[(more) keywords]

- practice

- rehearsal

- preparation

- pentecostalisms (again and always again)

- aesthetics

- black radical tradition

- ontogenesis & ontology

- marronage 

- secrete & secretion 

- performance

what if we performed a long history of a blackqueer aesthetics? something like what Robinson so brilliantly does in Black Marxism? [this book, really and again, is making my life happy]

moth’s powder [11.15.09]

from: a
to: dtim

Sunday November 15, 2009, 2:02pm

Subject: read this

so i’m still writing and it won’t let me go. anyway, hope this makes some sense. i’ve been thinking about what you told me, sending to his mother but i’m not tryin to start anymore fights between her and his father. i dunno, tho…if i sent, what would that even accomplish? it’s not like he’s gonna come back if i do…this shit is ridiculous…unfair…i’m just…tired

11.15.09

dear moth’s powder,

i think i might be one of the few people i know who uses a record player … often.  i decided to pull out Michael Jackson’s 1972 “I Wanna Be Where You Are” but before gently placing the needle on the spinning black disc, i brushed my finger lightly on the needle’s point, listening to that low, atonal blss-blss sound it’d make, listening to see and seeing to listen for if the stereo was turned up high enough.  blss-blss again until, finally, i was pleased with the volume.  of course, this is a saturday morning thing to do.  it was bright yesterday, the white cumulus clouds were making all sorts of shapes – unicorns, acorns, ears of corn, whatever. if you can tell, i’m hungry right now, and i haven’t had cornbread in a while [not since the last time i was in boston, actually, sitting across the table from my brother eating bar-b-que] and i had a cup of tea with lemon, the windows open, no lights on, save the sunlight shining through the half-opened blinds so that a cool shadow was cast all over the furniture.  i sat on the red leather couch, reclined, listening to all sorts of oldies music that i didn’t know i had until i realized i had it in the office that i do not use nearly as much as i should.

well.  i sat in the living room having gorged on someJames Cleveland and Dr.  Charles Hayes and the Cosmopolitan House of Prayer choir when i began thinking of you.  and of course.  Michael Jackson’s song reminded me of you but i had to go search the office again for that album.  and i found it.  Michael, back then i suppose, was cute.  of course, i wasn’t born yet – 1980 loomed around corners of which not even my parents were yet aware – but they gave me a set of albums they thought were clean enough for a not-yet-saved but soon-to-be-saved teenager and since they were saved, sanctified and filled with the gift of the precious holy ghost, listening to Michael sing about being where anyone was who wasn’t the lord was simply too much for them to bear.  but.  of course. 

they didn’t and couldn’t and – thankfully knew they shouldn’t – simply throw them albums away.  they wanted my brother and i to have some sense of connection to who they were before they knew the lord in the pardon of their sins, so to speak, they wanted us to experience how they were unsaved so we could feel a deeper connection to them.  this, of course, did not happen.  instead, i began to question the impulse that would make them turn off an album like this in the first place.  was Jesus really against this kind of singing, i’d often ponder and i think they knew that that wasn’t the case, that Jesus would likely shake his ass to the beat too.  i mean, who could ever listen to “I Wanna Be Where You Are” in 1972 or 1982 or 1992 or even 2002 and not be moved?  had they ever felt that way?  i’m sure they did, which is why they married in the first place.

but of course i was too young to know all of this when they gave me the albums – a lot of Marvin Gaye and Jackson 5 and Aretha Franklin.  oh me, oh my. [and i’m still a fool for love. oh well.]  but me being me, i just viewed them shrewdly, lightly and politely laughing at the fact that they could never understand my world and that we were separated by miles deep Jesus joy that i just didn’t have…and didn’t want.  but i know now that they simply wanted to connect but couldn’t find religiously appropriate language to make that claim, so they used song.

you’re used to my rambles by now.  anyway. the album cover had Michael looking cuter than i had ever imagined and since by 1995 had began a not-so-subtle phenotypic, epidermal transition that affected his hair texture too, i didn’t even really know who i was looking at until my parents told me that it was the same man who made the song “Scream” with his sister Janet.  i stared at the two images, the one on the album – 1972 Michael with the brightest, straightest smile ever, kind eyes (Baldwin might even say they were world-absorbing or that he saw something in the bottom of his eyes or something like that; Baldwin loved to talk about the eyes and what they could and what could be seen in them); a chocolate corduroy jacket that i’m sure is back in style; a great gray hat – not sure what kind, a tam?  a fedora?  sort of like a gatsby, i think; dark turtleneck; the bushiest afro puff stealing out from that hat; and the smoothest brown skin that i ever did think hershey’s could create, he must’ve been sweet – and 1995 Michael who, well, did not look much like that at all.

that’s not to make a judgment about either year or Michael.  he still made great music that haunts me even today.  so after the blss-blss sound, i put the needle down on the disc, laid back on the couch, feet dangling over the arm, left arm behind my head, right hand on my stomach.  the wind blew a quiet breeze into the house and then was the momentary break.  the scratches of the needle on the disc that i could hear literally in that infinitesimal space between songs – the song that makes me think of you is right after another song (“Ain’t No Sunshine” i think it is) that makes me think of you but that i don’t want to relate to you but is because it is more intensely you than the wishes i had for the song to come – came as some sort of warning but also as a faded memory, broken dream, captured soul.  desire.

long before CD quality music was created through digitizing, it was this scratchiness of surface sounding out through touch.  needle caresses of blackness occasioned the songs that we’d hear back then.  i remember when i got my first album ever on my first kiddy phonograph ever and the songs were age-appropriate.  london bridge is falling down, falling down, falling down / london bridge is falling down, my fair lady the song would play in a “modern” kid version, jazzy, i suppose.  there was a breakdown that i remember but cannot write for you.  it was maybe 10 seconds of the descent of sound, trumpets and keyboards playing, repetitious delight for someone who was maybe six or seven years old (let’s hope six, though; seven would be too old to be so delighted with such vain repetition).  anyway.  after the breakdown – it was christmas day and i was able to stay up much later than normal – because i was standing, tapping my foot throughout the song and the album player was on the floor, i would bang my foot on the wooden floor of the not-so-great first floor apartment of a two-family house.  the record would scratch a bit, skip backward a bit.  i created science.  i knew when to bang the foot, where on the floor and how hard to apply pressure so the song would skip right back to the beginning of the breakdown and not one hair of a second too soon…or too late.  at least, that’s how my memory records it.

intriguing how record and record are spelled the same, written the same but pronounced differently.  there’s a relationship between how we record and how we play a record, stress in the word’s pronunciation is placed differently.  we place the needle on the record of that which was once only the desire to record.  the sound from the record, the sound organized moment by moment to record share – i think – an ontic relationship.  buried within the word record are two concepts and they sound out from one another.  the relationship between record (played) and record(ing) is the movement from one state to another, scratching the black disc, taking it from its potential to kinesthesia.  maybe 1972 to 1995 and beyond.  maybe Michael in 1972 was the set of capacities to emerge as he had in 1995, with all of the force and sonic power, with all that had been written on and in him being played back for us all to hear, to see enacted publicly.

but of course you know that the album Got To Be There was Michael’s debut as a solo artist, the break from the sociality from which he emerged.  that break, i think, haunts each and every sonic break, from song to song, scratch to scratch, 1972 to 1995, from my writing to your reading.  all i’m trying to say is this: i wanna place my finger on you gentle, brush past your neck – blss-blss – place my needle down on you and play you, listen to the sound made when we touch.  of course, Michael said it best: i wanna be where you are.  oh!

be well,

a.-

— —

from: dtim
to: a

Sunday November 15, 2009, 6:17pm

Subject: Re: read this

You know you should marry me, right? hahaha! Who writes things like “all i’m trying to say is this: i wanna place my finger on you gentle, brush past your neck – blss-blss – place my needle down on you and play you, listen to the sound made when we touch”?

You know dude and I are on the outs again…he can’t get his shit together again…such a mess…again! I told you last time that I was done and the next time, I wouldn’t even take him seriously. I think I’m done forreal this time…he doesn’t take me seriously. Told me he didn’t want things to “be too deep” for him and that I was “moving to fast” … bullshit. Lawd.

But what are YOU gonna do?

— —  

from: a
to: dtim

Sunday November 15, 2009, 6:40pm

Subject: Re: read this

what imma do? no fuckin clue …

but YOU need to leave dude alone … i keep sayin it … but here i am, writing letters to silence or some shit. i ain’t a good gauge for what’s normal …

anyway, imma try to visit sooner than later … i’ll ttys 

[half-asleep notes & notes from a bar]

i write things when i’m half-asleep … they sound really profound in my head and like ish when i “write them” but whatevs … this also goes for the notes i write while sipping at the bar 

problems with the non-normative

the general “problem” with the non-normative is that it continually sets into motion a series of questions about the very concept of the normative itself: like, who, and for what purpose, goes the normative? the non-normative lays bare the fact that it is that which operates by way of resistance to regulation, forcing a consideration of the purpose and effectiveness of regulative behavior and apparatuses :: if the non-normative is that which is previous to any normativity, if the non-normative is the literal stuff, the literal materiality of that which, by way of repression and regulation [a politic of curtailment], one wonders what is the regulative attempting to do and also, given the insistence of the non-normative and given the utter failure of the regulative, why do we keep desiring this restrictive behavior anyway?

aversions

aversion of plurality shows up as writing of the literal rather than the figurative (pace Andrew Benjamin), and as the form agains forms (social poesis). but the text itself is produced socially, meanings of words are internally differentiated. as such, any aversion or glance is the worry over the infinite possibilities, the overwhelment [neologism!], that are ontological in that they do not come before in terms of sequence but that plurality has priority.

the score is the text of Western musicology that attempts to still motion, movement, of song, of social, in order to reproduce it. this reproduction, though, assumes that there are in-essentials to the production itself. think Radano’s “word.” maybe the score is the aversion of that which is prior, that which is plural, in reproduction, as reproduction. failure is necessary for discovery.

the thing itself extends as plurality and, thus, avoids the sheet. so to engage Gilroy’s Black Atlantic, by way of the Fisk Jubilee Singers, is to attend to rethink

• class struggle within black community
• movement on water by way of travel to the Queen with relation to sheet music’s movement on paper as literacy (what we might call “lettered accumulation”)
• movement beneath the water’s surface; the singing of other, unacceptable, non-normative, embarrassing, hurtful versions of the same song [and how, for example, the “Go Down, Moses” sung before the Queen was an aversion of versions]; the “changing same” elucidates how the notion of sameness is a socially produced

following Massumi, music exists within the field of its emergence

sorta but not connected: lyrics and averiorsion

what do lyrics do on a score, particularly given the notion that “words don’t go there”? how do lyrics on/or a score — something from which the Fisk Jubilee Singers would sing; something to which jazz musicologists would desire to relegate Coltrane’s flights— attempt to produce a literal “logic” and “grammar” that is reproducible? and what does this logic and grammar have to do with the emergence of a black normative subjectivity?

within black studies, jazz comes to us as dematerialized substance, sounds, no signs; or, more precisely, the shedding of and escape from a social field. it assumes that becoming subject is the submitting to grammar, rational logic, the sentence. This has everything to do with gender, sexual identity and maturity. some are allowed to “play” with style, with performance but only after having been subjected to the scene that requires regulation and restriction, which is to say violence and violation: what emerges after such violence and violation is the condition of the singular, individual “genius” that is nothing other than the play/fullness that was previous to the necessary submitting to grammars.

newton’s third law of motion & blackness

The mutual forces of action and reaction between two bodies are equal, opposite and collinear. This means that whenever a first body exerts a force F on a second body, the second body exerts a force −F on the first body. F and −F are equal in magnitude and opposite in direction. This law is sometimes referred to as the action-reaction law, with F called the “action” and −F the “reaction”. The action and the reaction are simultaneous.

or, simply, for each action, there is an opposite and simultaneous reaction. but action cannot determine reaction, it can only presuppose it. but this presupposition is always and immediately prone to breakdown [Scenario, of course, is important because trains do go off tracks even though they are not presupposed to do so; and my computer always freezes]. thus we might extend and augment Newton by stating that each action has within it the capacity for reaction, that reaction exists within the object itself in its multiplicity and possibility. 

we know that Marx discovered a similar idea by way of an economic system, a monetary sociality wherein at the moment the bourgeois class is called into being, its antagonistic of the worker class as the worker class is likewise there. the reactive force is there in that very hailing, the possibility for failure of the system is germinal. 

so we can think about blackness as a force, as the capacity to react that is at once plural and necessary in a world of constant regulation and curtailment. Kant would so say that one would need imaginative leaps in order to produce philosophy but immediately desires to “clip” the wings of the imagination because of the unplanned, impossible to plan, flights that it might take. 

melisma and the paraontological

yeah. Jimmy and James. one day.

On your Lefebvre question

i know that the general argument is that space is produced socially by way of the relations created; but does this also mean for him that space cannot ever be art(istic) because it is created by collective will, collective thought? does art, then for Lefebvre, need to be an act of individual will, individual thought?

Isn’t the point that you can say something about art like this: that we only recognize something as art once it distinguishes itself as art, in other word ceases to be indistinguishable from other things in relation to it? I’m thinking of how Lefebvre’s totality of Space works: Social Space, Mental Space, Physical Space. His Hegelian triad.

I think it’s important not to get objects and spaces confused.

I’ve been re-reading Production of Space recently. Saw your post. It’s not the easiest work to talk about. Hope I’m not being intrusive.

— — — (whatijustread’s reply) — — —

not intrusive at all! thanks for the questions/concerns.

when Lefebvre writes about Venice, he says that it cannot be a “work of art” because it “was not planned” as such; for him, it appears that art is that which was created with the intention of being art, something created as [or, what you might say is with] an irreducible distinction from other things in relation to it such that it might be called art. what i get from him is that art is that which stands forth in its prompting as that which is distinguishable from other things. of course, one would have to ask: who determines, then, what is art from its prompting? what determines the process by which art is made. when he says that it is “planned in advance” to be that which is art, it assumes, i think, that the concept “art” has one, irreducible meaning. 

he goes on to say that it is the labour of the collective that make it not art, Venice is “a place that has been laboured on” by a social and not an individual, and this labouring on Venice is by way of the advanced plan to be something otherwise than art, by the advanced plan to be a city. the collective will combined with the advanced planning make it something that is not art.

and, i’d also ask: how do we distinguish between a space and an object?