vrijdag 29 mei 2015

copyendlesspaste


Sabine Oosterlynck. Foto boven: de performance is pas begonnen. Vijfentwintig toeschouwers. Later op de avond komen nog eens zoveel mensen een kijkje nemen.
Foto onder: sluitstuk van de performance. Foto van Thomas Bogaert.


donderdag 28 mei 2015

I Can't Remember #3

I can't remember where I bought that Penguin edition with Yuan Plays. Most probably I must have bought it in a Brussels bookshop. It soon became a major influence. Lao Tse, Basho and Wu Wei, none of it failed to tell me the thing told. For a somehow similar reason I had no interest whatsoever in Western haiku. I can't remember when I first had the impression that Western haiku was a fake. The five seven five syllable thing annoyed me and this annoyment spat from most of the haiku's that I began to write. I do remember why but I can't remember when. Most probably in that Brussels bookshop or some tiny spoonship later.

I can't remember what he said or what I said, in 1986, during that last meeting ever. He looked fairly depressed and unable to make it nil nil. For many years I have been totally unable to trace anything whatsoever on the fact that he had been born from a wound, not from a womb, and that he kept bleeding ever since without anyone noticing the blood.

I can't remember the lines but it read that an amateur from the State of Washington had plunged into the woods near La Push with honey on his body and the frivolous idea to make photographs of a bear.

I can't remember how many but at least two geese, or four maybe, or three, made the major stock of wildlife at Little Pine, a charming little house where my parents lived early sixties, in many of its aspects similar to the house where the trouble with Harry began and ended. Me and the geese had separate living. They had their hide-out, far from secret, I had mine. They had respectful behaviour and I had mine. Of course they respected me, as I respected them. We had friends, sounds of fire and specks of sunlight on the garden path.

I can't remember her name. The girl. We'd been dancing all night. First of May. First of May Ninety Eighty Five. I can't remember if I liked her that much. Maybe it wasn't Ninety Eighty Five. She was sweet though. Hours and hours of dancing and drinking, other people around of course, but no one else seemed to have the dancing part closer than we had. She had that thing called desire, right there, on her face, or whatever she had on her face. After six hours of dancing and drinking we got to the surface again, that of a dizzy 2nd of May. The tide of deep and mysterious blue had faded, the ballroom neared closing time, we stumbled through a corridor, stepped out of the building and I must have had that blind feel of being close enough to suggest one more step, to get to her place. Or mine. She could have said yes, she could have said no, or whatever, but she obviously saw it from a different angle and left me baffled on the pavement. Later she had a short affair with someone from Ghana. I can't remember her name.

I can't remember the format, it had Dutch grammar maybe or math, but I do remember the thing I saw outside the cage, a flat surface of brickstone, the orange rooftop on top of that and above that a peaceful blue, that of early summer.

I can't remember when it occured to me that Plato was missing. I had the Complete Works. All of a sudden, even without looking for it, I realized that it wasn't there anymore. Years before that I had had a similar experience with Die blaue Reiter Kalender, an extremely exciting edition with texts by - among others - Kandinsky, Klee and Schönberg, but the experience had been different. The disappearance of the volume of Die blaue Reiter came gradually, first during a conversation on the topic when I failed to trace the volume in my library, that of Plato missing all of a sudden. Other volumes had disappeared as well. Ulysses had gone and Oostakkerse gedichten had gone, the latter in an early stage of family Miocene, the same era that included the disappearance of Die blaue Reiter and other volumes unremembered. The funny thing is that I traced another volume, Kunst Praxis Heute by Karin Thomas, an early seventies edition, in the library of the person who doubtlessly had stolen more than just that single volume, only because of its colour. The title page had his name, written as he used to do it, above a stroke of black ink, on the back of that page a similar stroke of black ink and apparently nothing else but the date, June 1977, in my handwriting.

I can't remember when I heard the word elephant for the very first time, nor when I first wrote it and why I had to write it.

I can't remember the spectacle on Broadway, late 1977, apart from one phenomenon, a man of unknown age and origin dead on the pavement.

I can't remember how many times I read De X-bom, nor the year that I travelled to Hoeilaert to visit Sleen, apparently during summer, and as such indeed rang the frontdoor of the newbuild cottage where he used to live. Peeping through the window I noticed a fabulous collection of exotic butterflies. No one came to the door to open it. Did I rang twice?

I can't remember why I dislike eel in green.

I can't remember how many of the Kronos Quartet members accompanied Philip Glass when I noticed them taking Plaza Merced in a straight diagonal from calle Granada to Teatro Cervantes. I do remember the year but I can't remember the month. It was a foolishly hot day. Hundreds of doves whirled around the statue.

dinsdag 19 mei 2015

I Can't Remember #2

I can't remember the date, the hour, the restaurant. It was summer 1976, it must have been bloody hot. Can't remember the weather. The Chinese lady served the dish with egg and shrimp. She looked better than the thing she had to serve, a dish so completely and automatically Chinese that I had no further questions.

I can't remember when universe began. As far as I know Italo Calvino emerged from it to be its only source.

I can't remember if I read it in a newspaper, or heard it on the radio, that Jorge Luis Borges had gone. He went for a walk maybe.

I can't remember if it rained on 2nd of April 1989.

I can't remember how it came, gradually or all of a sudden, the notion that I had to deal with a fake.

I can't remember the precise date but I have the girl still in front of me, far out on the mole, she wears a short, white dress and stares at the surface of the surf maybe two and half a meter beneath her. I don't know her age. I am ten and a bit. It's summer. Her face is directed towards the south. There's adults around. Parents I guess. I can't remember what I'm doing on the mole. I stare at the girl in the white dress. Near the surf little crabs may be noticed, seagulls follow the surf north and south. There should be a light breeze. The scenerie is far from regular. It would have been far more regular to sit near The Horse, as that spot in Ostend where we always sat and built sand castles used to be called. It must have been my first erotic experience, that girl in a white summer dress. Did I take the mole to its very end? I can't remember. Steady curls of foam flooded towards the beach. I can't remember anything else but the white dress.

I can't remember why.

I can't remember the setting at Heist-Op-Den-Berg, the railway station where I most probably once a week stept out of the train from Antwerp to Brussels, the streets, the houses, or even anything more specific, nor the long walk - once a week - to the bakery, through streets that seem deserted now. The bakery doesn't add much to the picture. I slept in a caravan near the road, worked at night, read Hermann Hesse, but apart from the caravan, where I ate, wrote and slept and masturbated, the setting and its surroundings disappeared.

I do remember as good as anything, from the pictures of Miocene prairies, from the glorious and ignominious battles wherever on planet Ass, from the curly phrases in Mozart pieces such as Ein Weib ist das herrlichtste Ding, from the lost lands of Dodo, from Melopee, considered by at least one virtuoso to be his favourite poem, from Satyricon and Under Milk Wood to each of the movies Hitchcock made, but there's still more that I can't remember.

I can't remember how many tullips, yellow and unbearable depressing, in that vase on the table, nor if ever since tullips yellow on a table - and in a vase or not - made such a disturbing and irrelevant impression. The table must have had many more features depressing and unbearable or awesome and as such forgotten, but despite of forgetful thoughts kindly clearing the table with waste and age, nothing seems more depressing still than yellow tullips on a table in a vase. The number has a safelock.

I can't remember the Sicilian style. A chessmate told me that his brother had studied on it, but he too had more or less forgotten how it went.

I can't remember how I came to Die Kunst der Fuge, with Lionel Rogg's organ version or with the multi-instrumental and charming version Munclinger made. Apart from that I do remember the August performance of Die Kunst der Fuge on a rainy day in Salzburg. It had rained for more than thirty-nine days. On the fortiest it again rained. Rain rattled on the roof of the church, a small, rectangular building downstream Mozart Bridge. The organist, a musician from Switzerland, began the B A C H modus and all of a sudden a heavy rain came down and took the interior of the church with power overwhelming.

I can't remember the first photograph I made. One of the very first may have been that of the plough horse and a willowed meadow.

I can't remember how I got that first, clear impression of the non-existence of god. It maybe began in a rather early stage, before that of teenage, when foolish things told didn't match the awareness of the untold. The probability whatsoever got suspicious before I got ten years old. I had of course to accept most of it as the truth it was told to be, but certain elements of that truth failed to make sense. With classes on the theme I used to stare at the rooftop of the building, gambling the told and untold. In favour of the untold I took from the told that it had nothing else but indecent and imbecile prepositions on the thing said. As far as I can remember I have never been in favor of the thing told. Priests always had that imbecile thing of telling nothing. Any plaster cupid could do better.

zaterdag 16 mei 2015

de anti-boeddha

de kleine vederlichte snolmakaak zei wat het te zeggen had
of verzon
natuurlijk ook wel omdat dat de snolmakaak voordelig uitkwam
snol tot de tiende snol
tot de tiende en nog eens tot de tiende snol
zo hadden snik noch snoek noch snak wat te zeggen
en hoefden ze natuurlijk ook helemaal niets te zeggen
wat snoek en snak voordelig uitkwam
want te zeggen hadden zij immers niets tot weinig
wat snolmakaak van dolle pret kraaiend kwijnend kwijlde
hoefden ze niet nog eens te zeggen
wat snolmakaak verzon waren ze zo weer vergeten
wat ie deed gaf aan hoe het vooral niet moest
en wat hij stal was toch al kwijt geweest

vrijdag 15 mei 2015

I Can't Remember #1

I can't remember the day I was born nor anything concerned with the delivery as my life as a foetus ended. The gap must have been fairly narrow as mam later often said that the delivery had taken over 24 hours, due to the astonishing fact that she didn't know how to do it. 24 hours of which I can't remember a single second, which is strange if you consider what a hell of a battle it must have been.

I can't remember the furniture, or even if it had furniture, that odd house north of Boston with a wooden grimace, similar to houses many of Hopper pictured, quite often in the pittoresque blank of a landscape with nothing else but grasses and pines and a liquid light on top of it. There it is, parked on the inside of a curve near the ocean, untouched as if really nothing happened ever since. I am able still to see the curve of a road, to notice a more or less infantile cliff and, if I turn my head the other side, the pines, and a similar house maybe, and with two ladies both a step behind stepping through that zone of shrub and brushwood near the ocean I am even able to see myself, unaware of the picture. Getting back to the wooden house, on the inside of the curve, memory fails. It fails as soon as I enter the house, where we sat, the three of us, and drank and ate and slept. Two ladies left asleep in the dark of a room without furniture. Say no more.

I can't remember when that foolish sucker got elected as president of, what's his name again. We played pool and drank beer and from hell angels came and turned on high heels. I so often fail to remember the date of common moments.

I can't remember how many weeks or months it took to finish MC0699. I often told that I finished the second of the perforated MC-catalogues during winter. Somewhere inside though a pencil note points summer 2001 and Kain walking along that boulevard.

I can't remember what I did, apart from sitting and doing nothing at all, during a flight from Seatlle to London, late 1978.

I can't remember the name of the Australian dancer, a smart and good-looking woman who sat next to me in an Italian restaurant downtown Edinburgh. It was August. Edinburgh had the festival. She invited me to her dance performance and later, for at least one year and a half, I had her name pinned to the wall in my working room. I went to the dance performance but unfortunately even don't remember what I saw and where it was. Apart from the spell it had. I do remember the table, where we sat, in a joint on the inside of a street curving steep to the upper part of town, she had her London manager with her and some of the crew she worked with. Turnfaced I notice males and females sitting in front of each other, all of the males one side, all of the females the other.

I can't remember how it went that day when Pepa and me drove to a joint near El Palo, it had a pool table on the beach, people sat around, Pepa used to have the chocolate in her handbag, we drank rhum and kissed and from the ocean came the sound of copulating turtles.

I can't remember what happened to the first essay I wrote. I can't remember why I wrote it. Apparently because I had to. Being a student at Art School I had to write something on art. It didn't matter too much. It must have been during 2nd bachelor. Sitting at the table in my small study I took a Playboy edition, opened it and started cutting it to small, rectangular pieces, page after page, using dices to direct the cutting up or down and to the left or to the right. I worked on a varying scheme of cuttings, reducing the nude pics to the abstract formula it had. The essay was less voluminous than it could have been. I can't remember the pages it had. I do remember that each page had a short note indicating the scheme I had used to reduce the nudes to an abstract mass of colour. I do remember that I handed it to one of the teachers, that day, and later never heard of it. No one asked why I had done the non-essay. No one confronted me with anything. Motive and object both disappeared, as if nothing had happened. Something had, and for some reason it acually did, and it did so as if nothing had happened.

I can't remember Nelson.

woensdag 13 mei 2015

Nausea #2

NAUSEA van Oona Libens. Met Eirik Vindgren. Met Mia Lundholm. Met Elsa Hofmann. De fabelachtige Elsa Hofmann, Cantatrix sopranica L. De L van Libens, vermoed ik.
Nausea gaat in een compleet verduisterde ruimte, wat belangrijk is voor Nausea.
Tijdens de eerste voorstelling zitten 16 personen mee aan, tijdens de tweede voorstelling 18. Wat belangrijk is voor Nausea. Omdat het intiem blijft. Geen grote volkstoeloop, geen kijkcijferpolemiek, geen heetgebakerde en tegelijk slappe, smakeloos domme commentaar van stukjesschrijvers die er bovendien alleen maar over geschreven zouden hebben als we ze betaald hadden.
Oona had op voorhand aangegeven, lang voor ze in een pasgekochte auto naar Senja zou rijden om er de decorstukken, Elsa Hofmann en de trompet van Eirik Vindgren op te pikken, dat elke voorstelling bij voorkeur niet meer dan twintig tot maximaal dertig aanwezigen hoorde te hebben.
Meer dan twintig stoelen hebben we toch niet, merkte de klusjesman op.
Gisteren ten slotte besloot ik om me aan een avond met Kaspar Hauser te wagen, dertig jaar nadat ik de film voor het eerst gezien had, en tijdens de tweede voorstelling, niet tijdens de eerste, viel me op dat een van de garnalen me aan Kaspar Hauser deed denken, maar dat had misschien alleen te maken met het feit dat ik een avond eerder naar Kaspar Hauser gekeken had.

dinsdag 12 mei 2015

the big thing

The big thing is the garden. The gardener is blind one eye and his wife ain't got eggs, but the garden is one thing he truly sees, as truly as the dirt in a pair of pants. And of course, and for no other reason, she became the beloved one, busying herself as a chicken would with the food and the dirt and the old turmoil of talk. She had three eggs, he said, and lost all three of it. And for some reason the garden became bigger than the eggs she had.

maandag 11 mei 2015

Nausea #1


Eerst kochten ze een auto, een blauwe auto. Met die blauwe auto reden ze van Malmö naar Senja, een
eiland of schiereiland ten noorden van de Lofoten. Drieduizend kilometer. Daar, in Krakeslottet, een door Georg Blichfeldt beheerde residentie, pikten ze de decorstukken op. Met die vracht vingen ze de terugweg aan. Opnieuw drieduizend kilometer. Dan van Malmö over Peberholm en Kopenhagen naar Gent.



Boven: het laddertje. Laddertje dat een week later, na het dagje filmen, na afbreken en inladen van alle stukken en nadat ze alweer richting Malmö reden, in de stockruimte bleef. Ze hadden alles met de allergrootste nauwgezetheid ingepakt en in de laadruimte opgeborgen en toch het laddertje over het hoofd gezien.



zaterdag 2 mei 2015

dreiging

De functionaris vond het spandoek een persoonlijke bedreiging.
Een persoonlijke bedreiging vond hij het, dat spandoek.
In regel, dat is bekend, gaat de dreiging niet van een spandoek uit.
Het spandoek duidt hoogstens, in het bijzonder of in het algemeen, wat de bedreiging is.

pas de peu

Hoeveel kilometer maakt een euro. Geen idee. Nul. Of ik benieuwd ben naar. Wacht even. Ho ho ho. Présence. Zo, mijnheer de directeur. Kameraad Schoonraap, vertelt U mij toch even, U heeft twintig kamelen besteld... Ja, mijnheer. Twintig kamelen? Ja, mijnheer, twintig, tien kon niet, ze hadden er twintig en we hadden ze allemaal te nemen. Twintig kamelen dus...? Ja mijnheer, twintig. Twintig... je had er toch net zo goed tweehonderd kunnen bestellen. Maar is tweehonderd... Nee, komaan, jongen, hou je bek, tweehonderd is niet eens het begin. Laten we om te beginnen met vijfhonderdduizend beginnen. Twintig keer om die gore aardkluit tot je fluit tot de enkels hangt. We hebben twintig kamelen besteld, Schoonraap, geen honderdduizend kamelen die het naar de zeik trappen. Jamaar, mijnheer, ik dacht. Hou op met denken, Schoonraap. Denken, daar schiet U geen zak mee op. Köhler heeft twee keer twintig kamelen besteld, jonge kamelen, begrijpt U? Jonge kamelen, ja, natuurlijk. Jonge kamelen, Schoonraap, omdat kamelen eerst en vooral jong horen te zijn. Als ze oud zijn, zijn het oude kamelen. Mja, dat is zo berekend, mijnheer. Ja, ja, ga uw gang. Trouwens, moet je horen, wacht even, heb ik je verteld dat Oliver Trail, toen ik recent om een of andere reden bij hem langsging, me een eerste editie van godverdomme, wacht even, van Krull. Krull van Köhler, mijnheer. Van Köhler godverdomme, inderdaad. En zo is dus Köhler opgedoken, m'n beste Schoonbroodt, uit het niets als het ware, waar natuurlijk net altijd die dingen opduiken die je potdoof met verstomming slaan. Of was Köhler ook zomaar een jongen die er inliep? Dat is de rotzooi met de rechtse zaak en ik excuseer me, want ik het had je het natuurlijk niet hoeven te vertellen. Met Köhler schaf ik me alleen nog meer verwarring aan.