When everything, all information is all accessible, and all at the same time and all simultaneously; order, ordinance does not matter. Linear time as we know it is indifferent. Things poke holes in the present moment from other places. The whole of everything is now in one frame. Everything at once. All the time. Flattened out. With a meat tenderizer.

Click here to watch an early excerpt from WOW AND FLUTTER.

The Chocolate Factory is awesome.COME!  

To purchase lots of tickets, (or just one), click here.

They just keep coming.

Download audio file (voicemal03.mp3)

• my apartment collapsed

• Re:placement installation / performance at PS122
• opening night panel at the Prelude Festival
• Blinkcam @ the ITP 30th anniversary gala
• The Archery Contest video design at PS122
• Fischerspooner video design at the MoMA
• Vieux Carré premiere at the Centre Pompidou, (The Wooster Group)
• This mustache started growing on my face
• I am Jerome Bel shows in London for Rolex, (The Wooster Group)

Pleaseure.

Amazingly, I seem to only have the script in hard copy, else I would post it here.  Here’s the idea.  Pleaseure + CHN01 + EDP.  I wrote this thing when I was in college.  It’s a performance piece that is written for a single performer.  The piece was only performed once in a theatre in Spanish Harlem by Michael Balsley, in its entirety and as it was written.  I’ve pulled various themes from it over the years to use in different pieces, especially a section called “BIG FAN”  which I’ve used specifically for dependent.study in Chicago with BPG and the New York Fringe Festival.

Last week I spent a bunch of time starting.  That’s always the hardest thing for me.  The start.  I shot video of my mouth  while reading There Will Come Soft Rains by Ray Bradbury.  I didn’t know what to expect, but the results were not at all inspiring.  I ended up using some of the video for the Fischerspooner show in Italy.  Surprise, surprise I insert myself into their show when I can.  I was pondering my meager output from a whole Sunday session of autovideo, in the shower, the next morning, when various things lined up for me.

The structure of Pleaseure as a script

The physicality of the TwitchSet and the Performoshoes

The mask of the Prolixus

The constraint of the FaceMask

Let’s get these guys together.  I’ve tried something like this before, but now I would like to flesh it out completely.

Wooster and West Broadway.

There Will Come Soft Rains – The short story by Ray Bradbury
Open Sky – Paul Verilio
Adbusters – Issue # 79, Hips†er, The Dead End of Western Civilization (see post # 156 – fauxhemian)
Twin Peaks – David Lynch TV series
Zizek! – A film about Slavoj Žižek, directed by Astra Taylor
Within the Context of no Context – George W.S. Trow
Dance sequence from Guys and Dolls – Michael Kidd, choreographer
The Fleetwoods – all songs
YouTube videos of slow-motion plane crashes and skydiving
Pornography
Swimming
pistons / machinery

Here we go.

Ararahgghhgegrhgrhghr.  I don’t know what to think.  These two articles have just been called to my attention.  Christian Lorentzen wrote the feature “Why the hipster must die” in Time Out New York / Issue 609, in May of 2007.  Douglas Haddow wrote the essay, “Hipster: The Dead End of Western Civilization” in issue 79 of Adbusters which hit the stands just last week.  Both articles beat down the fashionatic tendencies of the supposed “subculture” of the Hipster.  In traditional Adbusters style, Haddow declares the end is nigh while typing poetic verses describing the Hipster set dance-shuffling the entire human race into oblivion.  Lorentzen is a bit less dramatic and seems legitimately fearful for the death of New York Cool and those that are supposed to be the ones on the front lines of cultural innovation.  He even invites the defense of the Hipster from those institutions and publications who cater to the little rascals.   The vapid “cultural” blog, Down By the Hipster, in an invited retort, writes,

To us, hipsters are more than just people that dress in odd outfits and like to party. Hipsters are interested in the new, and because they are interested in the new, they help to spur innovation. Mainly in art, music and nightlife. It may not be innovation to most people, but that is why they are not hipsters. By the Pythagorean theorem, this means that they in fact do not ruin everything because if hipsters did not exist, a lot of what the masses come to enjoy would not exist either. It’s kind of like if Marty McFly didn’t get his parents to kiss in Back to the Future.

While I appreciate the reference to one of my all time favorite movies, this defense is nonsense.  Lorentzen writes, “The e-mails arrive, and though it is known in advance that the art will be nothing much,the trek is made. The avant-garde illusion ultimately sustains itself on free beer.”  I want to scream,  YYYYYYYEEEEEEEEEEEAAAAAASSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS! What is this crap that I’m doing?  Why do people come see me perform?  Why do I go to see other people perform?  Why is any of it good?  Why do people show up in droves to see The Wooster Group or something put on at The Box?

Haddow goes on to state,

Lovers of apathy and irony, hipsters are connected through a global network of blogs and shops that push forth a global vision of fashion-informed aesthetics. Loosely associated with some form of creative output, they attend art parties, take lo-fi pictures with analog cameras, ride their bikes to night clubs and sweat it up at nouveau disco-coke parties. The hipster tends to religiously blog about their daily exploits, usually while leafing through generation-defining magazines like Vice, Another Magazine and Wallpaper. This cursory and stylized lifestyle has made the hipster almost universally loathed.

YYYYYYYEEEEEEEEEEEAAAAAASSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS!

See, me: andrewjs.com/metablog.

Is this why I care about this?  I no longer know if I am what I parody.  I no longer know parody.  Irony can no longer exist.  I am becoming most of the things that I am hyper-critical of, maybe because I am hyper-critical of them.  I try to get in there and understand the stuff of culture.  The only way to truly understand is to subscribe and lose yourself in it.

I am also nagged by the thought that this is a very trite thing to worry about.  I do however seriously entertain the notion that culture drives culture and that the social undercurrents of the L.E.S. do in some way have ramifications outside of fashion mags.  Again, Haddow, with post-apocalyptic sentiment,

 We are a lost generation, desperately clinging to anything that feels real, but too afraid to become it ourselves. We are a defeated generation, resigned to the hypocrisy of those before us, who once sang songs of rebellion and now sell them back to us. We are the last generation, a culmination of all previous things, destroyed by the vapidity that surrounds us. The hipster represents the end of Western civilization – a culture so detached and disconnected that it has stopped giving birth to anything new.

That is what I am afraid of.  We are fantastic recyclers of ourselves.  But there is no longer any fodder for the mill of ourselves.  We are documentation of no content.  Focus relentlessly on content rather than what we think is demanding technique.

We are fashion of thought.  We live to excessorize.

Everyone can, and should, be ignored. We were warned about this situation we find ourselves in by philosophers, and well before it happened. It’s just too bad we weren’t warned by celebrities, or we would have listened to them.

-Choire Sicha, Editor Gawker Magazine