instead – i’ve been painting lately. another practice perhaps best left to experts but i find that pushing paint around is like my recent walking of the city – slow going, meditative, rhythmic and physical. sometimes i make an errant mark and my finger plunges towards an imaginary undo apple-z. it’s been years since the smell of oils and turps has seeped into the air of my ‘studio’ space. it’s not just an office anymore, and pleases me. this has always been fundamental to both my attraction and repulsion towards the digital experience – discorporealizing.mourning, facing death – wading the abyss – first expells ‘me’ from ‘my body’ and i take refuge in the placelessness of information, codes and pixellated texts. (we continue leaving comments on his myspace page long after he last logged in) …later, ‘i’ need to convince ‘myself’ that i still hold a space in the material of the moving world. like all good projects, this one leaves me (and has always been departing from my space to no-place) with more questions than i’d began with. how to bridge the digital – material ‘divide’? how to embody information? hyperlink in actual space? who’s gonna be on my A-team? who do you play in the ‘real’ world? what happens next? and what’s the first step? 

My mom comes and brings a vhs recorded with Kelsey’s memorial service. Why do we call it hers? Ours, about Kels (’over my dead body’). None of us have ever watched it. I take it to school, turn off the monitor and dub it to DVD. Then watch it one night in my basement studio, lights off, lying on the futon, blanket on.

i didn’t know – and couldn’t be bothered to learn – how to rip right from the DVD. so i filmed it again on my (cracked) computer screen, mini dv camera balanced on a beer bottle and a stack of books – as am, often, i. an aesthetic was born: lo-fi, rascuache and hand-made-for-youtube style.

Editing. The more I clip and playback the further the distance between the white-faced 23 year old with the hollow eyes and skeletal shadows and the me that’s like, ‘hey Chris can you do me a favor? Film me dancing around and singing to billy idol? It’s kinda weird but it’s to edit over the film from the funeral… you know, ‘hey little sister, what have you done?’

i’m into all the the youtube tropes – the music videos, the narcissistic (self-conscious) metubes, the i.movie edits, the bedroom girls – and i can claim my interest’s academic (it is – somewhat – so i do) but the youtube context (which is a separate theatre from the one i set to screen these works in) also works to disable any academic reading (comments & responses).

one of the most intriguing aspects of contexts such as youtube – such as livejournal, myspace, blogspot and so on – is the publicizing of ‘the private.’

death is a private affair. aren’t most affairs private? don’t they often start and end in public, though? i upload the evidence of my romance with death to explore the connections between ‘our’ fascination with voyeurism (personal, pornographic, violent or vitriolic), ‘our’ exhibitionist, group-therapy think-out, ‘our’ cathartic acts of record and replay.

to revisit death by video, to edit loss, reflects my process of memory and memorial, and speaks to and about the process itself. it repeats and it distances. reminds and cuts out. i work with little intention (just make something, anything, from this) – rely on chance encounters with timing, tuning, imagery. there are moments when two tracks (or more) align just-so, seemingly at random, and sense is made, momentarily. that sense-making, meaning-making moment, motivates the next motion taken.how to describe a process? to play it, and/or play it out.

To refer to death as a creative process does not imply that it is attractive or even ‘artistic.’ We humans have an instinctual aversion to the sweet, sickly effusions that decomposition produces. Yet this stage is necessary before the cleansed, aesthetically comfortable ‘bare bones’ state can be attained…

Mary Bradbury writes that the split between what is real and what is theatre is patricularly hazy in the social organization of death, as certain aspects of this organization are highly ritualistic in character: the funeral, the burial, even the embalming of the body are all performative traditions…

Academic attachment became elusive – instead, we reverberated, echoing the emotions of loss and reclamation that we purported to investigate impassively, and performing exuberant grieving as playfulness infiltrated the pathos and sadness that had marked our individual mourning practices…

All we may expect of time is its reversbility. Speed and acceleration are merely the dream of making time reversible. You hope that by speeding up time, it will start to whirl like a fluid…The imagination is scarcely any better equipped to appreciate reversibility than the person who has never slept would be to appreciate dreaming. And yet we experience in it that electrocution of time we call predestination. The signs exchanged in the process are instant conductors unaffected by the resistance of time. Certain linguistic fragments run back along the path of language and collide with others in the witticism, dazzling reversibility of the terms of language. In this they fulfil an unexpected destiny, their specific destiny as words, conforming to the predestination of language.– Jean Baudrillard, Cool Memories

You can, with your little hands, drag me into your grave -you have the right — I myself who am joined with you, I let myself go — but if you wish, the two of us, let us make… an alliance -a hymen, magnifcent – and the life left in me I will use to…- so not mother then?ceremony – coffin – etc.there we saw (the father) the whole material side – which lets us tell ourselves at need – ah! well yes! it is all there – no fear for me thinking of something else (the reformation of his spirit, which is eternal – can wait (granted but eternity through my life)_____father -shape his spirit (he absent, alas! as we would have shaped him better present but sometimes when it all seems to be going too well – as an ideal – cry out – in the mother’s tone, she who has become attentive – This is not enoughI want him, him – and not me – 

my dad first introduced me to eric whitacre on the westernmost tip of portugal, in april of 2004, more or less 5 weeks before the cabrillo college chorus sang ‘i thank you god for most this amazing day’ at my sister’s funeral.

hold onto that moment then – before but foreboding. i sat on the edge of the cliff in the sun and the wind and listened. for days before i’d been stricken with most horrible plummeting feelings of wrong/wrong/all wrong, stuck/angry/lashing out at him (on holiday) until i got the email (in the whitewashed shop) that kelsey was in the hospital and as i rushed heavily through the town to find him to tell him, i fit again (though cobblestoned) – it wasn’t me i felt but her. i felt better knowing why i’d felt so bad. and dad -he tried to get a flight back to london that day, or the next, but couldn’t. so we drove to sagres instead. to the cliffs. each town in and out, fumbling with quarters for phone booths – how much has mobile technology changed since even then – the time difference, time lapse. somehow we came to a little cove. it was still the off-season. we were out of time, but i felt at home there. the algarve is roughly the same latitude as santa cruz, and there was something about the air there – and the ocean, though atlantic, pacific. so i was pacified, momentarily. suspended on the brink of the big sink (or swim).

and you his sister, you who one day – (this gulf open since his death and which will follow us to ours – when we have gone down your mother and I) must one day reunite all three of us in your thought, your memory_____- just as in a single tombyou who, in due time, will come upon this tomb, not made for you -PrSun down and windgold gone, and wind of nothingness blowing (this, the modern void)? 

It is true – you have struck me and you have chosen your wound well –
– etc. – but
–
today i rode mom’s bike down to seabright beach after swimming with Paitra, after the chaos and fire of the 4th, last night – to meet David, lying in the sand – “looks like the fog’s coming in, though, you still gonna be down there?
/yeah, I’ll be with my Harry Potter til my nipples freeze
/alright then see you then” – I brought the Tombeau, but found I couldn’t read it then.
to everything turn turn turn…
Space/time.
his two eyes are watching me, they are enough – already taken by absence and the gulf –
bring everything to this?
David read to me from HP and the Half Blood Prince instead. I watched the currents of wind and fog rush in and over us from the south, til the sun diluted into mist and we crept up the beach to bikes and the Seabright Brewery.
This time: today, after, after, last, coming in, still, til, then, then, then, time, already, current, over, til, past tenses.

(first. this is not a poem, and Mallarmé did not call it anything in particular (though it calls/calls out)… Rather: “notes towards a poem.” and these: away from (the poem). Not a work in progress: progressing where? But processioning, processing. Professing. “Less something finished than something unbegun” (writes the translator). Scraps of almosts– returning again (and never) to the crux of it– oh impossible empty. Time, and Again.)

there is a time in Existence in which we will find each other again, if not a place –

– and if you doubt that the world will be the witness, supposing I live to be old enough —

une époque

où nous nous retrouverons

désolé, je ne parle pas le français. but i am drawn to equivalencies, so-called.

your future which has taken refuge in me. how can I (can I) begin to move my hands around, gesticulate the way this resonates within me. Your future :nowhere/nothing/not. Thus: your future (for ‘you,’ futureless subject, are neither either…)

Thus far: first, progress, procession, processing, -ing, finished, unbegun, almost, returning, time, again, time, again, old, future, begin, futureless.