Art projects and performances will migrate here, while general nonsense will migrate to cetaitlucien.xafec.com.

Is Category Dead? Watch the video! Listen to the track!

It's finally here! Category's Wake — the music video, released with great appropriateness today, Bloomsday 2011. (Top o' the Holocene to my man James Joyce.)

> See it here.

Ultra special thanks to Anna Daedalus, Pete Remine, Davee C, David Sampliner & Rachel Shuman, Andrew Wade Smith, Samuel Miller, and all my other magnificent friends who helped make this project possible.

Waiting for Stretchers is/was (L to R): Anna Daedalus, David Abel, Leo Daedalus, Mark Owens and John Berendzen.

Program:

0. David Abel: introduction
1. John Berendzen: How Boats Float (part 1) by Connor Kalista
   • with Leo D.: incidental effects
2. Leo Daedalus: Replay (part 1)
   • with Elizabeth Luce, transcriptionist
   • and audience participation
3. Mark Owens: dream/lie down piece
   • with audience participation
4. David Abel: Chutes and Ladders 1
   • with Leo D. & Mark O.
5. John Berendzen: How Boats Float (part 2) by Connor Kalista
   • with Leo D.: incidental effects
6. Anna Daedalus: DA
   • with David A., Leo D. & Mark O., readers
   • and audience singing
7. David Abel: Chutes and Ladders 2
   • with Leo D. & Mark O.
8. Mark Owens: directed vocal sounds piece
   • with audience participation
9. Leo Daedalus: Replay (part 2)
   • with David A. & Mark O. reading transcript of part 1
10. John Berendzen: How Boats Float (part 3) by Connor Kalista
    • with Leo D.: incidental effects

> See also: Replay

Mark Owens, Leo Daedalus and David Abel perform Replay (part 2)

Score

Replay (2010) is a performance piece in two parts for one or more performers and a transcriptionist.

In Replay (part 1) a transcriptionist transcribes everything said during the course of part 1 by the performer(s), audience and indeed any voice within hearing range. At least one performer is to perform an action which is in some way reversible. The end of part 1 is signalled when a performer picks a random playing card from a deck, holds the card up for the audience to see, and announces, "Let the record show that [name of performer] is holding up the [name of card]."

Replay (part 2) can commence whenever the transcript has been printed out or otherwise made available to the performer(s) who will read it. While they do so, the performer(s) who performed any "reversible actions" in part 1 are to perform such actions in reverse. At the end, when the playing card announcement is read, the original card picker is to again pick a random, and most likely different, card from the deck and hold it up for the audience to see. Fin.

Performance

Replay premiered as part of Waiting for Stretchers, Nov. 28, 2010 in Portland, Oregon. Transcriptionist Elizabeth Luce was planted in the audience with a laptop to transcribe everything said during part 1. This was known only to four people: me, Elizabeth, Anna Daedalus, and Mo, the owner of the Open Space cafe where we performed.

In the course of part 1 I prompted the audience for words, phrases and sentences, bearing in mind that in part 2 the transcript would be read by David Abel and Mark Owens (though I couldn't know who would read which words). For my reversible action I removed my necktie. At the end I picked the seven of clubs.

While the rest of the Waiting for Stretchers performance proceeded, Elizabeth cleaned up the transcript and slipped into a back room to print out two copies. After various technical difficulties, she emerged with the printouts at exactly the moment that I was getting up to commence part 2.

In part 2 I instructed David and Mark to read alternating lines of the transcript. I stood between them, putting my necktie back on. At the end I held up a face card. I don't remember which, and the photos are unclear. How suitably mysterious.

> See also: Waiting for Stretchers post

Leo Daedalus performing Trouverrou (part 1) (photo: Matthew Miller)

Trouverrou (2010) is a performance piece in four parts following a thread of lost and found themes beginning with the Trouvère and Minnesinger poetry of Chrétien de Troyes' (c. 1135 – c. 1185) Perceval ou le Conte du Graal and Wolfram von Eschenbach's (c. 1170 – c. 1220) Parzival. The thread winds through Wagner's Parsifal to Anselm Kiefer's "Parsifal" cycle paintings and to the Baader-Meinhof-Gruppe referred to in those paintings.

The score comprises 32 short texts, of which 29 consist of notes about these figures, excerpts from their works and quotations — in English, French, Old French, German and Middle High German. The remaining texts are an old Zen story about the sweet impermanence of a teacup, divided into three parts.

Before a performance the texts are randomly divided into four sets of eight, with the specification that the first section of the Zen story is to be in the second set, the second section in the third set, and the third section in the fourth set.

The performer is also to be armed with a set of four specially prepared magician's paddles. (This is a standard trick whereby a small paddle-shaped prop typically painted with a couple of colored dots is flipped back and forth, ultimately revealing a previously unseen dot pattern that seems to have appeared by, well, magic.) The Trouverou paddles must be large enough to be read by the entire audience.

In each part of the performance, the performer randomly pulls from a hat the eight allotted texts and reads them aloud. When finished, the performer produces the appropriate paddle and flips it several times showing only the first word until the last flip reveals the "hidden" word. The four paddles are:

1. first word: LOST (in red), hidden word: LOST (in red)
2. first word: LOST (in red), hidden word: FOUND (in green)
3. first word: LOSE (in red), hidden word: FIND (in green)
4. first word: FIND (in green), hidden word: FIN (in red)

2010 Performance

photos by Matthew Miller

I performed Trouverrou as part of Rearrangutan – Found/Sorted, a collective performance curated by Mark Owens at PNCA in Portland on October 13, 2010. I used a black Stetson cowboy hat, to great effect.

Discussing the performance afterwards, I was surprised and amused to find that some people were disturbed to learn that I had "rigged" the text selections to ensure that the three parts of the Zen story would appear in order, in the last three parts of the piece. They apparently felt that chance and deliberateness should not mix, were that somehow possible! Curious.

> See also: Rearrangutan

Rearrangutan seen from outside (photo: Matthew Miller)

From the program notes:

In connection with Nina Katchadourian’s exhibition Sorted Books, the Feldman Gallery hosts Rearrangutan, an evening of cut-up, found and multi-media poems. As curator Mack McFarland notes of Katchadourian’s project, “The pithy results of Katchadourian’s sortings, (such as What is Art?/Close Observation), and their origins from a quotidian database, bring to mind delicately deliberate and condensed versions of cut-up poetry, which originated with the Romanian poet and provocateur Tristan Tzara.”

The evening’s theatrics will be organized by poet and man about town Mark Owens, and will include offerings from Lisa Radon, James Yeary, Tony Christy, Linda Austin, Weird Fiction, Leo and Anna Daedalus, Arnold Kemp and Mark Owens.

Anna performed Illustrious Initiation, a postcard piece with a secret fluxus Santa vibe. I did Trouverrou, drawing on Trouvère and Minnesinger poetry and a bit of magic schtickery. Many of our friends did great things/readings/actions. No one got hurt.

Matthew Miller (PNCA '11) shot these photos (see more on PNCA's Flickr album):

Mack McFarland and his Weird Fiction shot a bunch of diptych polaroids with Mack's vintage passport photo camera:

Program:

0. Linda Austin – from “A Head of Time”
   • performed by Danielle Ross in background during entire event
1. Leo Daedalus – Trouverrou (part 1)
2. James Yeary - Karaoke Superego 1
3. Arnold Kemp - IN ARMS
4. Leo Daedalus – Trouverrou (part 2)
5. Tony Christy - untitled
   • (unrealized in absentia)
6. Weird Fiction – untitled
7. Anna Daedalus - Illustrious Initiation
   • interactive postcard piece in which audience members wrote postcards which Anna then mailed to other audience members selected by chance
8. Leo Daedalus – Trouverrou (part 3)
9. Lisa Radon - LANGUAGE to be LOOKED at and/or THINGS to be READ
10. James Yeary - Karaoke Superego 2
11. Leo Daedalus – Trouverrou (part 4)
12. Mark Owens – Talk Organism

> See also: Trouverrou

Blum Blum Shub Sound Poetry Coincidence
being David Abel, Leo Daedalus & Mark Owens
perform a sound poetry interpretation of
"The Metaphysics of Notation" graphic score by Mark Applebaum
February 12, 2010 at Portland Center Stage

In February, 2010 the Armory Café at Portland Center Stage teamed up with Third Angle new music ensemble to present four different interpretations of Mark Applebaum’s beautiful graphic score “The Metaphysics of Notation” — one every Friday of the month at noon.

On Friday the 12th it was our turn: David Abel, Mark Owens and I in our never-the-same-name-twice guerrilla dadafluxus sound poetry mobile unit. Appearing this time as the Blum Blum Shub Sound Poetry Coincidence, we performed "The Metaphysics of Notation" as a sound poetry piece.

video excerpt by Ron Blessinger of Third Angle Ensemble

The score was mounted in 11 panels along the oval balcony inside the Portland Center Stage lobby and a 12th panel on a second-story wall. Using binoculars to read the score, we started on the ground floor under panel 1, worked clockwise, moving independently until we came together for a finale at the 12th panel. The whole performance lasted about 30 minutes.

Methodology

Asked by event organizers Ron Blessinger and Tim DuRoche for some words about my approach to the piece, I offered the following elucidation:

"The Metaphysics of Notation" score comprises three sets of graphic expression:
1) structural marks,
2) marks that are proxies for other marks,
3) indecisive marks.

Applying to those sets the methodologies advanced in E. S. Segrob's Handbook of Unforeseen Categories (El manual de las categorías imprevistas, Naguara, 1936) I will construct a vocal body of filler concepts (see Wirklichstein, Der Füllselbegriff) in blind concordance with the blackbox predicates (Bazzutti, Gli sguardi incombenti; Jäänenä, Miksi kuka?) of my colleagues, Messrs. Abel, Owens, and Nenhum (in absentia).

The above stands ex post. Obviously.

Antiphonal Applebaum

Posting his video on the Third Angle blog and Instant Encore, Rob Blessinger had this to say about the Blum Blum Shub performance:

Antiphonal Applebaum*

Thank you to the Blum Blum Shub trio (Leo Daedalus, David Abel, mARK oWEns), for a very entertaining interpretation of Mark's piece on Friday. Metaphysics of Notation is a fascinating invitation to the performers, in this case giving literal 'voice' to the piece via improvisational poetry.

I loved how their take on it was sometimes literal (the glyphs as actual notation), or honestly confused ("I don't know what THAT is"), or even like a Rorschach test, bypassing their front brains to evoke whatever is lurking underneath.

*Thanks to Brett Campbell, uttered while under the influence of decongestants

"The Metaphysics of Notation" event series

• Feb. 5: Catlin Gabel's 8th Grade Drama Students
• Feb. 12: Blum Blum Shub Sound Poetry Coincidence
• Feb. 19: Quadraphonnes Saxophone Quartet
• Feb. 26: Linda Austin & JP

BBSSPC wishes to thank event organizers Ron Blessinger and Tim DuRoche, and all the folks who gamely attended!

Low Mass in its complete form is 3 hours 56 minutes long. It is intended to be played very loud in a cathedral or other large space into and out of which people may come and go as they please.

David Abel: writing, performance
Leo Daedalus: video editing, writing, performance
Andrei Tarkovsky: source film — Solaris (1972)
Venedikt Erofeev: source text — Moscow-Petushki (1970)
Konrad Steiner: event organization, performance video production

part of The New Talkies: Portland–San Francisco Neo-Benshi Cabaret
organized by Konrad Steiner of kino21 (SF), Rodney Koeneke, and Spare Room (PDX)
Sunday, May 3, 2008
Portland, Oregon

The New Talkies came to Portland today, with four pieces by San Franciscans and four by Portlanders.

In the program notes (for which I had the honor of doing the above graphic), Konrad writes:

Benshi is a Japanese term meaning roughly "film teller." In Japan, this profession thrived during the silent movie era. . . . with these artists who were both actors and writers writing original scripts. . . . Their job was to learn the films, crank out the texts, and perform them as dramatic accompaniment to the flicks.

[In 2003 Steiner was inspired] to approach several San Francisco filmmakers and writers to try out a slightly altered version of this practice, using modern film clips with the sound muted; this first so-called neo-benshi show took place on November 29, 2003, at Craig Baldwin’s "Other Cinema" in San Francisco.

David and I chose to remix Tarkovsky's Solaris. (Is there another one? I don't think so.) After discovering that a scene we had both independently remembered from the film never existed (!) we chose the black-and-white film-within-a-film interrogation of Berton (itself containing a film-within-a-film-within-a-film), for its discrete completeness. I edited out all the present-tense cutaways, did a small amount of judicious remixage, and made a new soundtrack appropriated from different parts of Solaris and other sources.

David assembled his dialogue — for the principal character Berton — from Venedikt Erofeev's tragi-poeti-comic samizdat novel Moskva-Petushki (often translated as Moscow to the End of the Line). I wrote my dialogue, for all the other characters, in response to David's text and to fit the video.

Rodney Koerneke suggested we should get an award for having found humor in Tarkovsky. That's fantastic. Who would oversee the ceremony? All the same there is humor in Tarkovsky, but it's of a kind so black, so submerged, so tormented that, well, it makes Aki Kaurismäki look like Jerry Lewis. I think there's something about the Russian sense of humor that's not entirely unlike the Finnish one. One doesn't know whether to cry or, well, just pour another vodka.

Rodney has posted a great review of our piece. There's also a listing of the evening's lineup, as well as reviews of all the other pieces, worth seeking out in his May, 2008 archives.

Special thanks to Konrad for making the great performance video above.

Closing the program notes, Konrad writes:

One concern is that the movies have become a little too jaded by this commodification and distribution model. One goal is to get the Theater back into the Cinema. That is, to experience the movies in a context that we interact with individually, in the case of the authors, and collectively, in the case of the audience, instead of merely watching rented DVDs on computers and blogging about them in solitude. The aim of this sort of live narration is to bring people together for a collective experience of film that is both critical and generative, entertaining and performative.