FRED MOTEN:
When I think about the way we use the term Study; I think we are committed to the idea
that study is what you do with other people. It's talking and walking around with other
people, working, dancing, suffering, some ir- reducible convergence of all three,
held under the name of speculative practice. The notion of a rehearsal--being
in a kind of workshop. playing in a band, in a jam session, or old men sitting on a porch,
or people working together in a factory..
from revision, impromptu
with David Rothenberg, Nicola Hein, George Lewis, Dafna Naphtali, Andrew Drury, Tanya Kalmanovich, Hans Tammen, Sarah Weaver, David Grubbs, and Ally-Jane Grossan
We gig everywhere and it just makes me wanna giggle, or holler at you from way over here, party over there, if you can wait, we being behind the beat a little bit but right at the beguining, gynomonastically basic and maternal earth tones all out from the tone world, deep in the bass loom, twilight weaving morning in La Jolla/moonlight in Vermont someplace, some folks parking, some just getting dressed, everybody waiting with everybody for right now in right there, party over here. Well moled, old Grubbs! We all here in the ruins but we got something in our hands—an experimental bandcamp for news and flowers. And I appreciate y’all letting me sit in, being so far from virtuosity. I wanna be communicable from way back. I wanna be in your base community, grace abounding to the chief of sinners. Remember that song by the Spinners called “Sadie”? The one on Spinners Live! where he reverted—that contrapulsive, not just knee-deep conversioning he got caught up in? Soul Wynne was sewing that night. It was like he had a drum in his chest, just to let you know that nothing lasts forever. The improvisation of forgetting is redactive flow everyday with all these voices in our head. These are always revising herself. One said they told us to be Germanic so, with great surprise, we took a picture of your tech with yourself, our constraint, and it was undecidable between us but plantational, since we the police of different voices, to be your instrument in this sovereign fade. Go back and look at it again when we fade a little bit, when invention won’t let us come up on it from behind. I don’t know my own stuff well enough to mix it right now, but we been remixing it all along past the everyday fade. Mama’nem are the different voices in your head. Are you gon’ play me now? I wan be played with you. I wanna be down with you. My code voice is Stanley Clarke,
I SAW ALL THE STRANGENESS IMMEDIATELY,
I saw it in this very particular slide of swell’s,
the sylphspun silk of the sylph, she sideways,
her garage is paradise in masque, her sweep
is saturn, szturn im sturm & string, install’d
in the area’s traverse. he follows that lucky
old sun, the gesture of her lining and loose
knot, and pulls herself through burns and a
dry wash and some soft lead. in discorporate
minerals, or in the sharing of the black sleek
sharing with the wild man in her soft shoes,
all over the panes of the various sworld and
out into the superhighway of bywater, hard
by marigny. to flow through one to another
indetermination, the posture of their brush
must be immaculate fray, all them, all they.
The So Gone
ACID
Blackie was met at the subway
advertising
wished for pumice sunny flags
WE GO DOWN WE GO DOWN
“Giant Grouper” said, in cold spray net tank
GREENS deep at me
fade corridors
tapped the wrong uncle & spoke intimately
in foetal lift of potty stalagmites, resting
hair pillows edges of dead batteries
the leak
Growth Mustard
earth vanity error: drainage , settle
cigarette balls on umber pools
the corners left to never return. . .
“call soon, I was underground”
from Delicatessen
after Hurricane Sandy & 3 nights of no power)
In the delicatessen a last avocado.
Black, pulpy—a kind of soft grenade.
I set it down
for probably nobody.
I step out—not through doors
but through clear plastic tatters
shimmering in a doorframe.
Hothouse roses on the shelves outside;
hyacinths in foiled cups.
*****
Calling storms by dumb names—
not the shabbiest way of neutering disaster,
I think.
Like the pit bull called Cuddles,
the Lovers’ Lane near the sewage treatment plant—
Even All Saints’ Day,
when you think about it.
Today, when I say, I have it good,
meaning, better than others,
& the children screaming Help
then Made you look, meaning
We tricked you—
*****
But what about the sidewalk Cyclops,
the all-seeing tattoo on the bald guy’s head,
who once, I swear, called me by my right name,
who saw me frowning in sunlight—
That & this so bad, Tyrell, you ain’t
seen the darkest yet...
The subway’s closed tonight—
what darkest dark can he guard now?
*
