All Stories are True...

Half Machine in Copenhagen

dan bear — Sat, 19 Jul 2008 13:45:31 GMT

Last night I danced on the top of a partially submerged submarine piloted by the man who built it, while accompanied by a beautiful woman playing beautiful music from a wireless electric violin on a floating raft beside us. I also performed a variation of the solo I performed during the Men’s Solo Night of Discourse Off The Walls. This version I performed suspended inside a massive welded metal globe (25ft diameter?), itself suspended from a crane, a few feet off the ground and accompanied by live cello and text. I’m in Copenhagen at the summer performance/installation/labs of a group called Half Machine. Actually, at the moment I’m in a small café on the edge of a river that is one of countless waterways and parks in this massive, bike-bustling city. I’m taking a breather from the boat. The boat is a vessel bought two years ago by Half Machine as a floating home base. The place is filled with tools, barrels, electric equipment, all kinds of industrial everything, diodes, explosives, and musical instruments, and converted wheelchairs. Everything to keep an artsy-techno crew engaged while they create bizarre and ingenious installations. Some of the other installations included the Explosion Village, where people drummed on amplified 100 gal+ water drums until their continues stimulus caused a climactic and powerful explosion of fire at the top of an incredibly phallic metal tower. It was, literally, hot. There is a spiral staircase suspended four feet off the ground and spinning and a sand spewing pendulum big enough to stand in. A caged in living room with a man who follows the commands dictated to him by buttons the audience push on a panel. Mostly they are commands for aggressive and destructive behavior involving smashing televisions and destroying books… I’m here as a dancer, so all of this is my playground. So, all of this, and Copenhagen… The location of Half Machine is pretty removed from the rest of the city, but I did get a chance to visit Christiania, where the festival used to be held. This place is unrteal, and you should all visit it given the opportunity. It’s a sort of squat village in the middle of town that’s been squatted for 30 or 40 years. Complete with restaurants, outdoor market, art galleries, kindergarten… It’s mostly walking paths and probably five city blocks with beautiful gardens and strange art and living structures all over. It is an island of organic community that has fought off the demands of current day bureaucracy and structure for decades and it is just beautiful. Think the rough and tumble aspects of Tacheles and some of the Berlin squats mixed with the healthful vitality and hippie influence of Santa Cruz. When you leave, there’s an arch that reads “You are now entering the EU.” And this is how it feels. Like you are entering and leaving a different country, or even reality. Anyway, there’s some snapshots for now. I’ll write more from Edinborough, Scotland next month…

24 Days of dance? You're crazy!!

dan bear — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 02:33:42 GMT

So we're in the last 4 days of this incredible ridiculous massive project called Discourse Off The Walls that I've been doing with my collaborator Sarah Day since June 6th (really for the last few months, but performing since June 6th). Every night Sarah and I have performed a new piece or produced an evening of shared work in a tiny little room called The Dead Cow Gallery in what will soon be The Tannery Arts Center in SC. I've been amazed at the whirlwind that it has been. We made a ton of great art in a short time. I hope y'all can make it to one of these last days, or at the least check out videos of some of the work on: myspace.com/shahandblahproductions. It was, more than anything, proof to myself that I know how to do this. How to create. To create crafted performances in a short time. To create a buzz around a project. To create a place for creativity and community to come together. It's alternated between inspiring and, for a brief stint there, totally repulsive. During that heat wave i just wanted to go watch a movie. Nothing like setting up a daily commitment to something to create resistance. Sometimes we performed for two people, sometimes to thirty. And while we were thinking of it largely as a research experiment, sure enough I learned that when the audience is not there and the energy exchange is only with a camera its a challenge to keep putting out. But even though I didn't feel our project fully recieved by Santa Cruz (until the last few days perhaps) the people who have come have been so grateful and inspired. Quite a number of long time Santa Cruz artists have said this is the best arts event that has happened here in years. We've built a ton of awareness about The Tannery in the performance community. And we've fostered more than a few new relationships with artistic collaborators. (There were about 40 artists presenting work over the course of the month, and we collaborated with about 15 of them). Now, as the month comes to a close, we have a ton of pieces that I'm really excited about and great documentation that hopefully will help us manifest future funding. I'll probably make a DVD of the month. There'll be a review in next week's Metro (the local papers NEVER write reviews)... And of course, as my life happens these months, as soon as this marathon is done, I zoom up to the bay area for a few days of intensive rehearsal on our two stilt shows to be performed on the 6th, than off to Ireland and Scotland to perform. Wahoo!! Whirlwind!! No rest for the art making obsessed! More on that project later. For now I'm happy to have a rest tonight while Sarah does a solo.

Writings from "Vanishing Point"

dan bear — Sun, 25 Nov 2007 16:32:02 GMT

The Vanishing Point. Fade to black. The moment on the border between waking and dream. The ending – where the story continues in the darkness. When the story is no longer your own. Awareness is a flashlight in an ever-shifting landscape. Around the perimeter, the stories are unknowable, liquid. Everything scurries, crawls, and rearranges when you look the other way. Someone asked me recently if the Dodo bird is really such a major loss. I can not know. We move forward, a tsunami, forcing self and faceless futures towards extinction. But Gaia giggles at death. Gaia knows only transformation. This is one story. All stories are true and all stories fade and disperse in time, eventually joining the indistinct grey pools marked “past” or “myth” or “forgotten.” The Lost ones, empty silhouettes. outlines of humanoid form passing through spaces black outline. stark white interior. block letter numbers. change positions and all possible relations without moving. stop animation washes, devoid of detail. No smiles. No scars. The lost ones end in fog. Grey dissappearance sheets of not-a-matter. The eraserbobbles fly low in the sky tonight. Tis the season of the Forgetting. Archeotopological chronologosauri dig up from the depths. tear apart fascades revealing centuries of internalized history. the blood, the sweat, the sex. A siren sings a lullaby. We are all listening. We all fall asleep. Dreaming other people’s dreams. We have lost our fingers. Are scraping hardened clay. Choose a form, a number, a palette and step inside. Draw the details, erase the edges. The lost ones are under every surface, contented or desperate as we paint them. They are our ghosts and only ours. “We are memories inventing ourselves” -Ocatavio Paz. “The world is a memory forgotten, and refabricated upon whimsy” – Me. A point: a location. without height, width, or depth. Achieving meaning only in relationship to other points. At least four points are required to define three dimensional truth. To point: To indicate direction. Vanishing: exists in Magic. Never in Newtonian Physics. Matter transforms and never dissappears. A point alone in space vanishes. Is pointless. As humans exist more and more in a singularly human world, without relation to non-human existence, do we lose our humanness? miss the point? flatten our dimension? Is it in relation to the multitude of other that we become ourselves? Vanishing Point: The point at which two infinte lines appear to merge. When seemingly disparate elements unify. The distance at which perspective collapses difference into unification. Is the point the vanishing? or is the point the vanishing of points? The Vanishing Point, Perspective, Self in Monterrey... a moment in a life. my life. represented as a point on a line? in a stream? in a field of possibilities? currently pinpointed on a map on a wall in Mexico, in a place off my map only moments ago. This seat on this tram in this park disappears on any “reasonable” map. This moment in my life disappears in any “reasonable” retelling. Telescope far enough and all things eventually become miniscule and than “vanish.” Vanishing is the inevitable conclusion of a finite instrument operating in an infinite universe. This “Forum.” people gather, moments of soon-to-vanish gather to make an indellible reshaping of geography acting so as to construct and silmultaneously vanish a landscape. Erasing and rewriting stories to create a history. Where has Mexican culture gone? Where is the native landscape? Where does the mountain become the sky? All things vanish become ghosts Linger. So long as their story’s told. The lost ones are not at home. They are in a foreign land, in unfamiliar territory. They do not speak the language. Do not know the customs. But what is more, they have no memory. I eat. My food disappears. I sleep. The room vanishes. i wake. My dreams are gone. The lost ones walk down corridors of distraction, claustraphobic smells of manufacture and metronomic 4/4 repetition lining every every micrometer of every wall of every hall of psychic babble. The lost ones wait patiently on mountaintops listening to the slow whispers of time turning circles eddies within eddies, tickling their skin mussing their hair, content to wait out the storm. We are in a time of exponential change. All things we have known, all ways of being, all concepts and contexts, human and otherwise change faster than we can see. They are on the point of vanishing. The size of that point, the urgency of the moment, again, depends on the scale of your perspective. Perhaps we are running out of clean water. Perhaps their is wine to spare. Perhaps we have lost human brotherhood and generosity. Perhaps it is everywhere. Perhaps it matters. Perhaps not.

Table talk

dan bear — Sun, 11 Nov 2007 04:55:17 GMT

We were sitting around the table, and there was tea and there was sacrament and we were practicing the possibility of communication We were in a pause who was contemplating his own comfort when out of the blue, spoke the sky on the topic (approved) of the weather: “I’m all dried up” she said to the pause from her place upon high Which caused discomfort to stir in his seat. The stirring awoke the baby who cried – “i offer my tears to the sky.” The mother, to comfort, said “don’t speak to strangers.” Said caterpillar slowly, “No stranger than you.” The stranger said “nobody” Nobody said “here.” And The dead man defended “my body alone.” And the lover, determined, caught all the tears and delivered them swiftly to fill up the moon. So said the moon “I’m old, I’m a crone. I’ll disappear each day before noon.” The lover, dejected, sat on a stone, who whispered to time, “This simply won’t do.” The vagabond laughed. The politician laughed. The expert for appearances thought he’d better too. I, overwhelmed, attempted a smile and excused myself from the room

La Pesca

dan bear — Sun, 11 Nov 2007 04:49:56 GMT

Morning in the Garden, and still i am blessed. A few firsts this trip to madre mar. The Gulf of Mexico. Agua caliente. The warmest ocean I’ve ever let toss me about. Join me. Cleanse me. Letting my muscles loosen and my spine be formed by the undulating waves. Each joint soaking in the nourishment of the salt and the gentle rocking rhythm. In the town, my first interactions with comfortable poverty and third world mentality. Roofs patched with palms, doorless tin sheds, dogsdogsdogsdogs. slow and soft in the unrelenting heat. Shrimp and fish in plastic bags and guts strewn and forgotten on the piers.

Of course, in the fall, we think about death...

dan bear — Sun, 11 Nov 2007 04:43:36 GMT

Yesterday, as our journey began, a ways outside the city, when the men selling hammocks and peppers in small plastic bags began to appear, we drove past a dog. Un pero, strong, quiet, dead, in the middle of the road. A recent kill, eyes open, waiting for the quiet – of the side of the road. El pero muerto. Death is pink and smells of cotton candy. Children sing in circles around the carcass of the rotting beast. Skipping, clapping, tossing their hands up to the sky. Their words almost swallowed by the cicadas and the men in the bars playing dominos, singing ballads about slowly braking hearts. “Despues mi corizon, Me viva es muerte,” The children sing: “We’re alive. We’re alive. You’re dead. You’re dead. Thank god we’re alive and not you instead...” ..................................................................................................... Death ~ fertile ground of existence Calling from beneath all seen sands. We dance upon him all glitter and mahogany shine. Buoyant mythologies of a sometimes exuberant life. I look around me, mountains-men-horses and humour. all will pass. Each breath we are fading. So we forget that we breathe. Dress in fine fascades of current plesantry. Smiles hide teeth eating death like rubber and a hard to digest. Lips gently quiver as they touch unwhispering that we are fading.

So I've been writing a lot this trip and haven't been posting, so.... catch up time...

dan bear — Sun, 11 Nov 2007 04:32:32 GMT

A concrete dock, somewhere near the end, illuminating alone the first twenty feet of ocean mystery. The fish come to the light, as we do. Forever curious. The clear sensation of floating quietly in eternity. .......................................................................................... Coyotes and fireflies and fish, like small transparent dinosaurs. My friends do yoga in the morning. Awakening their muscles, connecting to their breath and balance. My routine is different. Add three extra spoonfulls of folgers and three packets of sugar. You’ll end up with mud instead of water. Give me a place to sit, a cup of coffee, and when I’m connected, a pen. This morning I’m joined by a gently stirring lagoon, the droning sounds of insects, and a well off Mexican family cooking breakfast on a grill outside the peach coloured Hotel Pesca. Last night our plans to sleep under the stars were thwarted by a first rate batallion of flying blood suckers. So, half past midnight we pull up here. Ready to pay too much for a room with too many cockroaches and no air to speak of. We slept well, if somewhat dampened.

An Easter Greeting.

dan bear — Thu, 12 Apr 2007 06:43:01 GMT

Yes! To the indecency, the flailing, the trying too hard. the falling and flying and falling and flying. Yes, to the pain - inevitable from inside itself and laughable from the safely distant palace of the future. Yes to nightfall. To too close to the fire. To temporary (in)sanity inspired by wreckless sensuality. Yes! as i slither to the edge of my knowing, feeling my path along, eyeless, but with a tongue that can smell you on the shifting winds. Each polished pebble, every inexplicable crevice carving its coded blueprint into body's shifting memory. Memories shape our stories. Our stories shape our form. Temporal. Limited. Laughable. Darling. Yes! to a drive that bounces me off my four two small walls and sends me, fists a-whirlin', to smash computer, cell phone, clock. insipid assumed mediators of experience. Yes to unabashed immediacy of existence. It’s many faces. God tickling me, shit-faced grin. senseless gufaws, flailing arms, beyond the point of decency. Respectability ran screaming from the room back when we started drooling and knee slapping and squooshing each other's faces. Horrified by the possibility that we could be so perfectly meaningless. Yes to the yarn unravelling! And getting all tangled all over again. Sandpaper tongued kitten moon delighted at her new play thing. Bats me around 'til i play dead (i'm only playing) retires to her saucer source of perfect white drunk deeply. Yes, yes, yes. Purring distracted, she knocks over the all of it, sending mother's milk in puddles, submerging cosmos, sustenance as unreproachable flood, turns mourning dove, rising sun, first light, olive branch, the agitation of the springtime. Yes! Yes to the selves we’ve buried this year. The fallen leaves of past seasons crushed, and ground, and incorporated in our bones. Yes to the unborn, the aborted, the changed their mind, and the forcibly denied. And yes, to the eager few, born again, the lambs, born again and willing on easter, again. the seeds quaking beneath fragile yielding surfaces Yes, now. Yes, now. they say. Tambourines to the emerald queen's return. The queen of sleep has retracted her spindle fingers. The slut whore spring is opening. And death is naught to be found.

more time... (and Ricochet)

dan bear — Wed, 17 Jan 2007 01:46:30 GMT

-how to locate oneself outside of time? - how to locate the universe within the body rather than the body within time and space? .......................................................................................................... Time, concensus time, with numbers and equal meter, is a map. Like any map, it is flat. It can say nothing about depth, texture, or the territory. Maps are always lies. Decieving the reader into thinking they know where they are… Time… Tempus Incognito? The blind man at the orgy counts time by the rhythmic rocking that surrounds him. Light is unnecessary. Rhythm and movement are the source of time. The beast in the darkness moves closer. Unseen, unheard, i feel him moving closer. feel his will all over me. He reads space by the flickering of my scent, counts time by my shallow breaths echoing in his cavernous ears. i imagine the moment when he stikes. when he consumes me, disappears me into himself. time beats by the number of variations of my own death, chasing each other through my otherwise empty head… My heart beats. This is time. My bowels move. This is time. My eyelids blink. My nerves and muscles fire. This is my time. But it is internal, changeable. Unsynchronized time. “[The time] could not be measured in years, just as an ocean could not explain the distance we had traveled, just as the dead can never be counted.” -Jonathan Saffron Foer, Extremely Close and Incredibly Loud (I invite you, not to comment, but to Ricochet if you like. Add your own writing springboarding off something in this). This invitation goes for all my posts. Than the next person can ricochet either off the original, or off the comment...)

love, of course...

dan bear — Tue, 26 Dec 2006 06:34:51 GMT

If love is a rose, love is a sharp thorny bitch. Proclaiming promises of fold upon fold of inner secrets and spiralling depths, until you get close, grab tight, and try to squeeze the sweetness out. Your hands are bloodied, dripping in posession. You can not grab hold of love, silly man. Love is to be looked at from a distance, treated with care, held in open palms. Or, perhaps you should take a knife to it. Cut it down, strip bare its thorns, than hold it, humiliated and deformed, to your skin. Destroying the thing by claiming it.

the revolution

dan bear — Tue, 26 Dec 2006 06:28:05 GMT

The Revolution will be Ridiculous. Put on you big red nose, and come play in the apocalyptic ashes. Don your finest tu-tu, bring your invisble dog, and tell all your imaginary friends. Laugh in pain Smile in death. i'll see you there.

Time Space, and the Rest, Installation 2

dan bear — Sun, 10 Dec 2006 22:17:57 GMT

The soul travels at the speed of a camel. Time flattens in on itself. The veils become walls and collapse into pieces. A man in a top hat taps his watch, shrugs, and descends a staircase in an open field… Mother tending child drops a worm in his mouth, cries, and becomes a tree… These days were not meant to be counted. These moments between worlds… Young boy-child time is forced into a tu-tu and pushed out on stage sweating and still under hot lights. A paying audience gets restless shouts, “Dance. Do something. Dance.” We should not push our children this way. His soft young flesh turns hard, thickens, grows rough. He is a stone. passive. still. potentially dangerous. The crowd shouts, “Dance. Do something! Dance!” Silence. Stillness. Stone. He has gone inside himself… Time builds a house inside himself. Furnished with the fine whimsy of memory. He likes to sit in the music room, with the tall ceilings and grand pianos and the view of the sprawling fields where cows chew grass at sunset, counting time by mouthfuls of green earth. He likes to sit in the music room at sunset and listen to the silence of life passing. Sometimes he shouts to the cows: “Dance, Do Something. Dance.” They chew the grass, occasionally looking up to wonder at his clamor. Than return to their meal. He is happy. They are dancing slowly.

Time, Space, and the rest. Installment 1.

dan bear — Fri, 08 Dec 2006 21:46:45 GMT

I) The Unchartable Territory. Exploration as the only state. Terra Incognito. The map will never be the territory. To know where you are is to live in flatland. To know where you are is to write the ending first. Is exploration the only state? Clearly not. Exploration is a state that lives only at the edges. It is the state of a question. Questions are uber-senses. Statements are conclusions. They end things. Exploration lives only at the edges. But in a fractal universe, edges are everywhere. Edges extend into depths. Surface area expands into infinity or coagulates into singularity in proportion to distance. Because consciousness can constantly change size and shape, exploration is always a possibility. If one believes the maps, exploration is impossible. V) Just Space she says Yes. It is all “just space.” All of it. “Just space” But space will not stand for its own company. Restless with the sheer volume of possibility (space is always possibility) it becomes agitated. It twists and curls and turns in on itself, creating Dimension. In its tumult, it cuts part of itself off from itself, creating Differentiation. With dimension comes Inside and Outside and with Differentiation comes Other. Thank Goodness. Space has given birth to the dancing twins. Inside/Outside. Self/Other. …………………………………………………………………………………. “…stories, histories, lies, myths and legends… are all permutations of the same thing. They are all stories, and… a story, like energy, can neither be created or destroyed.” “All stories are true. Every last one of them. All myths, all legends, all fables. If you believe them true than they are true. If you don’t believe them, than all that can be said is they are true for someone else.” -(maybe) Alan Moore via Dave Sims, Reads V.5) What is it to stand before the falling place? The other serpent, who does not eat its tail, but enters its own asshole, and exits its mouth, Turning itself inside out… THAN swallows himself. over and over and over again… >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> time, elastic substance of continuity, taffy plaster of identity binding episodic experience into an illusory narrative i call my life. time, fiend of habit, speeding thief of stillness rigid metronome drowning out heartbeats shifting measures. time, you have strung me up between when and then, you have lost me to the great extent, beat me to the chase bested my fastest horse. But time, you old ding-dong, you forget i know your secret face. have looked behind your click-clack tick-tock insistence and rendered you impotent with a single word, a word that collapses universes. leaving us naked and exposed to the harsh simplicity of all of it. The word (and the word is god and the word is with god) The word is “Now.”

Morning in a small box.

dan bear — Thu, 30 Nov 2006 18:25:48 GMT

Woke up this morning in my small box. 5 ft. by 19 ft. rectangle shed in a friend's backyard. It's sweet here, though admittedly like a freight train car. I'll be moving to an actual home in the coming weeks. Where they keep bees and have fruit trees and a wild garden with naked busts of clay and inanimate women all over. 3 blocks from the great Pacific... Shah and Blah Productions (Sarah and I) just recieved a 6 month artist in residence of free rehearsal space and show publicity/ and production assistance for a new full length work... so... The show will be called "Anatomy of a Cloud" and is about themes stemming from Alzheimer's... memory, identity, time... more on all of it soon...