Betraying Gestures #25

a whole lot of blip blop

Dearest readers,

It is wednesday night at the studio. It is thursday morning at the studio. I am in-between, melting a blur, staining. I am at Vinícius’ (V.) studio typing this edition of Betraying Gestures the way I imagine he would: listening to music. I’m missing the wine, Vini, no; wait, you have two boxes of wine here, let me get some, actually I already had it before typing this out. Now I have wine. Now I am ready to write. Right? I am typing in a .docx, even though I think you use .pages, even though I should use my notes app on the phone, with its yolk-yellow background. It’s a kind of guideline I created, a limit to fuck around with, writing the newsletter on my phone. Rules are made to be broken and all that. What if we call it agreement rather than rule, suggestion rather than agreement, conversation rather than suggestion?

I’d usually be upset at being awake and far from home past midnight, but greater forces produced this situation and I embrace them wholeheartedly. They include a deadline, an itch, ambition, stubbornness, and the muscle memory of staying up late to write out yet one more application. The deadline has that name because it kills you, you know. It is a killing machine. But who among us doesn’t have their share of self to kill? (sincerely, I am upset, but my fascination with this situation seems to trump its general capacity for harm). Here in heaven I am listening to Josh Johnson, which sounds like a made-up name (just like Danish artist Jakob Jakobsen), but according to his Spotify description is an award-winning-saxophonist-multiartist-man. Oh, wait. I guess Vinícius would actually paste that description here. He would look it up with the intention of pasting it here. I looked it up in the interest of remembering what I am listening to, archiving it somewhere in the body. Give me a second: “Josh Johnson is a saxophonist, composer, multi-instrumentalist, and Grammy Award-winning producer.” There’s more, it goes on and on. When I first visited V.’s studio, he was working on a work (working on a working work, not quite yet an artwork, I wouldn’t say so) which included (not about, not on) the mini-bio of Will Holder, I think it was. Betraying Gestures’ godfather. The tautologically named musician has a bio that goes on and on, I start writing and feel as if I could go on and on until everything has been spilled (spelled?) and I am a dry husk.

A killing machine. Pharmakon, right?

J. recommended J.J.. I like it. I immediately question whether I like it because he recommended it, and think that what I enjoy about blurring boundaries is that I get to have a taste of V.’s beloved studio time after dusk. If I was writing this without a taste for my friends’ tastes, I would type: do I like this because J. likes it? See the change in inflection? But V.’s ghost demands that I write reflexively, that I refuse the end of the text to come into focus. Something about escape and death, from death, from biological processes. Exhaustion, instead.  

There’s a quality to this late / delayed / liminal / gap time of getting lost, that I typically resist. Of writing in circles, even though I meant to type walking: walking in circles, a circle made by writing, thank you Richard Long, spider webs and nesting; they’re the cliches at my fingertips, would a bird get lost in its own nest? I would; and I wonder and I could, but I most certainly shouldn’t: assertive movement demands heartfelt responsibility (or blind belief).

I have things I want to write about, arrows to drive me out of here, vectors that will take me back home to sleep and wake up tomorrow (and most likely die another time at the hands of so-called open calls). When I wrote Betraying Gestures #22, V. called me out, “called me in” (thanks J.)  for “having things to say”, while, from my understanding, he follows a writing pleasure as its own agenda. Well, yeah. There’s always things to say. Wish it was not the case, but assertiveness is an important ingredient of the fire I’ve been tending for, with the unfortunate consequence of having both V. and J. call me opinionated.

Ok, this is phasing into therapy. I don’t like it. I’m annoyed at all the Is and annoyed they might stop a you from being, a me from being a you too, that they would prevent the us and the we. I typed heaven before, which is a keyword for Eric Clapton, and an excuse to type this: limbo. Add it to my pile of time-space gap synonyms; it connects my recurrent delays of Betraying Gestures (briefly escaping the deadline’s scythe) to something I actually care about, first: making Vinícius proud; second: valuing these unexpected time pockets as opportunities for richer relationmaking.

From my notebook:

Enrolando antes da sessão […] Enrolar é bom. […]

Coiling before the session […] To coil is good. […]

Falamos que estamos enrolando quando estamos em pausa, ou distraídos com aparentes desimportâncias. Antes de algum evento de maior relevância. Enrolar, muitas vezes, é evitar esse evento, e falamos pejorativamente.

[In Brazil] We say we are coiling when we are paused, or distracted with apparent insignificances. Before some event of actual relevance. To coil, often, is to avoid this event, and we speak pejoratively.

Mas enrolar é criar condições para o que se segue, é estar consigo mesmo, degustar das promessas e perigos que te esperam a uma distância ainda confortável. O corpo brinca com o futuro, se solta para acolhê-lo, se acolhe para acolhê-lo. Se prepara. Não se arma, mas se prepara, aquece: se envolve e implica com as condições para criar impulso de presença para o tal evento.

But coiling is to create conditions for what follows, it is being with oneself, to savor the promises and perils that await you from a still comfortable distance. The body plays with the future, lets loose to embrace it, embraces itself to embrace it. It gets ready. It doesn’t get armed, but it gets ready, warms-up: engages and implicates itself with the conditions to create presence for that event.

Enrolar é uma espiral que traz para junto.

To coil is a spiral that brings together.

Processo de envolvimento.

A process of engagement.

I wrote this piece of thinking while waiting for J. before one of our work sessions at the Nordhavn studio. Now, sitting at Vinícius’ table, I thought a piece of writing about another type of time-space bubble:

Staying up past the point you should’ve collected your energy changes the texture of time, the texture of experience. After hours worldly activities are suspended, and we can release into a nameless space, closer to fiction and reality alike, blurring. Experiment a self usually unavailable. This can be both delicious and have terrifying consequences: creating art at the cost of sleep’s supple health.

Ok, that paragraph isn’t the sharpest writing. There’s good art that springs from the late hours; and of course several uninteresting musings and attempts. This has taken a turn for the melancholic. I’m sorry Vini, but I think your methods aren’t quite working right for me. We can also blame the red wine.

On that note, did you ever take pictures to match one of your newsletters on purpose? Or did you always choose something that was already in your camera roll? I took a picture of the studio (Gary was here! Ash is a loser!), but I will use another one. Maybe the one I took will show up at a later edition. For now,

Thank you for raednig!