars about a foot above my head. There was a noise in the distance, rising and falling, mountainous. Of course I was making a sort of air-song all the time in the back of my throat, something you can't describe very well in words. But as I kept changing the direction I was looking in, I did occasionally notice that soft white like a brittleness of an egg, and around it black bars, iron spreaders, which were the structures I moved along. House of matchsticks. And a big black tail stretching vaguely into the distance. Which strangely enough I didn't associate with that thing, the nine-foot Bösendorfer Imperial, so much as the black tails on the coat I wore. Tails, down here we all have tails. And there it is - that's the way you can think nothing. Except of course you can't, which is why after a while I found myself myself walking in the cold light of a spring afternoon down Moray Park Road, with deep cuts of shadow between the tenements. The sun grazing over everything like an abstract blessing. I felt quite happy. There was something I was going to do; I was off to do it. Cars kept passing up and down, going slowly because of the traffic bumps. A girl passed me, on the stout side, in a grey full-length coat, and a woman who for some reason looked back. Then a young guy, pale, as I came round the corner. That one looked like he'd had a bad night. Oh boy yes. And he passed me and then I saw the back of his head, a terrible killing gash in it the shape of a cross, hair around it so matted I couldn't see the edges, where surely the skull must have must have no don't think that not that and hurried on I didn't look again in case to a riverbank where hundreds of people were standing or lying on the bare mud under a sepia sky that never changed and when you looked further there were more than hundreds because they continued evenly spaced to the end of your sight how many were there how many and every one with 53

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that lifeless stare at nothing at all but the slow incline as the ground fell downwards to the river passed in black and in the sky a thunder thunder of startled chords A huuhhh a huuhhh I'm breathing __________________ In the Old Masonic Hall at 8:00 on the evening of Saturday the 26th (members of the audience will please be in their seats by 7:50) four students of the Thomas Erskine School of Music will offer a head-to-tail recital of Bull, Scarlatti, Brahms, and Ives. Tickets will be available at the door. Younger lovers of the arts are welcome, though a crèche will be provided for those under 6. These four promising performance students will surprise you with their dexterity and emotional depth, as well as the freshness of their musical approach, boding well for the interpretation of the classics in the new century. They will ride the matchstick castle. Woo you all with the astonishing trick of failing to fail. The tightrope walker standing athwart the gaping void can afford to ignore the possibility of a false step. Thank you Aexchel. And so to add to the noise of that old bastard Brahms who must have been a 'b' or yang there's a rising mulch of half-formed words, summarising, admonishing, to be aware of but never think about. And onward you roll, in the act of bringing off what you could so easily do in practice, forever and without pause, because time is universal. Doing it for the end the achievement of a sort which you could say by that definition will never happen. So concentrate on the tone quality of those uppers. Be glad there's no lipstick camera for the fingers, see that? Can't quite keep them still. Or take up base-jumping instead, where the delicate dome of the skull can be disintegrated in an instant by contact with any foreign object - masonry sills on the Old Masonic Hall. Lie all around you, in brittle offwhite fragments. Always remember to breathe. Ignore the spirit voices. Aim for the point of it, which is at the end, so they say, the crown and purpose, moment of consummating power. … When will it end? Or will it ever? My end, Margot's end. No no, not that. They nail you into a box. Oh right, I think I'm beginning to … Where was I?

54

Arno Löffler

The Spaceship Kurt lived in a squat in Friedrichshain. It was early 1991, six months after the Reunification, eighteen after the Wall had come down. There were more than 90 squats in Friedrichshain alone, several hundred in Berlin. East Berlin was a weird place, especially if you came from a family of Gymnasium teachers in a Swabian backwater town as Kurt did. Most of the squats were inhabited by more than 20 people, most of whom originated from somewhere in West or East Germany, but there were squatters from all over the world. They were a pretty motley crew, Punks, Skins, Anarchists, Communists, artists, poets, musicians, run-away kids, students, travellers, junkies, refugees, migrants, adventurers of all sorts. You name it. They had come to the run-down, post-Socialist metropolis in search of an alternative, liberated or “free” way of living. In Kurt's squat there were just a handful of people, all of them West German. The front part of the building was still rented out by the municipal Wohnungsbaugesellschaft, in the back there were empty flats, some of which had been squatted by East Germans reluctant to pay any rent - “quietly”, without any political aproach. The “real”, “political” squat that was part of the left-wing scene was the side-wing, six people on four storeys. Sven whose parents owned a little strawberry farm in a village in the Harz had moved in a couple of weeks after Kurt. The “Ossis”, the indigenous East Germans, loved the fact that “now they were the West as well”. Yes, that's how they put it: “Now we are the West as well.” No, it doesn't sound any better in German. When Capitalism arrived on the doorstep the first thing that happened was the official introduction of the deutschmark in the GDR. That was in the summer of 1990, and Reunification still four months away. The factories and other businesses in East Germany closed down. People were out of work but “free”. Free to spend their savings that had now, as if by some magic trick, been turned from worthless East German “Aluchips” into real money. They got loans and bought new sofas, tellies, freezers, jogging suits. And, above all, new cars. Western cars. They were eager to get rid of the Trabis they had waited half their lives for. The former working-class district of Friedrichshain had become an area of frustrated, unemployed Ossis unable to pay back their loans on the one hand, and happy-go-lucky squatters on the other. It was a strange combination, but the two groups got along fairly well. After all, they had a common enemy: Capitalism. Kurt had never had this much space to himself before - not in his par55

Arno Löffler

ents' house, let alone later as a university student away from his hometown. Maybe that's how he got his idea. Yes, pretty sure. So one day he carried all his records, CD's, clothes, books and his other gear out of the main room and into the smaller one. In the main room there was nothing left but a mattress resting on two Euro pallets and a big board supported by two large empty vats: his desk. In the corner there was an old-fashioned oven as in any other flat in Berlin. The squatters used stolen timber for fuel. Kurt bought a lot of black paint and some white paint. Then he painted everything in the room black, bar the oven and the mattress. He even cardboarded up the windows; the cardboard he painted black as well. Kurt was not depressed or suchlike. He had an ambitious plan. From a West Berlin toy shop he bought three cans of glow-in-the-dark paint, highly poisonous. Back in his room, he painted random little white dots on the black surface, all over the show. In some places, he created big clusters; sprawling spirals and solitary dots were eventually more or less equally distributed all over the walls, ceiling, floor and windows - a comicbook all-over rendition of space in black and white. Then for the finishing touch. With an almost hairless old brush he applied many yellow glow-inthe-dark dots on top of the white ones and added a few blue and red ones, for the “Doppler Effect”. And with an old toothbrush he sprayed glow-inthe-dark nebulae in some spots. At an electric appliances shop Kurt got a black light tube which he fitted into a socket he had ripped off the ceiling of an abandoned comb factory nearby. Finally, he turned on the black light and called his girlfriend Laura who lived one storey above. She smiled and said she liked it. They kissed. Kurt saw that it was good. But something was still missing. The following day Kurt got on a bus to another West Berlin toy shop. He browsed the plastic model section. A member of staff asked if he could help. “Well, I'm after a plastic model of a spaceship”, Kurt said. “Funnily enough I don't seem to be able to find any here.” The toy shop assistant dropped his professional façade and told Kurt quite chummily that for some reason there weren't any SF shows on tv presently, so there weren't any corresponding plastic models in the shops. “Just glue a few random electric components together, some resistors and some capacitors or something. That's going to look even much more swanky than a plastic model from a shop!” He advised Kurt to get those parts at Electronic Conrad and bade him farewell. Kurt returned to the squat scowling - he would feel like a complete jerk at Electronic Conrad, rummaging for things he didn't know anything about. But luckily, just then Michael was in the kitchen. He had heard news of 56

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another abandoned factory, this time in Treptow. It had been producing electronic parts before it closed down, and it would offer just what Kurt needed. Civil rights activists believed it to be a “Stasiobjekt”, a business used as a front by the Staatssicherheit, the almighty East German secret police. They were convinced that was where all the bugs had been custom-made and maintained for the Stasi and probably there were also files there giving away intimate details of the lives of spied-on citizens, Michael explained, munching a cheese sandwich. Yes, the factory was watched by a security firm, but it was teeming with really pissed off civil rights activists looking for their files. The guards had lost control and they didn't care anyway. Sven, who was also present in the kitchen, banged his fist into his hand. “Hey, that's fucking great! Let's go and see what we can get out of there!” he exclaimed. Sven would always be game when there was something for free, no matter what it was. The six squatters were sharing a Trabi at the time. “Papyrus white”, the official description read in the car papers. Its former owner had sold it for 20 marks, slightly more than the price of a crate of beer. He ran a successful “Spätkauf ” in the neighbourhood, an open-till-late dairy where everybody bought their beer, tobacco and papers. People will always buy those things, even when they're broke. Kurt and Sven drove to Treptow, which looked pretty much like Friedrichshain. The brown and grey plaster was flaking off crumbling walls, the road surfaces were cracked. It was a nice, sunny day in early spring, Kurt and Sven had the windows open, they were having a beer between them and they were laughing a lot. Sven was driving. The little two-stroke engine made a lot of noise. They weren't going much faster than the allowed fifty, but it sure felt and sounded like 250. The factory was next to the rusty remains of what once had been a railway bridge across Elsenstraße. The tracks had been unused since World War II; they lead to Görlitzer Bahnhof in Kreuzberg, a station that had been bombed to smithereens and never rebuilt. The railway area was like a jungle in the city now. Sven jolted the Trabi into a park. The two cracked open another beer and had another joint. Kurt put on his backpack, they idled off around the front building, climbed over a wall and reached the yard. The security guards had put up signs to keep trespassers off. Sven laughed like a horse and yelled “guten Aaabend!” - good eeevening! - in a shrill, goofy cartoon voice that sounded just like those silly Mainzelmännchen from German tv: animated chubby dwarf charaters populating the screen between commercial spots. The racket Kurt and Sven were making resounded from the walls around them. The place was teeming with nobody but them 57

Arno Löffler

alone. All the doors were locked, and there weren't any open windows in sight either. “Ah, shit!” Kurt scratched his head in disappointment. “Doesn't matter. We'll just climb on that roof over there, smash the window and go in,” Sven chuckled. So they shimmied up the drainpipe onto the roof of the shed, which proved more difficult than it had looked from below. Of course the only window they could reach was locked as well. Without hesitation, Sven gave the pane a good kick that shattered the glass with a terribly loud noise. “The security guards will see at once there's something wrong,” said Kurt, doubtfully. Sven laughed. “What security guards? There isn't anyone here! They don't give a fuck about this building!” Kurt and Sven's eyes took a while to adapt to the darkness, but their noses smelled at once the pungent, unmistakeable Ossi odour left by decades of scrubbing the floors with a mysterious Eastern detergent of a chemical composition probably unknown to Western science to this day. The vestiges of industrious civil rights activity were indeed evident. The shop floor was covered in electronic components almost up to the squatters' knees. Sven and Kurt imagined the civil rights activists to be bitter, bespectacled, bearded Protestants in turtle-necks and sandals. Kurt would have preferred to pick up a few parts and leave as quickly as possible, but Sven's mood was getting ever better. He shouted to test the acoustics, and before long Kurt did the same. Sven ventured deeper and deeper into the building, kicking down doors, knocking down with a clatter whatever was still somewhere up. Kurt followed on his heels, tentatively first. He remembered from his failed law studies that burgling a place and breaking objects to get in constituted a “besonders schweren Fall des Diebstahls”, an especially severe case of theft, §243 penal code, punishable with three months to ten years imprisonment, as opposed to ordinary theft, §242, only up to five years or a fine. Maybe they should at least try not to leave their fingerprints? The echo in the staircase was particularly impressive. The two yelled “Guten Aaabend!” at the top of their lungs and laughed like crazy. The factory appeared to be a limitless playground. Kurt filled his backpack with all kinds of things, wires, resistors, capacitors. After a while they decided to pop back to the car to drop off their booty. They had a beer, a joint and a little snack from the Spätkauf opposite. Their strength restored, and with an empty backpack, they returned to the funhouse, breaking more glass, kicking down more doors and doing more frisky shouting. They opened the windows, drank the fresh late afternoon air and looked out over the city. “Guten Aaabend!” Kurt and Sven screamed down at the passers-by who turned around but couldn't fathom where the yelling was coming from. Kurt 58

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and Sven thought that was extremely funny. On the top floor they didn't pick up any more electronic parts. What they found much more exciting were old posters advertising Wartburg cars, the “Mercedes of the East”, SED and union leaflets, a box of Ata detergent (the very one?), broken pencils and all kinds of rubbish. Kurt and Sven got up on the roof to look for another, easier way out. From here the view was quite something and in fact this is the case with every rooftop in Berlin because all the buildings are the same height: the city stretches before you like an endless ocean of bricks and dust. Kurt and Sven pointed in the direction of their squat giggling and shouting “Guten Aaabend!” many times. Then they heard them, voices coming from the yard. Down in the shade there were half a dozen men in dark uniforms. “Hey, what are you doing up there? Come down at once!” Kurt and Sven laughed and banged each other on the shoulder. The men in the yard were not amused at all, they insisted the two should come down. “Ok, ok, we're coming!” Kurt and Sven cried, waving their arms in the air. “I'd better leave my backpack here and pick it up later,” said Kurt. They climbed down the ladder to the attic, from where they walked down a different staircase just to annoy the guards whom they expected to be waiting for them downstairs anyway. They'd be told off and let go, Kurt and Sven figured. But there was no-one. So the two chuckling burglars wandered off into the nearest squatters bar and had a cherry-andbanana juice. After that they doubled back to the car in a wide semicircle chatting casually and enjoying each other's company. The lazy security staff probably had gone home by now. Kurt and Sven were following a disused, gently curved railway track. They had almost forgotten where they had been during the past few hours. Somewhere somebody seemed to be shouting. Sure enough: it was the security guards, behind them, very far away, little dots in the distance. Kurt and Sven looked at each other and cackled. They began to run. It was more like jogging. The guards weren't jogging, they were really running - and catching up fast. “Halt! Stay where you are! Put your hands up!” - “Do you think they're going to shoot?” Kurt asked Sven, only half-kidding. “You never know with those arseholes,” Sven panted. “Let's just wait for them. They'll only tell us off, I'm sure.” The burglars slowed down and the guards were upon them in no time. They forced Kurt and Sven to lie down on the track, face against the rocks, put their boots on Kurt and Sven's necks and shouted into their walkie-talkies, “we've got them!” They seemed to be really pleased with themselves. Proudly they handed Kurt and Sven over to the police who shoved them into an old, grey Barkas van formerly belonging 59

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to the East German Volkspolizei. They were even wearing Vopo uniforms, with new badges. Inside the car: the unmistakeable smell of the East. The perpetrators were taken to the nearest police station (same smell) and locked up in separate cells. After what seemed to be an eternity a falsely chummy plain clothes policewoman visited Kurt's cell: She told him Sven refused to say anything but give his name and that she expected Kurt to be smarter. Kurt's mind was racing. Anything but §243! he thought. He and Sven hadn't broken anything, Kurt lied, the windows and the doors had already been open. She left him alone with the odd smell and his uneasy thoughts, and a few hours later Kurt was transferred to the old police headquarters in Mitte, a terrifying, gloomy monstrosity of a building. The ubiquitous smell welcomed him, his photo and fingerprints were taken. Kurt told the guard who was taking him to his cell he was freezing. The guard bluntly replied, “Es friert im dicksten Winterrock der Säufer und der Hurenbock . Are you a drunk?” “Er, no.” “So you fuck the whores.” No blanket, no phonecall. Laura would presume Sven and he had crashed out at some party, Kurt comforted himself. The following morning he was given a cup of coffee and a bread roll with marge and jam. No shower. A guard escorted Kurt to the commissioner's office. The commissioner politely asked Kurt to sit down while he was reading the file. A uniformed officer entered the room, mumbled something and emptied out Kurt's backpack onto the big, shiny, dark wooden desk. The security guys must have walked up to the rooftop to retrieve the backpack! Resistors, wire, capacitors, Wartburg and SED posters, broken pencils, one box of Ata were piling up between the commissioner and Kurt. The commissioner examined the loot, then he leaned forward, put his fingertips together and smiled, a very firm police smile. “Now pray tell me, Mr. Bareiß, what did you want with all that stuff ?” Kurt felt it was pointless to lie and he told the truth. “I wanted to build a spaceship.” Kurt was driven home to the squat in a new midnight blue Lada by two plain clothes detectives. Kurt said he liked their car. They liked that kind of conversation. The officers told Kurt's baffled friends, “Boys, your mate here has screwed up.” They complimented the squatters on their antifascist barricades and Kurt on his record collection. Sven was released a few hours later. That night he and Kurt got the Trabi back from Treptow. They were stoned and paranoid. From the remaining resistors and capacitors in the boot, a broken ball-pen, a champagne bottle top and some left over glow-in-the-dark paint Kurt tinkered a little spaceship he fixed to a piece of string below the light bulb dangling from the ceiling of his room. It didn't look so great. 60

Martin Kovan

Near Mumbai, November, 2008 Grit that seems to come from under the door. As if self-willed, stolen in by night. In the morning, before I turn on the TV, there is a small ritual of gathering this fine sand, come in from the street, from different travellers' shoes, from the largely arid wastes of the plains beyond the small town. A minor ordering against general encroachments. In the mid-morning, the TV doesn't work. The general power is disconnected, though this is only meant to last for three hours. There is a disturbance, outside, down the corridor, a brief verbal skirmish between a Spanish woman and one of the Indian workers: she is impatient and he is repeatedly apologetic, both it seems in a familiar mode, a small scene of disorder they have played out many times before this one. The woman wins the minor contest - even in India. In bed, reading early Bellow by torchlight, candles not permitted, the adventures of the prose exploit this one, a youth again, in hiding, picaresque fugitive between walls. I never know what will come next. Later, with the power returned, it's possible to go out and eat. The Mumbai ticket needs confirming, down at the local station, an obscure, stray satellite of one of Dante's purgatorial suburbs. Always far more people than the existing system seems able to accommodate. A thousand men materializing always at the head of the queue. If I were not a self with a self-project to enact in the world I could stay there indefinitely, eternally, relegated to the end of the line a martyr a saint of patience and waiting except that I have by this time gone beyond suffering it seems, suffering is what real people do and I am a cipher a circle a zero or orobouros not merely chasing its own tail because this tail and all its imaginary outgrowths have been digested, self-fellated so many aeons before there is no more of that fictional shambolic passage to show for it has been told a million times what more another Cervantes Sterne Rushdie or Foster Wallace to repeat the tale of misbegotten quests? Please, steal this cheap plastic pen, the cheap imitation watch from this same wrist that itself imitates how many yesteryears of DNA? In this queue in this queue in this queue I am nobody nada to wait to be waited upon by others to wait for the enaction the event the happening I believe it has become a truism to suggest that the à venir never arrives or does it or does it or does it. I leave, I can't wait, I abandon the confirmation side of the process, the ticket is in my hand, this is enough, this will be my way out of here, I will leave, I will be delivered in Mumbai, three hours away, tomorrow, my birthday, of all days. 61

Martin Kovan

Five more hours of powerlessness. It is good, it is better, to read, cut toenails, wash a dusty shirt, prepare cups of electric black tea and biscuits in my small escape-hatch, Bellow to hand. The town itself bellows, aches and roars dimly, beyond the single, barred window. The Spanish infanta departed. The Indian peon (archaic word, strangely permissible) — chastened. He eats his unlit lunches on the cool floor right in the corridor. In the early evening the TV appears to work. I seek 'the world news': but there is no English broadcasting. Hindi, Marathi, some Tamil, apparently. Perhaps Gujerati, even Malayalam. (Listed here only for phonetic pleasure.) But only brief skirmishes into English, occasional morses of escaped worlds: bandits, world summit, cholera, one-day test. Field day for a collagiste. (Be my guest, while I am yours.) Soon the transmission buzzes out, exhausted in the swinging temperatures. I sleep early, Bellow patient, near-silent (there are still echoes) by my ear. And it slips into the decision-making apparatus that I'll go to the caves enter the grotto Buddha place, what wombs still there simple sublime, but here here but what I know but sublime but this desiccated wasteland outskirts of town, dried heart, small pitted dried fruit they sell like shrunken yellow dried pussy in the streets on a cart, to the caves on a cart thus have I heard Lord Buddha once saw lying beyond the palace gates a cripple an old man a corpse on a cart on a cart on a cart a corpse on a cart a corpse and saw a robed giver-upper in the muddy street and did the same did the same did the same did the did he did he not did did di di di didididididi… * There's no entry for the real-life journal, unlike this simulacrum. Strange European companion for the day, I never knew her name. Children, impeccably poor. Touts, scammers and shysters. Big thick horde-groups of French and German burghers. (Where's my bacon, where's my beef ?) Not charitable, on my birthday, can't afford to be, when so much is lost. Already gone. Gate gate parasamgate. Many of the finest wall-paintings ruined by vandals. But the echoing vaults there still. Buddhist sutta bled clean and transparent into the walls. Schist and basalt. Centuries of industry. Centuries passed now, only these marks here, nameless workers, unknown bhikkhus, bhikkhunis, carving into the empty vast of earth: full weight of elephant ear, chariot, flank of deva girl, so many breasts limpid fruit hung from the boughs of mango trees, how many sweat monsoons slipped away but for these austere dripping fruits of time. Before the body became an item, commodified by an unreal market value, gave supply a demand. Gave need, a craving. Tanha, 62

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or the Noble Truth, re-told by Cervantes and Co. I pay the guide vastly inflated sums merely to regain my solitude. The beggars demand spiritual succour in the form not of mangoes but of Euros. Even the children disdain the bunches of bananas I offer them. While I am there I'm accosted by three local children, near-violent in their demands. I teach them to teach themselves how to make an offering - a Marathi folk song for paid lunch, a Bollywood shimmy for the schoolbooks they say they need. They are nervous at first, outside the regular routine, tentative as young horses drinking at strange water. Then satiric, parodic of themselves without ever knowing of punk or post-New Wave or postmodernism. They understand the disguises of irony, its self-protection, not yet ten years old, never gone to school. After their debut concert, shambolic but brave, leave them most of my last rupees. By then their song has been sung true. They can join the greats. End of day dusk, before the bus is leaving, a poor farmer with splintering crystals gathered from his fields. Another I had had was stolen, weeks before. So I buy, just one, to replace it, the lucky charm from the Womb of wombs, the Door of all doors, the Cave of all possible recesses, refuges, and places of eternal safety. I buy, and will buy again, to pay penance, to placate the demons, to make feeble mark on my slate of credit out in the unreachable sky, I pay, I pay because in this world here below it is the only way we now know the only sacrifice we now make the only intermediary between the gods and ourselves we still trust in. So we will pay. And pay, and pay again. On the bus ride back I'm the only one standing, no-one offers me a seat. The ticket for Mumbai somehow between my fingers, November 26 illprinted, foregone now, let slip through the window into the darkening night. The sunset is supernal. An ache of surrender. Next morning the TV doesn't work. I go for late breakfast, a year to add to those that have gone before. Back at the hotel the Jain proprietor offers me the front-page Times of India, shakes his head, little more. Then the TV is working, as if self-willed, I can't follow the Hindi, but we watch, we watch, craning old survivors' necks, lizards in the largely arid zones. Still alive, yes. Hell three hours down the line, the line that divides. But we know we have paid, as they have. as they have but not as they have.

63

Ben Webb

Three of a number of (colour) works as exhibited at Rotes Haus, Künstlerhaus Bethanien/Kunstraum Kreuzberg, Berlin in 2008

64

Ben Webb

100 x 80 cm irregulars, oil, ink, opalescent pigments on etching paper.  All titled ‘Study’

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Grant McDonagh

On Hearing Roger Douglas’s prescription for a solution to the global financial meltdown Atlas Shrugged is a stupid book, Ayn Rand is a stupid woman, and John Galt’s ideas are stupid. That said, none of them are nearly this stupid. Rand’s novel isn’t about a world in which executives who build companies based on a lot of incorrect decisions, then pay themselves millions of dollars while bankrupting their firms, then come to the government hat-in-hand asking for bailouts, then find that the bailers-out want to attach some strings to their hundreds of billions of dollars in public funds and then go to hide out in Galt’s Gulch. That doesn’t make any sense at all. Mathew Yglesias There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs. Daily Kos

1

March 09: From the far right, the same tired old prescriptions in the same rusty razor blade voice. But this recession will not end. We can’t control how quickly it will deepen. Everything is uncertain apart from the fact that we can’t continue to grow driven by Taylorist methods in the name of Randian goals. That’s all gone now. All the cards (and casino chips and scrip) have been thrown crazily up in the air, like confetti and who can say where they’ll land? And some are beginning to whisper “maybe we should redefine wealth” Thankfully, the war that Bill Mollison talked about (of industry against nature) is beginning to slow down too, as the empire of abstract finance withers and the cracks in the concrete façade slow the cult of never ending capitalist expansion and rein in the momentum of change for the sake of change (meaning profit for the sake of profit) & even the long fiscally straightjacketed arts and culture start to look for bearings beyond the world of the mega-deal 66

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2

The televisual factories of Hollywood went on strike last year, disputing the value of the written word & its place in relation to the new media. Democracy supposedly validated by the election of the new, black President, instantly undermined by the implosion inseparable from capitals’ long-term trajectory which is to say its collapse, and as always the far-right blames the frenzied, desperate partying of those who sense no other future than incremental loss. Not just three decades of “There Is No Alternative” brought us to this but the death sentence pronounced and executed on cooperation, a social contract, fairness, honesty in order to enable “Greed is Good” its continuing dominion, and that broken razor blade voice that dictated the terms and gameplay that defined the process of social evisceration of health, education and welfare in the eighties is back with new prescriptions; to fritter away control and the obligation to maintain for the social good, the country’s roads, water and power generation (since apparently the model of the SOE hasn’t resulted in sufficient private profit ). That Orwellian voice deems entrenchment and the increase of privative accumulation the basis of equality, labelling his millionaire friends “Average New Zealanders” and by sleight of hand, by the sophistry of statistics smearing their paper losses, on speculation in mostly foreign markets across the board as if every family in New Zealand had tens of thousands invested in capital funds managed by gambler-addicts whose stupid risk-taking was financed by their life savings. Just to show that there was never any real integrity there the rhetoric has turned 180 degrees, and now consists of whining that the state should bear the costs of these speculative losses, just when the collapse ensures there is going to be ever greater need for ambulances at the bottom of the cliff, so that welfare agencies, hospitals, psych and addiction services are being expected to do more with less though there always seems to be sufficient money for more cops, anti-terrorist squads and prisons.

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3.

Lower your eyes, it’s not about being international financial tightrope walkers any more, now it’s about making sure there’s still enough enough food, enough shelter, enough education for the kids. We didn’t lose 30 billion dollars, you did, you and your friends, the scum who bought Telecom, and all the rest of the assets built by our parents and prior generations. We didn’t turn the property market into a gigantic casino with speculative cash floats layered on speculation layered on ever more speculation. We didn’t invest the capital of ACC and the Super Fund in foreign stockmarkets so that the cumulative losses, you say, add up to 80 billion. It’s tempting to say its all illusion, words on paper, impressions stamped on metal, fit to be stuffed into the dustbin where all the elaborate fantasies composing the Evangelical Christian delusion, all that bullshit about armageddon, the rapture and so on have so recently been dumped, since they’re both forms of reification – treating metaphors as being literally true and using the resulting false consciousness as justification for continuing social control. It’s also tempting to say, as anarchists do “Fuck the state, the state has no legitimacy” and it doesn’t. What it DOES have is power which is why any theory or practise that fails to increase understanding of that power and to indicate its flaws, where it is vulnerable is and will remain forever impotent. It’s important to understand why and how we’re being fucked over.

4.

All the parties infused with neoliberal ideology abhor or at best grudgingly tolerate the fact that society recognizes and is committed to protecting the weak and the damaged and that propaganda couched in statistics will always fail to dislodge this practise and commitment from the core platform of any party that seeks to govern in this country. The template must always be objective conditions and the right responses 68

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to them not this or that pre-programmed ideology, especially not some claptrap cooked up thirty odd years ago at the behest of Ronald Reagan and his minders to rig up like some cardboard cutout McGuffin to face down already failing Soviet pseudo-communism. That’s all Milton Friedman and “the Chicago Boys” ever were, script doctors brought in to jerry-rig some gags to make the fantasy of confronting and beating an “Evil Empire” already lead by Gorbachov, already kneecapped by Solidarity in Poland, seem credible and even desirable. The fact is everything we think we know about the world and the economic system that has existed for the last three hundred years is a lie, and further it is based on other lies and they’re based on lies too, so that the only truth is this, it’s never as simple as it’s made out to be and any bastard who pretends it is is just another scumbag out to take us for the little bit we still have left. Yet New Zealands’ financial managers and their far-right lackies respond like so many Pavlovs dogs imitating in lockstep the same mistakes being made everywhere else. As always its taken to be a signal from on high to centralize, to increase control, to defer deevolution of beaurocracy, to nip in the bud any move to free up the roots. God(dess) forbid that something constructive like a national cycleway to keep people in work and able to support their families should happen. Yet nowhere is the most fundamental cause of this crisis ever referenced – the fact that globally the productive capacity of industry has overshot demand for consumption many times over and that falsely engineered pseudo-demands could only be engineered to a certain extent and for a certain time and now that house of cards has collapsed, so has the need for people to “work” at producing ever more consumerist crap. As Bertrand Russell pointed out many years ago there is a possible solutionmerely redistribute the surpluses equitably among those still without, but as he also pointed out that’s not going to happen voluntarily on the part of the parasitic class. Those fuckers are hard wired to keep every little bit of it to themselves. It’s what they do.

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5.

The solutions will, come, are already coming from the streets, from the worlds’ deprived, the underclass of Thatchers’ era, the discarded from third world’s “Autonomous Economic Zones”, from the Jungles of south eastern Mexico, and the world that will emerge from this phase will look different to the world as it stood on the cusp of November 2008. They will come in the form of workers’ councils in enterprises and neighbourhoods federated regionally and globally, bound together, no doubt by constant contact and adjustment to changing conditions enabled by the next phase of the internet, the ambient web, ever present, always available, always subject to control and adjustment from the base, the collected users. This is why Twitter has suddenly come to be seen as so very important – because it prefigures this change. While I think that it’s inevitable that much of our production will move to the local, our collective thinking and debates are about to become even more general and diverse than they are now. It won’t be possible to support and sustain lies and false arguments in the future when every assertion will be instantly critiqued from every concievable angle, much as a great deal of the debate that happened in the Sorbonne during the May ’68 “événements” consisted of relentless criticism and counter-criticism repeatedly showing up the lie of “Democratic centralism” as practised by Trots and Maoists. The “free” market has failed : the time for Generalised Self-management is approaching.

March 2009

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Spirits of the Stone A site-specific civil union gift by BackLit Productions (Rosey Feltham and Janine Parks) on the edge of the Waikaretu River (‘Limestone Country’*—see note over), NZ. Jan. 17, 2009.

Rosie and Janine emerged from a grove of totara trees near the river and crept slowly towards us, across grass that had been mown and sprinkled with petals. They wore white clothes, and had pale clay smeared through their hair and across their exposed skin. As they came closer to us, we saw that each of them was cradling an object in her arms. 'Are they carrying children?', I heard someone ask. 'Rabbits, perhaps?' When they reached the centre of the mown grass area, Rosey and Janine placed two large stones on the ground with almost torturous care—they might have been handling live explosives, or new-born babies! After disposing of their cargo, the two began to dance wildly about, as strange music fizzed and crackled from a strategically placed speaker. After several minutes they disappeared behind large sun umbrellas. Later in the evening, after she had washed off the white clay and stepped into more conventional attire, Rosey talked to me about the dance. She explained that it had been inspired in part by my essay 'The Discovery of Limestone Country'*(see over) and that Spirits of the Stone was an attempt to convey a visionary experience of the region. 'We were supposed to be stone people, stone spirits, emerging from Photos of Spirits of the Stone : Cerian Wagstaff and celebrating the landscape'.

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Spirits of the Stone may be a fantasy, but it is no mere work of whimsy. The 'spirits' in the dance are at once corporeal and ethereal—their white costumes and smeared skins make them look like ghosts, but they can also be associated with the boulders and spurs of Limestone Country. Because it is so soft, limestone is easily caved by water and wind, and the area between Waikaretu and Port Waikato is studded with hundreds of openings and tunnels of various sizes. Many caves contain the bones of ancestors of the various Tainui peoples who are the region's tangata whenua. To the annoyance of speleolgists, a number of huge caves near Port Waikato have been declared tapu, and made off-limits to non-Maori. Yet for the Maori it can be a place associated with life, as well as death—a number of Maori oral traditions speak of autochthonous ancestors who emerged from caves onto the surface of Aotearoa. In Rosey and Janine's dance, stones are brought and laid before the audience with the sort of care and respect usually reserved for the dead or the newborn. In their direct emergence from the land, the 'stone spirits' allude not only to an element of Maori oral tradition but to longheld Pakeha dreams of indigenity. As we have already noted, the desire to cast off the status of settlers or 'second people' and be regarded as autochtonous is a theme that runs through much Pakeha art and literature. In the poetry of Brasch, in the paintings of McCahon, and in the extravagant claims of the Celtic New Zealand movement, such a desire leads to the construction of myths which deny the real history of these islands. In Spirits of the Stone, though, the yearning for a direct connection with the land is presented less negatively. Rosey Feltham’s whakapapa goes back to Maori (Te Arawa) as well as Pakeha ancestors, and the intricate manoeuvres of the second part of Spirits of the Stone allude to both Maori and European dance traditions. At times the spirits move with the grace of ballet dancers; at other moments they make stiff, awkward motions that recall the innovations of contemporary dance; at still other points they discover some of the powerful rhythms of traditional Maori dance. The mixture of grace, awkwardness, and power is appropriate to beings that are at once physical and supernatural. The syncretism of Spirits of the Stone is well-suited to the dance's setting. Unlike many other parts of the Waikato region, where divisions created by the wars and land confiscations of the nineteenth century linger on, the countryside around Waikaretu has seen

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the growth of a hybrid Maori-Pakeha culture. Maori and Pakeha families have regularly intermarried, many Maori words have entered the lexicon of local Pakeha, and marae are often used as meeting places for the entire community. It was an honour to receive Spirits of the Stone as a civil union gift. The dance is both visually impressive and thought-provoking, and my comments here have only hinted at its richness.

* note http://readingthemaps.blogspot.com/2008/10/discovery-of-limestone-country.html

In this text, which was mailed out to guests at the civil union, Hamilton talked about Limestone Country: “an extraordinary and disorienting region ... with its juxtapositions of ancient bush and eroding sheep farms, its weirdly-shaped rock formations and its deep, sudden tomos, its abandoned coal pits and lime quarries, and the wild empty beaches on its western margin.

Two New York Art Shows, 2009

It is March 16th 2009. I have survived participation in two international art fairs in N.Y. within the space of 2 months. I have come here from New Zealand. I am representing the work of various artists... all from New Zealand, mostly self-taught… that has been my selling point… that and the distinctive quality of the work, of course. I travel on the subway each day, into the city, to an office by a window on Broadway in Manhattan. Like all the other commuters, I spy on my fellow travellers… Mexican, Puerto Rican, Polish, Black, white, hipster, worker, bum.

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Spying on myself and looking good.

Stuart Shepherd

A young man comes out of a store front doorway, he leans against the window, crosses his legs at the ankle, lights a cigarette, tilts his head back and exhales upward. From across the street, and four floors up, I can read his body's public announcement of ease and self-congratulation. He is taking a break. He is dressed in black. (The window display features Hugo Boss). His hair is shoulder length. The fringe is tossable. He is 26. He is not just smoking, he is SSMOKIN'. We read people from a long way away. We advertise and we get read, we assess and we read into. We read art the same way and art behaves accordingly. It has no choice, it makes its own announcements and then, if it can grab an audience, it reveals its motives ( just like 6 minute dating). At an art fair, reading must happen fast. There is not enough time to drink things in, to savour a flavour, let alone to grapple with an implication. All that can happen is a scan, a snapshot. There were over 400 galleries exhibiting in the various art fairs last week. With between 1-4 artists in each space, that works out at about 60 seconds per artist over the course of 3 days if you want to get around and look at everything... and have a decent lunch. Snap shots can be O.K. Headlines get across a message, and “you only get one chance to make a first impression”. This texting generation has been groomed for speedy communication and the reading of signals. However everyone rightly complains that art fairs are often less than satisfying. How much nutrition is there in an orgy of fast food? How many alluring magazine covers can we look at before we are hungering for some kind of engagement, some kind of felt experience? Several years ago I visited an exhibition at the Ron Feldman gallery featuring the notes of legendary Village Voice art critic Kim Levin. The walls were papered in her jottings in margins of flyers. She had covered dozens of exhibition openings per week, all through the 80s and 90s. The notes were brilliant: in three or four words, incisive and profound Levin revealed both the place of the artist, their attitude, and even her position as critic. No-one likes to get pegged, summed up in a cursory manner, but it's what happens. It's what we do. I look down to the street again...I see … sneakers. Tight jeans. A brisk pace… Student. 18. I see… a tan colour scheme, a professional man, unhurried, cultured, balding ... superior, stuffy, 55. (It’s sobering to recognize your own type.) I see a Puerto Rican woman, an office worker, no colour scheme... … a mother. 44. The artwork that has stayed with me this week was the exhibition of Lisa Yuskavage in the spacious polished cement halls of David Zwirner Gallery. Her paintings feature plumped up, gooey, overly and overtly sexualized girls. In this series they recline and squat, spread legged in hazy interiors or outside, in tropical stage sets. These paintings work fast... the messages strike me in this order: 1) provocative comic sex 2) kitsch kiddy porn? Disney smutty/ problematized beauty, like Nazi art 3) narrative mystery. where is she ? what is she doing? (I don't need to know WHO she is, I know she is a supposition posed by the artist) 4) colour, I think about her choice of the scheme 5) I see the paint. 74

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With this work I get hit with pussy, dragged through style, & end up with paint. I like the work of Yushkavage. When I start looking for more clues in the stories she contrives, what I find is the painterly technique, the handling of colour and light and the rendering of form. And I applaud whenever an artist draws me in, then leads me off to a contemplation of materials and processes and human touch. Something allied to this happens in the work of Vanessa Beecroft, who exhibited this week in Brooklyn. When I look at one of her beautifully selected nudes, the exchange between me as split-second assessor and the subject has been pre-empted by the artist. My assessment mechanism has been anticipated. In fact my magazinecover consumption process is the real subject of her work, and I have to deal with an artist offering me a mirror to my own media-trained projections. Both of these artists, women dealing with women's bodies, reached their zenith in the hey-days of the art market and perhaps their work does not exactly reflect the tenor of these times, (which has to question the structures surrounding big ticket items). But for my discussion their work does a job on me. And while it is debatable whether or not art needs a job, or needs to be burdened by a purpose, art inevitably does assume a privileged platform. It claims, or is granted, a special social space. In the midst of these pop-mediated times, in this burst- balloon economy and at the end of an art circus, it's good be reminded of the flawed humanness of being, the contingency of responding, and the centrality of looking.

Gamelan and World Choir Adam Concert Room, Victoria University School of Music, Wellington NZ. Gamelan Padhang Moncar, directed by Budi Putra. NZSM Jazz Vocal Ensemble directed by Julian Raphael. Special guest Susan Walton. April 3, 2009. Reviewed by Gregory Street.

The concert opened with 'Must Be Together!' composed by resident Gamelan teacher Budi Putra—a lively introduction to the Gamelan with brisk unison playing and dancing rhythms. A reduced Jazz Choir joined the Gamelan for 'Parisuka'—a modern Gamelan composition in the traditional style by R. L. Martopan­grawit. The text tells of the beauty of the sounds of the Gamelan, and its beneficial effects on the

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listener. Here the choir joined with the Gamelan, singing the traditional chorus. The Gamelan for their part displayed their soft-style of playing, in which gentler instruments were able to come to the fore and weave around the melody to generate intricate patterns. The Gamelan re-formed as a small ensemble to play an interpretation of a traditional interlude. The thin and wiry sound of a rebab (spike-fiddle) was replaced by the fatter timbre of the electric violin which joined with the gendir (a metallophone much like a marimba) in this mood piece. A traditional male vocalist and the guest singer, Susan Walton (a specialist in Javanese singing) joined in. The violin traced the melodic contour of the sung text, providing a “wall of colour” for the singers to return to when they had sung their parts. The gendir provided sparse melodic detail and resolution to the sung phrases.

Victoria University Gamelan Orchestra photos by Budi S. Putra

Unable to perform some of the larger Jazz Choir pieces, the director of the choir produced an mbira (African 'thumb piano') and played a short composition of delicately counterbalanced melodies. The final piece was another modern Javanese number, 'Prau', in the form of a catchy popular song that tells the story of a fishing trip. The vocal ensemble sang its evenly paced phrases to the punchy beat of the Gamelan accentuated by complex drum patterns and a pair of xylophones playing tricky interlocking patterns. In all, an exciting concert, memorable as much for the sonic landscapes created by the Gamelan as for the international flavour and rhythms of the Jazz choir.

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Keith Rowe  / Rhys Chatham CAC Brétigny. Concerts forming part of

a series of performances (April 5–June 22) celebrating Cornelius Cardew and Scratch Orchestra, organised by Jean-Jacques Palix and Dean Inkster. Keith Rowe: 5 April; Rhys Chatham: June 7th, 2009. (See also p. 81) Keith Rowe, original (& card-carrying communist) member of Scratch Orchestra,

used an electric guitar neck with various effects boxes and two Fender twin reverb amplifiers. I think the right hand amp was reverbed and the left was not. When the reverb was cut, carefully equalised crumpling or scratching sounds remained (very clear and clean)—this created a feeling of great intimacy. Rowe seemed to bring us into the present and into the sense of Brétigny, the region, as a song by an Egyptian pop star singing in Arabic was picked up by the antennae of his trademark devices. Such chance sampling has apparently been a feature of Rowe's work for some time. Tuning into existing radio frequencies made hearable the invisible music of the local airwaves that day at Brétigny sur Orge (an outlying suburb of Paris). The idea of dual projectors was a daring one to try, but two 16mm projectors make a fair noise, and while they took us back to the sixties and seventies (ah! how I remember those clattering old projectors, and how miraculous they seemed to us) I'm afraid that they detracted from Rowe’s music in the same way that Rowe’s presence distracted us from the content of the films (made by Luke Fowler and Peter Todd out of rushes from the 2006 Luke Fowler film ‘Pilgrimage From Scattered Points’, a history and portrait of Scratch Orchestra). The result was a kind of uneasy alliance, perhaps not dissimilar to Cardew and Rowe’s theory-inspired performances of the seventies. A certain sadness endured, connected to the passage of time, the historicity of the event and references to the passing of one or more former members. Two months later I was lucky to catch Rhys Chatham’s interpretation of Cardew’s 1965 Volo Solo (for a virtuoso performer on any instrument). Chatham (photo below) used the same stage space as Rowe had. He employed various effects that relayed and echoed, overlapping the sixty-eight “events” of the composition. The piece should be played so that “the instrument seems to be breaking apart”. And that’s just what he did!

Pic: w.d.

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Fast Down Turk by Jeanne Bernhardt. Kilmog Press. isbn978-0-473-13842-4

Fast Down Turk returns a woman to the land her parents left before her birth,

where she undergoes a psycho-existential low, one which blowing her savings hardly relieves. The novella traverses “hell” (her term) in the form of depressed areas of San Francisco till the story-teller’s money runs out and she escapes her own diffidence, terrifying hallucinations and paranoia by travelling the south-east overland. Some gruesome drug spectacles and lurid sexual adventures may shock the faint-hearted, but they provide realistic evidence of the grotesque will-to-consume of the poor in a larger society characterised by mass consumption. Grasping, desperate, by turns callous and indifferent, she and those about her consume pathologically. The fact that the heroine of the story is never raped nor violently humiliated in this milieu where sex is a ready, drug-induced utility used to acknowledge and reinforce power testifies, to my mind, that others see her as an economic provider. The heroine is called Rachel. The biblical Rachel (Rachel is Hebrew for sheep or ewe) died while giving birth to Benjamin (a breech birth), and she had a kleptomaniac streak. Perhaps Fast Down Turk's Rachel is trying to give birth, painfully and dangerously, to herself. “I wish he'd go so I could start thinking and unravel myself in private.” Like the biblical Rachel, this one also steals. When she makes off with someone else's lighter, for example, it is not to use it but to immediately throw it away. She comments: “stealing seems to be something I do when I feel I've been ridiculed in some way.” Her rent is in arrears, and she has no intention of paying it though she does have money, more money than the people she moves among. We find out that she has been blowing her savings on page 43 of this 52 page book. “I go to the ATM to check my money — four hundred dollars. Five months ago there was seven thousand in my account… I want it gone.” Shortly after, the key to the story's curious title is revealed, or rather, it is there to be discerned. Much of the novella is like that, to be discerned; Bernhardt rarely points at meaning. But if you can read through the sensational descriptions of drug users, of women ever ready to drop their panties and of men who seem to be ever-erect, you get to the heart of an excellent fiction. Auto-biographical or not, this writing stems from wide reading. Its Beat forebears might give approval if they could rise from their graves, and Feminine Realists too (if there is such a school!)—this is not a man's story. Neither does it dwell upon the anti-heroine's femininity. Bernhardt does not claim to have many answers. When fully-willed sex does occur for the anti-h, it is with a guy who is talking to his girlfriend on the phone. The kinkiness of it is unplanned, unconsciously motivated: 'That turns you on doesn't it?' He jeers. I shake my head confused, 'I don't know … maybe ….' Bernhardt is socially aware without highlighting any economic or feminist line. The most philosophical moments are conversations; one is with a drug buyer over the subject of fear, and another is with a writer. But she cannot avoid feeling some antagonism for the fully employed, and at times the reader is drawn to feel that she might be contributing to the problem. 'Look out the window, everybody out there's depressed.'

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'Well they've got something to be depressed about! Everyone at work— they're always smiling.' I spit this out like it's a crime. A story that demands to be read in one sitting. Beautifully hand-bound by Kilmog Press with as much craft and imagination and dedication as the writer put into her words; an aspect not lost on your reviewer.

Piano Trio ‘Arno’ by Babadjanian Performed by the NZ Chamber

Soloists Lara Hall (violin, viola), James Tennant (cello) and Katherine Austin (piano). NZ Embassy, Paris. 15th January 2009. It is a rare treat to hear a wonderful work about which little has been said, played

by musicians invigorated by the feeling of having discovered it. The composition itself has more than the reflective sadness you’d expect from a post-war composition. Babadjanian (1921-83) seems to convey to us a determination to rebuild. However one describes his energy, this performance brought it out, it invigorated, it vivified. This was an evening of chamber music presented by astute musicians and public performers determined to please the well-attired and influential guests at the NZ Embassy. It was a little lesson in musical history. And it was something more. The three NZ Chamber Soloists presented a programme that showed how twentieth century “serious” music developed from Rachmaninov (1873-1943, ‘Trio élegiaque in sonata form’, composed 1892) and Shostakovich (1906-75, ‘Piano Trio’ composed 1944) to a position of expressive restraint within the harmonic strategies of nineteenth century music. But the evening was dominated by Babadjanian's ‘Arno’ (‘Piano Trio’ composed 1952). In this piece, the composer does not engage in avantgarde subversion, serial (or other) extremism or post-modernist exaggeration of the simplissimus, and yet there is a sense of all of the fraternity/sorority that generated such developments—a sense of a community struggling with the legacy of traditional form. Tradition is not Babadjanian's enemy. The tripartite structure and makeup of both composition and group reveal an adherence to stable tradition. Tonight, the piano (often in an attacking role), with the foundational cello, allowed a marvellous performance to take place, particularly in the second movement, where Lara Hall's tonal intensity gave us, at any moment, an exciting combination of expressivity and emotional restraint, communicating the music in such a way that it was not only presented but discovered.

Six Dunedin Poets presented by Stuff Legend. Circadian Rhythm Cafe, Dunedin, NZ. Thurs Nov 13th, 2008. Advertised as five, six poets took the stage. Peter Olds, the most experienced, read

first, and in a break with his policy of recent years, gave a sample of his work from nearly four decades. Most of these were drawn from the only selection of his work available, It Was a Tuesday Morning (Hazard Press, 2001). Smiles of recognition could be seen as Olds revived poems that had long lain silent. 'Psycho', an ode to a car and its passengers and drivers who “roared along Ponsonby Road drunk on rum” was delivered with a self-critical tone devoid of nostalgia. Olds has now reached the stage where he can return to poems written when there were destructive elements in his lifestyle. You 79

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could have heard a needle drop. Your author read recent work (in English of course) inspired by translations (into French) by former Oulipo poet Michèle Métail. The originals which she studied and translated were ancient Chinese; the form, called Huiwenshi, can be read backwards as well as forwards, or even in circular fashion. Chinese is more polysemic than English. Any Chinese character may be noun, verb, adverb or adjective but this is rare in English. My Huiwenshi were not translations, they adopted the form. M.C. Eggleton introduced the surprise guest of the evening, Jeanne Bernhardt. Her poems steamed along, though she shrugged them off a little. I suspect that her mind is more in prose mode at present given the recent launch of her novella Fast Down Turk: a study of depression, drug addiction, descent into poverty, hallucination, and a sequence of rather ugly sexual encounters. So it was great that she then gave us an extract from it. David Karena-Holmes introduced his environmental philosophy and outlined the calamity which New Zealanders and world citizens are facing. He read poems which he had printed out in collectible single-poem editions. Most of these carried an ecological message enriched with his native lyricism. He is concerned with inner spaces as well as outer ones: “…though vast we find / the universe, the mind, / even of the blind, / must be just as vast.” ( 'A Star in Space') The compere himself took the stage and did not mess around! Eggleton's intense declamatory lines steadily wove together a fairly bleak depiction of consumer society. An impassioned performance by the self-styled “kiwi ranter”. Richard Reeve read with commanding apocalyptic cadence. Notwithstanding its intellectual content, this was a spell-binding invocation. There was something for everyone: Jeanne Bernhardt's poems and the chance to hear an extract from her speedy (crack-infested) novella; David Eggleton entering his prime, finding a middle way between expression and impression; the assertive Reeve (who must be thanked for suggesting the evening in the first place); David KarênaHolmes' ecological diatribes... As for Peter Olds and myself, local writer Lani Cole had this to say the following day: “Really liked the variety and the atmosphere last night. Loved hearing Peter Olds read the poem that got my 6th form boys thinking art could be relevant to their lives; and your own poems—I can hardly imagine the work that went into them.” Unexpected output from six in Dunedin. The evening finished with spontaneous encores (is there any other kind?) from Olds, Bernhardt, Reeve, and your implicated reviewer.

Writers in Residence and Other Captive Fauna by Ted Jenner (introduction by Scott Hamilton). Titus Books. 2009. isbn: 978-1-877441-09-7 The six sections of Ted Jenner's first book since Sappho Triptych (Puriri Press,

Auckland, 2007) take us from New Zealand’s suburbs to Italy and on to Malawi. If we begin with silence, “an insistent monologue continues whether I listen to it or not”. We are in the “Antipodes” where the first spoken words, “'anti-clockwise, Southern Hemisphere'”, “are disturbed in a cavity of the larynx”. Other organs that

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made man the animal who speaks are not yet brought into play: “The body is under suspicion”. “The head is under suspicion”. “The tongue is content to slide along the bottom lip.” The first story is a ride through semaphore towards “unstable,misplace d,multiple,irrelevant. Or words to that effect this afternoon.” If we begin with words that will do, “in the absence of our own vocal gestures” (“Go ahead and play with words, they advise you”), if we begin with public address to “Boys!” “Comrade critics”, “Fellow Phagocytes”, and “old pal, hypocrite lecteur”, if we begin with terms that were once considered post-modern chic (“I was often accused of reading literary import into any stray referent”), “scribes and signifiers” and “hieroglyphic doodles”, Writers in Residence takes us on a tour (of Auckland, of Africa, of Europe) that brings us to impassioned apostrophe (to Athens), and to that address to the reader that is a (unique) personal style, and an insight into the order (cosmos) of a writer's thought. ‘Writers in Residence’, the first section might have been titled “A writer on the run”. There is a lot of jogging (“looping the loop”), and a lot of consciousness streaming. The body is occupied, but not as a speech organ. In fact, just before the section titled 'Itineraries', the body, and precisely that part that provides breath to the larynx and resonators, is the victim of violence. “At ten you were ... clutching your midriff in Alma Street, bent double, your breath suddenly sucked out of your diaphragm by a rival's punch.” One is reminded of Francis Ponge’s analysis of his own work as bipartite, containing what is commonly owned and what is strange (surprising) (‘My Creative Method’). Violence is the ultimate strangeness. 'Itineraries' marks the beginning of journalesque entries, capsules of thought, more poems and the conscious effort of capturing other perceptions of the “strange” in our “commonly -owned”. Some of this is aphoristic, and some highly quotable (do I hear a case for a Titus Dictionary of NZ Quotations?). Passages in which he frequently addresses himself now, (as “you”), are broken by the Ode to Athens, where “nothing counts but calm reason” and you do well to “study your neighbours' silence”. There are warmly satirical moments in this collection of writings from the past twenty years of Jenner’s life (and still going strong). There is a timely irreverence where Borges is concerned in “the spiraliform Yangste River fluke and the patterns incised upon Babylonian tablets used in entrail divination” ('Señor Borges' Index Fingerprint'). And there is grief, here, interpretable. The writer tells us of scratching an inscription to his dead dog into concrete in Zomba. But it is not all dead beasts. News arrives of Peter S. who has died of AIDS. An African mother “has just joined her daughter in the Kingdom of Heaven”. Though Belinda may ask “'Ever been to South America? Then how do you know it's there?'”, we do not need to meet Ted Jenner (though one may meet and talk with himat some Titus Books events), we have this book to know that he is ‘there’.

Skin Hunger. David L. Brown. Titus Books 2009. isbn: 978-1-877441-08-0

The first part of this three-part book has a friendly near-domestic ambience; the

second part (‘Fountains of Blood’) is rich with baroque physicality; the last contains much about the pain of love and its adversary, the ordinary: “'What I really love, /

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what I really love the best / is KFC.'” “And, at the end of the bar, as always, / The poet of the city.” 'Cavafy's Shoes’ reveals much about the poet : his friend (personality and poet Bob Orr (an assonant relation to 'Moth Orchid' of Part 3!)) who apparently took to some 19th century Alexandrian tiles (discovered in an Onehunga warehouse) with hydrochloric acid, his sense of travesty and of humour, his readerly influences (Durrell, Forster, and above all Cavafy)—« the ghosts of ghosts ». One feels, reading Brown, that his influences are indeed spectral, but that his present is as much a sensuous adventure as it was in his youth. An accident with a knife lends a drop of blood to a ratatouille pizza, a return voyage from the funeral of a lover makes present again a particular moment of their love. In some ways the tome is an act of resistance against insidious ageing (“Middle age pounces. / Old age sneaks in”). Brown dignifies the scavenger (or is he a happy consumer “pushing a TV in a supermarket trolley”) and the transvestite (a queen from bygone days / picking through the rubbish in Symonds Street). I think I like most his urban delight in happening to spy a self-possessed neighbour: “a naked boy silently singing as he ironed / his shirt for tomorrow”.

EMO by Jack Ross. Titus Books. 2009. isbn 987-1-877441-07-3

My review copy measured in at 17.4 x 24.7 x 2.1 cm, which, knowing Jack a little, might represent some mystical dimension of an alchemical age. The first impression is dramatic. Here we have a book uncharacteristically (for both the author and for Titus Books) large and boldly striking (with its blood-red sketch of a weary child's face); it also invites a biplanar approach. It is at once strident and muted. One might almost be tempted to suggest that the author is writing at cross-purposes, an underling text in tiny greyed type may be read (though with great difficulty, even if my Latin were up to it) at right angles to the “presidential” texts. (Some of the underling texts have previously been published.) Strong titles, heavy black print, brief extracts, stories, dramatic voices and samples from who knows where (+ a web reference here or there) make the presidential text highly readable-if you are the sort of person who can read on a bus, on a plane or (no offence) in parliament. The underling text, then, is not meant to be read, but taken as a given. In fact, on most pages the presidential text makes its deciphering difficult. The impression is of a private studio, reflection of the writer's mind, scattered with his influences and cuttings which have appealed to him over the years, which have formed him. In this room, a little fusty like the atelier of a Mabuse or (in fiction) of Balzac's Frenhofer, one seizes upon one loose page (the foot of Frenhofer's “masterwork”) and gains an idea of the traditional (i.e. informed by, nourished by tradition) emotivity (emotion as an activity) of its creator: Ce pied apparaissait là comme un torse de quelque Vénus en marbre de Paros qui surgirait parmi les décombres d'une ville incendiée. [This foot appeared like a torso of some Venus made from marble from Paros emerging from the ashes of a torched city]. Some argue that it took 200 years for art to arrive at the impressionistic and surrealistic stage of Frenhofer's denigrated “Belle Noiseuse”.

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CAC Brétigny & David Watson chez Jean-Jacques Palix. 8th June, 2009.

The last day of an astonishing series of performances organised at CAC Brétigny by Jean Jacques Palix and Dean Inkster included not only Rhys Chatham’s achievement (see p. 75) but performances by the curator Palix himself with three others on laptops, and a group including Nadia Lichtig, Sara Stephenson and Nina Canal. They had hoped Lee Ranaldo might make it, but a snappily-dressed Michael Morley more than compensated. They gave a fairly rowdy interpretation of Cornelius Cardew’s The Tiger’s Mind (an improvisation in two parts), with recorded sounds: a motor bike and David Watson’s bagpipes. The laptop group comprised masters of their fields Samon Takahashi, Marcus Schmick­ler and Michel Guillet. It was a studied interpretation of Cardew’s Concert Treatise (1963-67). In removing the visible, ancient connection between musicians’ hands and sound, laptop performance places extra demands on the imagination and concentration of the spectators. What’s more, the source Treatise has a 193-page graphic score! The art gallery provided a perfect environment for this collective and intellectual meditation. The following evening David Watson restored the ancient connection between sound and source. After seven concerts in as many days, he eschewed the bagpipes for his Maton semi-acoustic guitar and gave a virtuoso performance making wayward usage of the everyday and the technical—the lid of a Twinings tea caddy, silver paper from the caddy, a hand-held elctronic (e-)bow, the butt-end of a short cello bow and a hair brush used for cleaning bagpipes. He played his guitar laptop fashion, sculpting a freak psychtexture. An electronic glitsch appeared, a menacing fat monotone that threatened his cervical micro-pulses and stream of consciousness rhythms. Having (while continuing to play) identified the source, he dealt with it by removing an offensive heavy duty lead. The crackle of faulty connection and unprotected deconnection led to a new phase of mindcurrents. To see him at work I could not help thinking of the potter at his wheel, but also of the thinker whose train of thought seeks and sounds until—silence. Finally his work is, like all performance, offertory—a gift to the audience, that we may see and use our own minds differently.  The next morning when we met for coffee at Alésia, he pointed out that he could have played a piece not too dissimilar to that one in New York or Wellington fifteen years ago. His heart these days is in his bagpipes!

David Watson

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Pic: w.d.

Index Ont collaboré à Percutio 2008 : Franco Bianciardi—ancien journaliste à l'hebdomadaire "La Vie Ouvrière", il a publié dans différentes revues et figure dans une anthologie de l'épigramme (2003). Sandra Bianciardi—peintre (Paris). M. A. Bourke—réalisateur et écrivain de Wellington, NZ. David Lyndon Brown—poète et peintre de Auckland, NZ. Skin Hunger (2009, Titus) Will Christie—Poète de Wellington NZ. Luce Cannon (2006, Titus). (Dr) Jacques Coulardeau—professeur invité des universités de Paris. Brett Cross—éditeur de Titus Books, West Auckland, N-Z. Steve Dean—néo-zélandais d’origine cornouaillaise. Infirmier, randonneur, passioné de film et de théâtre. Gunther Dietrich—photographe et galeriste berlinois (Galerie Ray, Berlin). William (Bill) Direen—poète-musicien et enseignant en littérature. Dernier roman  Enclosures (2008, Titus) David Eggleton—journaliste et poète de performance qui habite à Dunedin, NZ. I. A. F. Goldsmith—a fait les collages de la couverture; prend part à des projets insolites psychédéliques et expérimentaux. Scott Hamilton—bloggeur, chercheur et poète. To the Moon... (2006, Titus). Ted Jenner—poète, enseignant et écologiste. Writers in Residence (2009, Titus) David Kârena-Holmes—poète et enseignant de langue Maori à Dunedin, NZ. Tim Keane—poète newyorkais. Alphabets of Elsewhere (Cinnamon Press, 2007). Martin Kovan—voyageur et écrivain australien. Il vit à Paris. Arno Löffler—journaliste, voyageur et traducteur allemand. Grant McDonagh—peintre, écrivain, musicien, vit à Christchurch, N-Z; rédacteur en chef du journal engagé Ultrazine. Anne Mounic—poète et traductrice française; prend part à l’équipe d’édition du journal Temporel. Dernier roman Quand on a marché plusieurs années (2008, Orizons) K. M. Ross—écrivain, vit a Édimbourg, Écosse. Dernier roman Falling Through the Architect (2005, The Writers Group). Stuart Shepherd—artiste, chercheur et commissaire d’une exposition en 2009 d’œuvres d'artistes autodidactes néo-zélandais à la Galerie Impaire, Paris. Michael Steven—étudiant et poète. Homage to Robert Creeley, Centreville Springs (2007, Soapbox Press). Chris Walshaw—ancien administrateur du LAB, English Theatre, Berlin. Ben Webb—graveur et voyageur néo-zélandais. Jim Wilson—promoteur et manager de plusieurs groupes de rock néo-zélandais.