see - eyebeam: http://eyebeam.org/blogs/alansondheim/
Kittler just died, I remember Sartre going, my father at 97 was born in
1914, his mother died very shortly after, the world went into flames, has
continued along the same path. So everything, Derrida, Lacan, Jack Benny,
falls apart, falls out, I continue to work not with _those_ references,
but in new currents, until something withdraws, draws me back. It's too
simple to think of the past as stories, that what one ultimately offers is
stories, that these go the ways of mourning, lamentation, pain, death
itself. As if we're continuously walking wounded. I'm tired of this; I
want to work new for another twenty years at least. Memorials throw me
back into pasts that gnaw away at my soul, with the appetition of souls as
so many Barthian puncta, grasping away. It's all fiction. Tonight I was
given a sheaf of pages from a scrapbook or photobook of myself at ages
maybe 1-2 until 7, black and white museum pieces with my father smiling at
me, openly in a way I cannot remember. Everything dates the images, which,
analog, breathe with an other's air/heir; they crawl over me, and I cannot
look at them directly, only askew. This memorial lasts four days, the day
of arrival, the day of business and organization, the memorial proper, the
day of leaving. The reading of the Torah begins anew during this same
period, Simchat Torah, Friday the 21st, as if in preparation for the
Shabbat. I need this renewal myself, this beginning of a beginning, not my
own, not my beginning of the end as death is always making that beginning,
something however otherwise. What am I saying here? That on the fifth day,
the Monday morning I am meeting Monika Weiss to begin thinking concretely
of a mobile installation/performance/video/workshop at Eyebeam, that this,
for me, as to be as an infant, without the weight we may be leaving
behind. And oddly it might be my father's smile, which was lost on me
early on, that could create an uneasy resurrection, a false past, that
gives me momentary grace.
In any case, the litany of names, Fred Astaire, Lucille Ball, Roland
Barthes, must cease, not seize.
I am murmuring against or through the in-corporation of Eyebeam, with a
sense of wonder based on any and every architecture, corners reflecting
perfectly, hiding places full of magic, the smiles of the demons within
us.