THING 021 : GRIP 
AURELIA GUO
POTENTIAL
I’ll never like writing as much as i like talking
I have a cameraman on call all the time, so we can manipulate real situations in an organic way
I don’t like talking about things that haven’t happened yet
I’m studying fairytales at the New School, and I’m studying French
I’m all alone. I have two boyfriends, but I’m all alone
My life had so much potential before I discovered sex
VIJAY MASHARANI
2 IN 1 LOVE POEM
This time last year in Leyton, sharp un-diagonal dead-lines (weird word) finally flayed a rotted transoceanic cord. Contrite, disoriented, compulsively delimit culpability still, daily, everything’s noisier, grief from prick prick roommate for being hysterical about Omicron. I was just trying to heat up some frozen sausages from the butcher next door, he said Asian countries have lower COVID rates because of holdover immunity from SARS, I snapped “oh from 30 years ago???” He warned of Romani robbers in the neighborhood, PoC writers stealing arts funding,
I am not a resilient person—blocked/keyed up, stressed out, seething, “dense about the obvious implications”1 skipped Christmas due to Omicron, history’s leap-frogging motion, advantage turned disadvantage and vice versa, got treated cavalier, got yanked around, a lot was happening off-screen. Finals were due a week into the new term, two with the extension I begged for, meant literally no Break, a word I implored my gurgling phone avoid, we know where we are from and we know where we are going: the horizon, the hem
Skipped thinking, The Day passed unremarkably, was locked in and livid, dissolved into “a phosphorescence, a luminosity, a generous effulgence,”2 feel raw fresh, there’s no time in the unconscious, lately been Time Traveling—mania’s signature syntax—December/January became March/April, daytripped, caught a glimpse of Mew
again, Quit, prick’s syntax fit snugly in the superego slot, unloaded on love, it was all me/real/rotten/super sorry stated, called Slop “I’ve been Really Really Really Bad,” in an old new voice, “ever since my brother died…” Right, that periodization
Today I am exiting professional practices receiving The Email, didn’t wept kept saying “oh my god dude” in a new new voice on the phone with a caveman by the vending machines, wouldn’t make it to the tavern that night after all,
left something in Baltimore by the dumpsters by the bridge, an uninhibited belly laugh, joyous silliness I got from M and have been able to recover only on select occasions, 6019 singing I’m sooo addicted to the shindig, besides last, 2017 was the worst, Slop—Kam—Rich—Aud—Dyl, save me. Envied him on two occasions, guess, speculation’s profane. Me, a Challenge, according to—ow! cut down
Reanimating a corpse: a habit indulged, recently, remotely, bicoastally, like, how were your holidays? Man, I was just trying to lock in, get good grades, I didn’t want… all of this, slept-walked towards a siren, all that really happened, wow like “what? I didn’t even want to see the waterfall,” to my mother’s chagrin.
When M appears in dreams he walks in through That Door, I say “that’s Impossible!” Rationality braces, buckles, splits: he grins, “nope, surprise,” hugs, more recently he had gotten pudgy, a pillow under his button down, we drank cyan beers,
1. Joseph Barnett, M.D., Narcissism and Dependency in the Obsessional-Hysteric Marriage, 1971↩
2. Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 1961↩
JUSTIN CABRILLOS
AS OF IT REHEARSAL NOTES (EXCERPT)
Support everyone
Individual threads
Tap into your situations
ME: Don’t hold back in sections
ME: Lab your material and CREATE IN THE MOMENT FREESTYLE
Try different arranging of order in line
What is the breath of each section
Ending
Narrator
Xananas
New moves:
Dinner party: Matt some side curl
Reed jumping after the stillness running to Matt
ME: levels for shaking in the final crim3s
Low curl
On silence—Doing shaking in meshuggah shapes?
Or heavy breathing?
Trying to move while shaking in shapes
Eating energy shifting faces
I’m on fire
More softness
More letting go
More under the skin stillness
Me: Xananas—Octopus
Material
Drawing
Becoming it
Hands are the head and the tentacles
Taking octopus from the shelves
ME: Move less in Xananas
ME: Don’t look as much at the others
Try different placements of the arms and tonuses
Play with my materiality, softer placement in the teapot,
Can have more pedestrian moments
ME:
More open eyes in the
Focus on my imagination in the horsey section
Different kinds of steps and pacing from me are good
Let myself get out and be human
More under the skin, slow, imagination time
Narration + up down + imagination + the torso moves
More softness
More letting go
More under the skin stillness
More charging
I’m on fire, Circles with face shifts
More legs, kicks + back stomp
ME: More levels + stillness
IMAGINATION TIMING LEVELS AND WORLDS
Go with the imagination, not just the rhythm
DON’T hit every beat
MORE OVERT THEATRICALITY IN HORSES
Be with the audience and less with Matt and Reed
Less repetition from me!!
Material levels with the energy section
Let the spasms manifest in big extended movements
Emo body parts warm up
Put imagination in space or in other body parts
CRIM3S: HEAD AND LEG FOUNTAINS
Keep and work and travel with levels, stay and work from different levels.
Work with mid and high core levels
+Put lean or tilt or slouch in the core for horsey section, core engagement
Me: SOFTEN into the horsey section
Light legs
Gives me more options
POSTURE MOMENTS
Multiple postures, hunched over
Or curved back
1 disco line
2 horsey section
Lead with different parts of the 1/2/3 for the horses
NOTE for everyone, take lid off of tops of shoulders when horsey
What landscape are you entering?
New horse step: skipping with envelope
tango+triplet (jack)
House mini farmer
NOT just one step
Where am I what am I stepping on?
**ME:
Narrating spine and legs (less arm placements)
Bouncing from core
Skip releve
House straight leg bend hop
Side to side
Hop kick
Solo: Whoas/bumps/head rolls/dropping forward/straight/More ARM SWINGS in energy
sections/extension arms
CORE SWING/ARM SWINGS DANCE
Big turning and spinning from the hip heart
Hit head by stopping contracting and snapping
Level shifts
Also Shift to UNDER THE SKIN
Big snap effect into floor curl
Bodies out of control or reacting to catastrophe
Line dance, longer stillnesses,
Raining, cloud on top of the head
Shower
Imagination timing
EVERYONE NOTES:
Posture disco (deep breaths and holding for longer)
Play with core levels!!!
Alarm is an alarm clock, call to attention
Take time with the horse race
Lead with different parts of the 1/2/3 for the horses
NOTE for everyone, take lid off of tops of shoulders when horsey
KEVIN JEROME EVERSON
STILLS FROM OSR (2023, 11:30)
OSR (2023, 11:30) is a new film based on the sound of the high contrast film footage creating its own sound track. OSR is the Ohio State Reformatory prison in my home town of Mansfield Ohio. It was built between 1886 and 1910. It ended operations in 1990. It is the highest (six stories) cell block on planted earth. The OSR serves as a non-profit museum and movie set major hollywood productions. OSR is part of a series of films based on people and/or objects that have a representational history from my home town.
MICHELLE WOLODARSKY
FOUR POEMS
The Man in Bridge at Dawn
Just take a deep breath and you’ll see that’ll all blow over.
Though, hopefully, not into the river and sink.
Like the story of the Man in the Bridge at Dawn,
Who lost his footing,
and also his life:
In one fell swoop,
The Man drowned.
A gust took him,
Underground.
1 Milk and 12 Eggs
When the bell rang, I ran downstairs to Open Up.
Outside, and beside myself, in this particularly soft evening, there they were:
The presents.
1 milk and 12 eggs.
The presence, on the other hand, was gone—
Even before I had the time to say Thanks.
Though not what I really wanted, these presents were what I’d needed, and so,
What I’d actually asked for.
It was warm still, the milk,
And they were, the eggs, unhatched.
So I scooped it all up, delicately,
And refrigerated it with the swoosh of air compression.
I thought: you never know
When you might need to break some eggs,
Or to spill some milk
When you most need to cry.
The First Day
Three strands have been intertwined to pull in different directions. They are red, green and blue and now lie there, knotted.
Earlier, I lay on my back by the pool—I did not want to swim. Reflected on the still water was the skylight, patterned with upswept leaves and the fainting shadow of the trees.
Later, I awoke, not knowing I had been asleep. The window was swung wide open.
Now, this daze has turned into night as heavy rain patters outside.
The Grassy Hill
What happened was that a Tear was held in an Eye for thirty minutes exactly. It was waiting to be released at the right moment, when the top of the Grassy Hill was reached, as the sun set, over the trees and ponds. All of this, by the way, was in the hopes of a moment of Great Catharsis.
Sadly, what occurred instead was something different: a violation of privacy, a cruel stanching—a sunset robbery, if you will—by the hand of those cheery people walking their well-groomed dogs. From the start, it had been an impossible feat: Great Catharsis had left the scene long before that point in time.
In a moment like this, a key question is raised: “Must this be how depletion piles-on?” And, in many ways, it is.
For it is true: the Grassy Hill stood as it should. But, in recent times, it has been shown that, the Held-Back Tear, tends to cumulatively build. So much so in fact, that, in some cases, when it is dreary and silent, it may dully drop.
And plop, on top of an umbrella—trudging through, in the dark, when Cruel Fog envelopes the gaping inconsequence ahead.
So, this is why there is a longing for the Grassy Hill to be empty—or for Tears to roll-down, hot.
But, before that, must come the snow. It must first turn to black ice on roads sidelined with sleet, frost must bite branches of crackling trees and hills must be muddied with slush. That rattling pane must whistle, all the way through. Only after that, may it pour, down, onto a different plane.
Then, a ‘ding’.
Which interrupts repose in the sleepy cabin. Slowly, seats and trays are repositioned and blinds raised. Could this watery sun, finally, hold a new day? When repetition dissipates over frosty hills, snowy and swerving, Clear Skies are bound to lie ahead. Zero chance of overcast—if the prediction is right. But, tomorrow will also be cold, according to the same forecast. In here, however, the knowledge of warmth fortunately stretches out—into centuries of sleep.
Arrested by this restfulness, thus, the Cycle may end as it begun—terribly—no longer able to stand the cruelty of it all.
And so, encased in sleepiness, and drowned by direness, another hour passes, tosses over once more and sinks, slowly. That is, of course, into time, not sleep. Because the hour is ungodly—that’s for sure. The gold-light was turned off at some point—though, when exactly, is hard to know— a woollen blanket was pulled over that Eye, the one that held the Tear, long ago.
Until, a warm itch spreads—stretches—and scratches away yesterday’s cold.
Then is when, outside the window, the low sun went into a high blaze. And, yoked by inevitability, it cracked, spilt-over, on top of the Grassy Hill. And so, as was excepted, the grass grew greener and the flowers bloomed yellow. Dew gathered on the blades, and smelt strongly in the clear mornings.
Days expanded into silence.
YUU YAMAMOTO
A TO J THROUGH I
HARRY DAVIES
THE DUMP
N and I arrive at the dump
in his converted ambulance, which now, rather than tending to bodies, tends to the expelled innards of buil-dings, Da dump receives our tribute.
Silica water tinsel
Shloosssh paint
Bouquets of whatthefucks
Ceremonial doo-dads
Dusty bits
Bitsy parts
Clanky bones
Knife buckets
Clickers
“We are here to expel a family’s innards!”
If ‘house’ through the metaphor ‘body’ we are concerned with their house’s [the family’s house] fat store, or caboose, its ancillary rear shack. Its (the house’s) innards are in a constant protracted state of renewal, as things fall apart and new things take their place, just as cells die and are replaced by other, newer cells. The scale is different, a refrigerator feels more like a brain than a single cell.
…
…
…
Chairs without seats
Chairs with rustbottoms
Chairs for outdoor meals
Chairs for racoon excrement
Chairs a baby sat on
Chairs which never were sat on
Chairs for sweaty and or cold asses
Chairs more accustomed to the asses of racoons than those of my family members….
…
…
…
Katana, air conditioner, furry sweatpants, soggy chipboard, child’s range rover, sanctified racoon’s nest. the eventual cabooosification of all stuff in the house.
The caboose is where I find myself painting.
The dump is less like a toilet than one might think at first.
dump maybe more like a mouth, whose appetite is as great as the surrounding area’s inhabitants desire for new stuff to replace their old stuff with. As a mouth it is a cruncher, slicer and gnawer, and is very efficient. Its teeth, by virtue of resemblance, and our guiding anthro-metaphor, one might think are the jaws of its resident backhoe, but its teeth are really the hands of da dumps workers (while they are at work at least).
It is the height of plague paranoia which the papers stoke with accounts of darkened apartments crammed with generations of people all unable to taste the difference between garlic and crabapples. The dump’s appetite subdued as the smorgasbord of potential treats glomms together into a single non distinguishable shlopp. As a result, the dump’s central heapp, which I would see in subsequent visits could swell two stories tall (not counting its resident backhoe perched on top), is only some scattered clumps and voids. The dump’s usual line of tributaries isn’t there and we slide N’s former ambulance right in…..
Hello, a query for you: can I write about what was never mine? Put differently can I throw it away at Da Dump with N?
[the writing of finality isn’t the law and it isn’t inscribed on stones, it’s the great pacific garbage vortex]
The answer is yes: if writing is throwing away then there is no uncertainty in expelling the sediment of another, especially if those others are inlaws.
Chop saw
Armoire
Flatscreen Mortar drywall
Stuffed platypus
[on the way from the house-body’s ancillary purgatory, its own heap, to da dump:]
N splutters my brother in law’s name: MMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM Splintering its singular (assumedly) coherence (also assumedly)– my brother in law appearing in a cracked mirror. It’s hot and the van is full with a slice of purgatory, that is if purgatory is a 20 year state of suspension somewhere between intermittent trips to Asunción and a landfill on Staten Island. It’s only later that I learn that N and I have the same name, another resemblance to go along with the fact that we are both (for now) skinny and bald and myopic. We commend each other for making money.
Well…. Dump logic is loose, mercurial and so, very strong. Under the resident backhoe, the objects, if thought about through their names, can be separated into categories such as, for example: ‘building materials’, ‘play things’, ‘entertainment implements’, or adjectivally into: ‘rotten’, ‘forgotten’, ‘worn out’, All of these things are in the family called ‘waste’.
…
…
However, each of those categories falls apart quite quickly when a cubic yard under the backhoe includes all of the aforementioned and another twenty dozen categories in states alternating between pressurized osmotic congealment and coming apart.
The Heap (the dump’s central heap) is made up of all those things which cannot be called ‘necessity’, not now at least– though this would be to take ‘waste’ at its word, rather than consider how these things could have been used.
‘What is the weight of that heap’
‘Wellll i’d say based on how much uh the ground it’s takin up, and the backhoe’s arm is swingin above the perimeter, i’d say ballpark 2wenny sumthin tons’
‘can you tell me about the…… uh, ‘non-putrescence’ of the heap?’
‘Welllll listen, i’m not sayin there’s nothin putrefyin in there, we get a lot uh stuff hidden in other stuff gettin thrown on there….. But i could guarantee there’s no more than 1% uh putrefyin goods comin through our gate everyday’
‘Can you tell me about the….uh guys who tried to…….rob the dump?’
‘it’s a waste transfer station, pal, and i got nothin to say about those bums besides that We got cameras everywhere.’
‘Is this mound any different than…………………………………white light?’
Can a heap ‘weigh’?
What is ‘weigh’ without structure?
What is ‘structure’ without edge?
What is ‘heap’ other than a moment?
To take the heap for granted for amoment:
What is specificity in the heap?
What is a name in the heap?
What is an object in the heap?
Counting is impossible in the center of the heap
Difference doesn’t last in the bowels of the heap
The center of the heap seethes…..it’s seething!!!
In the center of the heap there is no center of the heap
In the center of the heap there is no outside… .at least to me, to hands which could only grab hold of clods of heap and crumble them between fingers.
To a being misconstrued as undulating edifice, the heap is unassimilable as anything but…… ………..
…
…
…
…
…
…
‘garbaggio’
All your stuff is in there! Don’t forget about those things called
Wing
Drywall
Seltzer
Your things still have names on the perimeter of the heap…… but as they reach the center they morph into
Carbon
Schloop
‘Krrrrrhhh’
The maybe most unassimilable is whatever is happening between the perimeter and the center where your stuff might be called
Twoo x fffffffffffffffffffffrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr, Mirrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr, hemmmmmmiisiphrrrrrrrrr
White light must have a weight!!!!!!!
…
…
…
…
…
…
N loves to break shit, and I’m finding I do to— though I like to keep the pieces around for when the pieces join back together
Painting isn’t about keeping things, even though we might be told that this is the point-to arrest a form, to calcify a set of actions and gestures. I can’t think towards such an end. It’s not about what the paintings are about– what they are doing is what’s important.
…
…
Painting (,) a constant osmotic [crucible] of decay, delay, mess, fungibility.
…
…
‘Painting’ as in momentary appearance, a flash of visibility, of what is, or what is becoming, invisible— and then,
‘Painting’ as in disappearance, a visibility which undoes itself. revelation through displacement–for an image to appear it must also be covering something up.
‘Painting’ through ‘metabolism’
…
…
Painting cracks open relations between things that allegedly have nothing to do with one another
…
…
Painting a place where the grammar of things as received, twists, where a spiraling relation between things takes space, where sediment gives way to plasmatic swirling.
…
…
Painting the room in my house where I can put things I find
…
…
Painting less about ‘work’ or ‘working’ and more about negotiating,
…
…
more about arguing,
more about making out,
more about being casual,
more about being brutally serious,
More about brutalizing seriousness,
more about crystalizing, more about plasmifying,
more about looking around,
more about feeling around,
more about smelling around,
…
…
…