anna telcs applies ribbons to rachel,
originally uploaded by artofmulata.

a little more than a month ago i was on governor’s island. it’s a small dot of land off the coast of manhattan. perhaps 5 minutes by water taxi.

i was there with seattle theater company, implied violence, to perform their latest, ‘the dorothy k,’ an introductory piece to a much longer working that IV principals ryan mitchel and mandy o’conell warn me will be around 24 hours in length.

new york was the opening volley at the presentation of this work. next year there are plans to stage other segments of this opus in austria and later in germany. it sounds extravagant, but someone needs to be producing epic theatrical work out of the states.

i won’t discuss the island or the festival that brought us or even the piece here, but i wanted to post some shots of the installation space that was created to house the show and a few images of an exhausted crew loitering, lounging, fitfully grimacing and collapsing our way through a grueling amount of work to produce a two week run.

if you have any questions please feel free to contact me.
if you think i’m being lazy please feel free to contact me.
if you think you want to use me please feel free to contact me and then stand in line; i feel like i’m being used all the time these days.

just another tool on the surface of the biosphere…

pol

more pics here: behind the scenes of the dorothy k

shadows 1,
originally uploaded by artofmulata.

coming back from the implied violence performances in new york has been difficult. sleepless nights, moving to my new home, changes in attitude towards friends and the idea of what constitutes a relationship.

i`ve been doing a lot of soul searching and reading deleuze. his work is always grounding and helpful. especially the 1000 plateaus stuff he produced with guattari.

the other day, the degenerate art ensemble had a listening party for their new album. i`ve got some work on it, lyrics and singing; it`s pretty fantastic. when it`s available i`ll post procurement info!

the photo is one i took of a friend. loving the high contrast right now. sometimes the lack of detail says more…

drops.walks is my first attempt at serious film making. it’s a short meditation on sexual chimerism and waning consent. or maybe it was just an excuse to make out with a lot of people in one day.

drops.walks was created for the tubs film challenge that was sponsored by the northwest film forum of seattle, washington. it was constructed with the creative assistance of sara murat and steven miller who acted as camera people, cinematographers and provided onsite documentation. a lot of photographs were taken of the event and a few have been used here and there in my work. check out the post titled, ‘the end of all flesh‘ to see a few.

my good friend jessie smith of dead bird movement edited the film while i slept on a nearby sofa and robb kunz, also known as inphase prod/audible semaphore group, and i colaborated on the soundtrack.

at present i’m working on more films. i have this idea that i’d like to have 5 to a dozen short flicks produced by the end of 2009. none of them will be more than 5 or so minutes long. each will will be inhabited by a single theme or motif. dialogue free and purely expressions of art. well, they’ll be art in so much as they can’t be called anything else…

{photography: steven miller}

“flesh eating bitch,” he mumbled to himself.

“what the fuck? what the fuck did you say you ravenous piece-a-shit?” she yelled back at him, striking his woolly head as she did so.

“nothing, honey, i’m just talking to the baby…” his head was in her lap, lips kissing at her navel through the velour and random dog hairs that constituted her sweater, “i’m just asking it what kinda name it wants.”

“goddammit, you motherfucker. get out of there. i told you: there is no baby. there will be no baby. and if there was a baby it wouldn’t be your baby. i am in love with somebody and she left her sperm bag at home, too!”

the bitterness in her tone tasted like menstrual blood in his mouth. he was thinking now, quicker than normal, which is how it always was when they fought. his mind would explode in ways that speed, acid and x could never have pushed it. not even one of those cocaine suppositories he occasionally enjoyed could get him so activated as a good fight with the woman biggie smalls had taught him to refer to affectionately as ‘my bitch.’ but only when she wasn’t listening, of course.

she was sweet, smart, and beautiful in a canned corn kind of way. a little backwoods girl from a meth-trailer free trade zone, the backbone economy of america’s working poor. she was willful, well educated, tight and a freak. what else could he have asked for from god except that maybe she hadn’t turned out to be gay?

“what the fuck?” she yelled again and this time she threw his lazy, indigenous sperm-bag on the carpet and out of her lap. “you honestly think you can still say shit like that to me? where the fuck are you? i left, man, and i am not coming back. i left you, this town and shit; i don’t even talk to men anymore except for you, bus drivers, and my parole officer, that little bitch.”

he laughed at her joke; he was always amazed at the level of awareness she could maintain even in the most hectic, hellish, and high situations. no matter what, she could argue, insult, insinuate, lie, mind read, and seduce total strangers behind his back all at the same time.

sometimes he wished he could have gotten her to carry a gun. not because he was too freaked out by them himself (he was), but because he would have loved to have deep throated the barrel the next time she threatened to kill him.

the television was broadcasting some shit in the background about the terrorists having possibly used alien technology to stop all air traffic for the last few days, but he could barely make it out so intense was the sensation burning from the depths of his asshole to his nostrils with the stink of his own internal bodily processes and the abundance of lube still dribbling down his thighs.

“this is it, man; i am never doing this again,”she said quietly.

“bitch prolly crying,” he emoted on some deep level maybe right around his prostate gland. he was dreaming it now as nelson mandela and many girls from his highschool drug dealing phase licked his delicate, native-flavored weenie.

and she probably was crying, but it was also hot in the room with the tv on, him shaking and groaning, all these ghosts watching and her arm shoved further up his relaxed-as-only-a-negro-can-relax rectum. thanks to her anatomy classes she knew she couldn’t reach on through and crush his testicles, those vibrant factories of testosterone production, with a fuck-capitalism-and-screw-the-reds-too-post-literate-feminist grasp and once again she cursed her education and the institutions her parents had believed in that allowed her to even be able to string such concepts together in the skip rope chambers of her backlot mind while fisting her whatever-the-fuck-he-is-now at the same time.

Tagged: fiction, gender irrelevancy, lube, race, sex, social violence ]]> http://artofmulata.wordpress.com/2009/06/30/the-end-of-all-flesh/feed/ 3 artofmulata hall shot 3 hall shot hall shot 2 http://artofmulata.wordpress.com/2009/05/07/287/ http://artofmulata.wordpress.com/2009/05/07/287/#comments Thu, 07 May 2009 19:43:05 +0000 artofmulata http://artofmulata.wordpress.com/2009/05/07/287/ ]]>

my friend filastine has finally made a music video.

it’s pretty damn fabulous and feels just like our conversations on life and culture.

check it and then go grab his new record, ‘dirty bomb,’ at www.postworldindustries.com

for the record, i suggested multiple times that he call the new effort ‘dirty dirty bomb bomb,’ but that was all for (dread)naught…

TimeoutNY has posted a review of our work-in-progress showing of last week. Read it here.

hello, i have no time to write anything new; luckily, i don’t have to.

as you know, i have been doing the artist in(n) residency gig at the new museum with the degenerate art ensemble. they have some great posts, pictures and videos up on their site so check it out: The DAE on Tumblr.

i’ll post my own shots, stories and whatever else ephemera over the next week.
it should be juicy and scandalous. especially if jeff gives me those bathtub shots he promised…

pol

hello, it’s been quite a while since i last posted. lately i’ve been working on the degenerate art ensemble’s ’sonic tales.’ this could be a tentative title or it could be the final. who knows…

last year, joshua and haruko, the main instigators/driving force of the dae, asked me if i’d like to collaborate on some song writing for the next album. i assented; working in a musical fashion with those two was something i’d been itching to do for years. unfortunately, my chops had never been proportionate to the task. luckily, all i was asked to do was contribute lyrics and some vocal lines. lyrics i can spit all day if given the impetus. melodies? much the same.

eventually the dae (which now includes composer jeff houston) asked if i’d consider coming on to their latest production as scripter, actor/dancer and to even perform some of those songs i’d helped to lyricise. i of course said yes and my life has been made much richer thereby.

sonic tales will debut in seattle in october over the 30th and 31st of october at the moore theater. in april we all fly out to manhattan where the new museum will be hosting us for a residency slash incubation. we’ll be doing some filming out there and probably play some public participation games (guerilla theater? does that still exist?); the new museum will be hosting a working production of whatever ideas we’ve generated and refined on the 16th and 17th of april. more details on that as they come.

that’s enough for now. if anyone has any ideas for promoting our work while in nyc please feel free to contact me at artofmulata ATsign gmailDOTcom. sorry for the dopey obfuscator. you can also go to the contact link at the top right of the page.

here are some far too dark photos of the dae recording some tracks at inphase productions here in seattle. i’m not in the pics as i was shooting them. make of them what you will.

pol is artofmulata

Degenerate Art Ensemble 2009 Recording Sonic Tales

i’m off to korea in a few days… for lim inza’s seoul marginal theater festival 2008. i’ll be there for two weeks and not as a performer. simply as an observer.

this will be the first time i have ever traveled alone. it’s kind of a frightening prospect. i’m taking a couple of cameras, video and film, and a small field recorder with me. it’ll be interesting to only have my own head to bounce things off of.

right now i’m kind of scared. not by my trip. my trip is necessitated by that which i’m nervous of, namely, this smooth transition of power. or perhaps i should call it a smooth transition in narrative.

we have a new guy in the seat of highest public office in my country. i’m sure you know who i’m alluding to. the night they announced that he’d been granted the reigns people poured out into the streets in so many cities. dancing and cheering. drinking and blowing things up. that’s us. that’s what we do. we’re americans. it’s good.

for the last few days since that event so many people, including my banal self, have been expressing the same sentiment. seeing people smile again in such great numbers was beautiful. striking. humbling.and infectious.

it even got to me. now, i love a good street party, but as my friend 9 was saying only tonight over glasses, healthy glasses, of whiskey, “it was so weird to be surrounded by all those smiling happy people. i’d gotten used to only feeling that kind of bonding at protests and riots.” and i had to agree with her.

the last time i can remember that kind of bacchanalian emo-overflux i was with the marching band in new york to say ‘eff-u’ to the republicans four years ago. we swamped a deserted area in the city with two other marching bands and we all went to jail. for days. and it sucked.

i have always believed that the endpoint of any successful revolt, revolution or uprising should be the party. and not just the drunken melee, but the real party. you know, all that peace and justice and respect stuff leading to a land and a lifetime of joy and fulfillment. where the pain you feel isn’t from a truncheon upside your nay saying head or finding out who got shot in the eye with a rubber bullet or the back with a steel jacketed one. the reason we should be making all these demands is to find some happiness in the day to day. all the time. world without end. amen and forever.

so the gathering in the streets on election night. some woman grabbed my hand and yelled, “yes we did!” and it was intense, man. so very spiritual and overwhelming. sitting in a car for a moment with my friend sruti and she said, “when i found out that he’d won it felt like i should be making out with someone…” god. it’s so weird to hear people say all the things that are perpetually playing in your own heart.

for forever i felt that i was alone in thinking these things. such hubris. and maybe that’s why i’ve fallen from such great heights so many times. it’s just a shock to hear it spoken by so many people out loud your own post-philosophical mantras.

but it’s wonderful. and it makes me realize why i keep my art-mouth shut so much now a days. because it’s becoming evident to everyone how this shit should be going down.

but here’s my concern. a philosophy professor i was hanging out with in the spring of this year told me that he’d already prepared a zine with obama’s face on it. the title of the pamphlet is, “the face of the new enemy.” and it doesn’t matter how much you love the man or his principles or his story. it’s true.

obama’s just taken on the mantle. the crown. this is the office that truly waves the velvet glove. nothing changes that. the office is metonymic, a synedoche, for all the brutal policies that issue forth from our country to the rest of the world. remember that. he’s your man, but he’s also a policy himself now. he is an image and a representation. old school critical thinking on my part to be sure… true though.

i will give him his first 100 days and then some. because in spite of his being terribly conservative by my reckoning i want to see him promote the slow move of this juggernaut back to something a little less ugly and frightening.

i wanted to be gone from this country for a while after the election. cast my vote and bail, say, on the night of the fourth be on a plane to korea. not come back until after the furor over the fuhrer was spent. i didn’t think i could handle the gloating of the ‘bamites over those other people. but it hasn’t been so bad.

i forget sometimes that i’m surrounded, by choice, by groups of people who are aware that this changes very little. yes we have a wonderful new story to write thanks to all this marvelous hope that’s floating around, but we also have a lot to do still. it’s so good to know that the people i run with aren’t allowing a small thing like an election to interfere with their plans for social restructuring.

i think it doesn’t really matter to some of us who wins that boring race. there’s always so much to be done. and people want to talk about how the left shouldn’t put all it’s energy into running this candidate and defeating that one as if there is such a thing as the ‘left.’ the left as it was once understood no longer exists. when clinton (either) can be referred to as a liberal it’s time to put the term away.

the left is no longer monolithic and it never was. the left is constructed of so many small and autonomous groups doing what they feel is necessitated by circumstance. and the circumstances have barely changed. and they will remain more or less the same set of suspect circumstances up and through january the 20th when they ride the motorcade through the streets of dc.

does anyone remember what happened four years ago when george junior had his second little moment in the limelight? people came to dc in droves to protest. to riot. to ruin the day for the old fool and his cronies. and folks went nuts. banners and loud speakers and eggs. and none of it really made the news.

i met these two ladies from chicago the day after the election who’d just flown in to seattle. they told me about the street party there. and about throwing up on the plane ride. my kind of people. they told me that they had already bought tickets to dc for the inauguration. they want to do that whole dancing on public land with a drink in your hand thing again. i can’t blame them. i suspect they will not be alone. i would not be surprised if a lot of people go to dc just to party the bush away. and i hope rice and powell cry as they pack their bags singing, ‘free at last/free at last/lord god almighty/i’m free at last”

not that you should ever trust those motherfuckers again.