call in question

To call in question the society you "live" in, you must first be capable of calling yourself in question.
To call in question the society you "live" in, you must first be capable of calling yourself in question.
To call in question the society you "live" in, you must first be capable of calling yourself in question.
To call in question the society you "live" in, you must first be capable of calling yourself in question.
To call in question the society you "live" in, you must first be capable of calling yourself in question.
To call in question the society you "live" in, you must first be capable of calling yourself in question.
To call in question the society you "live" in, you must first be capable of calling yourself in question.
To call in question the society you "live" in, you must first be capable of calling yourself in question.

naked man

(Daily Mail runs very short story of a man jailed for two months who can’t be released because he refuses to wear clothes. He is kept away from other inmates in a bare cell)

He gets up one day and he thinks ‘I just can’t take it anymore - my clothes don’t fit, I’m tired of the feeling of them. Look at them, they’re ugly - they aren’t mine. I bought them in a shop where there were many others just the same. There must be thousands of people walking around right now in these clothes - just like me, exactly my height, my weight, my shoe size - only tiny variations. The cloth chaffs around my joints, its so difficult to put them together. Choose between colours and styles, minute differences of tone and shade, length and balance. Its such an effort to keep them all clean, all tidy - to maintain myself. To look normal, to be decent, to hide those tender areas, those little secrets, those intimate details. The surfaces and parameters of my physical existence. The cloth all woven - thread over thread, covering up all tiny holes, all leaks, all flows of air and scents and feel of something living, something breathing, somewhere in there, past the weaving and the nets. And such a thunder of background noise, rustles and scratches and rubbings and creaky stretching, but never ripping unless you have failed in the endless battle of the maintenance of what you wear and who you are. I kinda like my skin. I like the tones and shades, its softness and its harshness, bushes, whorls and scrolls. In fact I want to be seen this way, this is my style, my statement - better than the best tailor, better than anyone else. I want them to look and see it all. It makes me feel good, I am free of past restrictions and tight school uniform collars, I am a Scandanavian, rolling in the snow. I am super super human.’

havanna biennele 2000

And the architect said I will ask people who live with their parents what they would like their dream house to be and she made collage/ paintings from images from magazines in geometric patterns so that they ordered the vast number of pictures that we see everyday into an eye-confusing whole that shimmers and he took leaves and wood and stuff and made figures sitting on deckchairs in a circle and tied 3 living pigeons with nylon thread under them and he recorded shamanistic dancing in replication of their religion and she recorded accounts of sightings of aliens from across the globe and played them all at once but being hung up on the myth of the artist she made few friends in Cuba though the voices spoke in many languages from speakers suspended from the ceiling and he played around in photoshop to make water towers look like UFO’s floating over this city and she said all I care about is my son and Castro shut our café and now we sell manais (peanuts) on the street and these are my parents after we had climbed three flights of unlit stairs and their fridge was broken and he said ‘Art is a misrepresentation of the soul’ and they said ‘welcome to Havana, our city is beautiful’ and he made a mirror to walk on which reflected the patterns from a film played overhead and called it ‘Pozo donde todo se para’ and he made an animation of grotesque shadow figures cavorting in line and Nelson Mandela said BE NICE TO WHITE PEOPLE THEY NEED YOU TO REDISCOVER THEIR HUMANITY and in the Convent they display a large photograph of Fidel Castro meeting the Pope with the very chairs they sat on and he said it was not an installation, it was not art but he took a photograph of it when I did and Kcho builds boats that are not boats and bottles that are bottles but he’s getting a bit slick and his ship is beginning to sink and she has a pirate radio station set up on the tallest building in Mexico City and Al Capone said ALL I EVER DID WAS SUPPLY A DEMAND and Mother Theresa said GIVE UNTIL IT HURTS but on a poster it reads NOTHING IN EXCESS< EVERYTHING IN MEASURE and he x-rayed his hand and recorded a sound track of scratching and scratching as the bones held a pen and moved across the page as the woman sang a song of ancestors the man ate a local narcotic which made him hallucinate a wooden hut baking hot inside and made him see RED and made him a fashion designer for carnival and made her take photographs in Che Guevara’s office, perfectly preserved with his tooth extractor and his gun and the illegal lobster cost $26 as the transvestites danced in the Fiat Café and the French performance artists who were not performing at the exposition but liked their work to be called ‘body art’ but were uncertain that it was ‘now’ enough searched for a taxi on the dusty road outside the castle and the curator in the hotel bar said no one star has emerged so far, the fetishists have stolen all the spaces, tied them up with rope and made voodoo dolls, stuffed birds with cuddly, furry faces but one stone balanced by a bouncing line of rope round all the walls was ‘kinda cool’ and then they took over an empty space for a ‘Window onto Venus’ and filled it quietly with secret things and the secret cross high on the wall dripped sand onto the flowers and white aeroplanes glided in the Plaza Vieja, tied up with parcel tape by the third day but still flying, we survive by bricolage said the curator excluded from all events because of his politics in his garden and FAX MACHINES ARE DANGEROUS and I pay a guy who has an illegal server to transmit and receive my e-mail and they use a fear of losing human contact to justify the loss of human contact and they made bread in the shape of a crocodile and sold mock broken tools fixed with band-aids as they tried to accommodate 1500 Americans in one week just to see the Biennale and the dance students practiced to Salsa drummers in a building like a lost temple in the jungle on the best golf course in Latin America and the Caribbean as the art student killed a goat as part of a performance - the bastard - and the performance artist washed his mouth out with soap and God said THOU SHALT NOT KILL and Nietzsche said GOD IS DEAD and Brains from Thunderbirds laid the pattern of his bedroom floor at the entrance to the Creative Arts School and the Iconoclasts walked all over it but the Iconophiles bought everything at the art auction and if all the dead guys could get together in La Bar Florentina - Hemingway, Che Guevara, Wilfredo Lam, Jose Marti, Basquiat, God, would they say WELL DONE, HAVE A CIGAR?

for integer

We put the things we love in a museum - they cease to move, they cease to breathe. They cease to speak. We can look at them and remember how it used to be, perhaps see in them thoughts of dead ends and possible futures - the first computer, the last Dodo.
Integer’s story - `will you come away with me?' he said finally to her; but the reed shook her head, she was so attached to her home.’
Of course this story is about love - unrequited love in the end. Dreams and more dreams piled on top of each other, arguing with each other and fixating and trying to control the flow. Fixate and then try to control the world through that fixation. COVETOUSNESS. BLACK MAGIC. I CHARGE A LOVE SYGIL AND SEND IT OUT INTO THE ETHER.
ITS MINE.

But nothing really is, is it?
HOME - as travellers we carry it with us, for it no longer exists. Bless this House.

genius 2000

From: nmherman@aol.com
>Reply-To: Genius2000Conference2000@egroups.com
>To: Genius2000Conference2000@egroups.com, clebares@fibrogen.com
>Subject: Re: [Genius2000Conference2000] Re: I kiss Genius2000
>Date: Wed, 8 Nov 2000 22:27:59 EST
>
>In a message dated 11/8/2000 6:37:05 PM Central Standard Time,
>chrudie@hotmail.com writes:
>
> > Can you be a Genius and female? Genius 2000?
> > Isn't there a description of Genius as being kissed by God?
> > But also the spirit of a place, its ultimate, fundamental identity/spirit,
> > what makes it itself?
>
>This is the best post I ever got, maybe, but my brain is too draggled by the
>eternal campaign to deeply appreciate it. I applaud your creativity and
>daring, to make someone else's idea your own. It takes genius to think of
>Genius 2000 the way you did and that's the goal of my work and fierceness.
>
>Anyway, yes absolutely genius can be female! Or any gender or combination
>thereof. Genius is when something's really going on in real life.
>
>I never heard of the description of kissing, but it certainly is apt.
>Netochka N. calls cognition itself an extended kiss between the synapses.
>I'm into the idea of a kiss now because I kissed a few papers after I voted.
>I like the difference between a kiss and a vote: voting should be more like
>a kiss but now its a warlike act, harsh and crude (at least in USA). I
>compare Genius 2000 to God, so genius (fulfilled genius rather than oppressed
>genius is here an important distinction) is being kissed by Genius 2000, no
>doubt.
>
>But it's not something Genius 2000 or God gives you; a kiss isn't like that.
>Or to put it another way, we are God, so salvation or messianism or blessing
>is not a gift from a foreign entity but our own reception of ourselves (our
>genius both collectively and as individuals, to quote the Video).
>
>And yes yes yes, genius is the creative and guardian spirit of cognition, and
>cognition is contextual like an ecosystem, so relations to other geniuses
>(like place, time, other people, nature, all of it) is part and parcel of
>genius.
>
>So thanks for writing Catherine. Perhaps my sister Carter Lebares will
>elaborate further on your interpretation. (She's working on a concept about
>"home," interviewing all different kinds of people to point out some
>materialistic concepts of genius that her neighbors have. It relates to your
>idea of place.) I'll ask her to. But here's my question for you, if I may
>be selfish for a moment: Does Genius 2000 as you interpreted it--i.e., your
>thoughts and feelings while getting the gist of it--seem like a trivial
>truism, or a last-ditch attempt to heal our world's primary disease, the
>hierarchy or tyranny of genius? Do you believe as I do that Genius 2000
>should be welcomed and not rejected?
>
>Restitutio in integrum,
>
>Max Herman
>
>P.S.--the word "vote" comes from the latin "votum", a vow. "Votive" and
>"devout" are from the same verb also. The latin verb in turn is from the
>Indo-European "wegh-" which means "to preach or speak solemnly."