SHUFFLE: EIGHT X EIGHT

Lisa Radon
Tim DuRoche

ultra editions
portland Oregon
2009
Foreward

You are looking at the product of a one-day, one-

document, co-writing/collaborative thinking project we're
calling Shuffle (cards not feet). It's a conversation in
writing. We agreed to bring eight ideas each. On "go" we
wrote on our own or each other's ideas in an online
document. Often we were writing back and forth like a
true conversation and at points we were off on our own,
writing in different directions (kind of like letting your
mind wander when someone else is talking). It was an
opportunity for us to get at some of the things we've
been thinking about a lot or talking about a lot knowing
that ideas might overlap, jostle each other, or turn their
backs on each other and "go your own way," sang
Fleetwood Mac.

Lisa Radon and Tim DuRoche

November 15, 2009
Portland, Oregon

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4
EIGHT X EIGHT

• Bean Spasms and coral reefs (recombination,

accumulation of meanings, memes, tropes)
• Triangulation – social practice/relational
Whyte
• Abstraction of Language (and its perils/failures)
-- Gertrude Stein/James Joyce/Zaum &c.
• Fibonacci sequence, Pythagoras -- natural
ordering systems
• amateur/expert/professionalization
• Next Thought Best Thought
• Future of the Book, requirements, economies,
etc.
• Intimacy as theme in contemporary art --
social practice, Kathleen in the living room, Tim
Etchells,
• How We Learn to Speak (i.e. the opposite of
how we are taught most everything else) Holt and
writing "s's" or "n's" backward, the difference that
doesn't make a difference (or isn't perceived to
make a difference)
• Abstraction of Language (and its perils/failures)
-- Gertrude Stein/James Joyce/Zaum &c.
• Fibonacci sequence, Pythagoras -- natural
ordering systems
• amateur/expert/professionalization
• Abstraction of Language (and its perils/failures)
-- Gertrude Stein/James Joyce/Zaum &c.

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 • Fibonacci sequence, Pythagoras -- natural
ordering systems
• amateur/expert/professionalization
• Next Thought Best Thought
• Future of the Book, requirements, economies,
etc.
• Intimacy as theme in contemporary art --
social practice, Kathleen in the living room, Tim
Etchells,
• How We Learn to Speak (i.e. the opposite of
how we are taught most everything else) Holt and
writing "s's" or "n's" backward, the difference that
doesn't make a difference (or isn't perceived to
make a difference)
• Anxiety of influence
• Root-checking: what makes us who we are,
reminding us why we're here, the real stuff (ab-ex,
jazz—from ragtime to no time, Frank O'Hara, etc.)
• Score(s): hidden maps to reading, listening;
performance guides
• Civility & Democracy: WWJDD (what would John
Dewey do)
• Education: how we learn; how we maintain
curiosity and wonder and pathways to new
learning
• History: sounding-board, guidepost; when did
things work well/when did we lose our way
• The Way Things Work: impulse toward
rhizomatic thinking
• Manifestos: what do we believe; how much do
we believe it

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• note: Progress is an implicit undercurrent
connecting these all of ideas: the dance-remix, as
it were

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New York's lovely weather hurts my forehead...
Ted Berrigan, "Bean Spasms"

Introduction
I am looking at these lists of ideas. Most are ideas we've
addressed before, in passing as you are cutting
vegetables in the kitchen or as we're brushing our teeth.
There are ideas that come up in response to the NY
Times story you read to me or the link someone tweets
me that gets my mind revved up. These conversations
might be illuminating, clarifying, but they are ephemeral.
I thought maybe today we could run around with
butterfly nets and if we're lucky pin a few to the board.
Because time, time to write them down is what we never
seem to have enough of. Fleeting as a Karner Blue.

Yes, in fact our bean-spasms are about bean-spasms—a

continual root-check and hot-wiring of new vehicles and
new information that eventually allow us to ask the
question: are we there yet?
I realized that one of the ideas that spans both artistic
practice and professional arts policy life is the idea of
Progress (not on the list). Or (back to the list) the
Anxiety of Influence. As a jazz artist and someone
really interested in modernism and progress, I'm
fascinated by how we overcome the "anxiety of
influence." It used to be the young artist had to
overcome and slay the master. In The Anxiety of
Influence: A Theory of Poetry, Bloom explored the
psychology of influence, and concluded that it was
"conflict of Oedipal dimensions between the poet and his
or her literary forbearers." It is the struggle of the artist,
Bloom argued, to find his or her own voice through an
ambivalent, anxiety-ridden relation precisely with those
precursors whom they most admire. Through creative
misinterpretations of these shadowy figures, the artist,
in the very act of holding up certain past artists as
admired precursors, also imagines them as incomplete,

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failing for all their genius, and falling short of the mark
that only the present artist is capable of reaching.
Here's a note I found in my computer about this, not
sure whose words they are: "On the surface of things,
the concept of influence seems straightforward. An artist
trying to define a space for himself or herself under the
weight of tradition is inspired by precursors. She or he
selects elements that are useful or admired, interpolates
them with implicit commentary of his or her own, and
arrives at an "original" production that nevertheless
grasps what has gone before. Influence is pervasive and
inescapable, even if the artist is a revolutionary and
acknowledges the past only to condemn it. In this way
history in the arts makes progress."
One of my favorite ideas from this was "Clinamen" (the
idea, not the word—the word sounds dirty). Bloom used
it to refer to an artist's "swerve" from the influence of
their predecessors. It's a groovy metaphor that goes
back to my man, Lucretius. For Lu, the clinamen
designates the ‘smallest possible angle’ by which an
atom deviates from the straight line of the fall of the
atoms through a void. Cool, huh? In his view, there
would be no contact between atoms without the
clinamen: "No collision would take place and no impact
of atom upon atom would be created. Thus nature would
never have created anything."
The "swerve" then begins with the root-check. (Root
checking is how we refer to the repeated return to
various cultural touchstones that have contributed
to/shaped our thinking.) What do I take in, what do I
discard. <the actions that occur before the shuffle. What
made me pick up an instrument/a pen/brush/welding
torch/etc. in the first place. What do I want to say and
how am I saying it? Who said it first? Who said it best?
How do I put myself in that line of fire? Do I want to be,
as Franz Kline sez, "part of the noise" or just a
spectator? If Barry McGee already painted that
distended, sad face why are you and 239 other "street"-
inspired painters painting it again? That's a great Lee
Morgan album you made, when are we going to hear
Your record?

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There are some folks who think that the nature of the
universe is permanence; there are some who will argue
that surely the nature of the universe is innovation and
change. “Tradition, says Gustav Mahler, "is the passing
on of fire and not the adoration of ashes." In jazz, as in
art I think it's true that, “the essence of the music, is
change itself,” to quote pianist Muhal Richard Abrams.
Where was it when you found it, how'd you make it
yours, and what did it look like/sound like/dance like
when you finally set it back down?

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"I love my brain
it all mine now is
saved not knowing"

Bean Spasms
We use the term "bean spasms" to refer to self-quoting
{Is it self-quoting or re-sampling one's catchy riffs?}, re-
cycling thought or received thought, line, quotation,
idea. In poem, especially, I've become comfortable with
the idea of riffing on phrase or passage I might have
written in another poem years ago. I've become
comfortable with the idea that being a self-quoting
machine in poem builds the body of work in an organic
way around certain pillars, certain branches and even
twigs. We took the term "bean spasms" from the poem
of the same name by Ted Berrigan, second generation
New York School poet, in his Selected Poems. It's clear,
in this little volume that has been important to both of
us, that Berrigan self-samples regularly, playfully,
experimentally.

He also did a lot of speed, so he might have just

forgotten.

One might not know (we didn't) that the title of that
poem refers to a collaborative project that he did with
Joe Brainard and Ron Padgett in 1967. I've never seen
the book. Each wrote poems for the book and
collaborated on pieces as well. None are attributed.
It occurred to me that there is a rhizomatic
connectedness to all of this: we both learn through
mix/re-mix, shuffling, reflecting on how we learn—
continually thinking about how to "make it new" while
being equally mindful of tradition, history (both so as not
to repeat something that's already been done, but to
gain insight into process). Which would explain why our
love of Manifestos is not something merely about
nostalgia, but about tapping into urgencies and

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immediacies and a demand for momentum, progress.
Yeehaw, Marinetti's as much about the future as he ever
was, right?!
To shuffle is to learn, evolve. Learning is perceiving,
making sense of it, assimilating (that's the shuffle...new
information is integrated into the existing storehouse of
info), and the learned, the new info becomes part of the
souffle into which further stimuli, experience,
perception, can be folded. Shuffle is the undercurrent of
Jimmy Forrest's Night Train, James Brown at the Apollo,
Duke Ellington, the sound of something about to happen
—crime, sex, suspense. In this sense, shuffle creates
tension, lays a ground. (Ironically, shuffle also is the
dragged foot, the shamble is the neighbor of the
shuffle.) It's then both ground and figure, if figure is
object representing new information.
Winston Churchill liked to quip, “Without tradition, art is
a flock of sheep without a shepherd. Without innovation,
it is a corpse.” For a French perspective, Proust said
something akin to change/innovation occurring not in
the search for new landscapes, but in searching with
new eyes.
Regarding Bloom and "creative misinterpretations" of
one's artistic forebears, the idea of reading the world
through squinted eyes to knock the perception out of
kilter, to see the world anew. Creative
(self-)misinterpretation is exactly what Berrigan is doing
in the poem "Bean Spasms" and many of the others that
are included in Selected. When misinterpreting himself
by recombining lines in alternate ways, or by inserting
lines from Donne into abstract compositions, he removes
himself from either the linearity of repeating the past or
the linearity of reflexively trying not to repeat it. The
strategy allows a lateral move out of the verticality of
what it is, what it was, and what it shall be. And in doing
so, the swerve becomes your own. You've begun the
process of curating perception/deliberation/delivery. It's
how we learn to embrace recombinatory principles.
Creative reshuffle, stealing, call it what you will—the
pants fit.

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And this borrowing, can we trace it back further than
Ezra Pound's Cantos? I think we can't underestimate the
creeping spirit of Laurence Sterne (Tristam Shandy) on
both Pound and Joyce—Satire is a huge and savage
instrument in how they parsed now-ness and then-ness
[uh-oh, now I'm thinking on other ideas that aren't here
and getting a little flustermated: one of my topics should
be 19th Century Writers with Wicked Satiric Sensibilities.
. . then I could go on about Wm. Hazlitt, Thomas Love
Peacock, Bellamy, etc.]If, prior to the written/printed
word, news, information, story was conveyed verbally,
passed from person to person, there's no escaping the
fact that each retelling altered the telling slightly. [see:
game of Telephone] Not only is there nothing new under
the sun, there is nothing new about the way we talk
about it, record it, reinterpret it under the sun, whether
our motives are to consciously recombine or simply to
relay information. ["Speak these words as I tell them to
thee, trippingly on the tongue"*] Recall the talk that DJ
Spooky gave as part of the Portland Institute for
Contemporary Art's Time-Based Art Festival some years
ago. It was at a time when sampling was in the news.
He's also very interested in the cross-platform (culture,
tradition, discipline) re-mix—which makes it more
interesting: Debussy intercut with William S. Burroughs
and Marinetti gives us a lens into the sublime, ridiculous
and poor aesthetic judgement, yet with a somewhat
danceable impulse. Part of Spooky's rap concerned the
feeding back to culture, the idea that one takes the
proferred cultural product, chews it up, and spits it back
out again in another form. (Who was artist who chewed
up Clement Greenberg's book, Art and Culture? [John
Latham, Still and Chew]) But this is a larger point--the
notion of Debussy bumping up against Marinetti--that
the thing next to the thing is affected by proximity. That
by selectively placing two disparate samples (objects,
phrases, &c.) in proximity, each is altered. [see: Shuffle]
And if proximity is dimensional rather than simply linear,
the interactions between the individual pieces affect one
another in an exploding number of ways.

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Feedback (whether internal or exogenous, to use a nice
economic term) is a form of remix.
*Misremembered Shakespeare quote. Actually, Hamlet
said, "Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it to
you, trippingly on the tongue."
So how we remember and process is something that
ping-pongs off a couple of different ideas here: The Way
Things Work, Education, and Score(s)—how we
read/learn/listen and deliver/deliberate on information,
sound. See Below
One of the recurring rootcheckedbeanspasmmanifesto-
laden things we've talked about in the past is the "heroic
impulse"—certainly the Ab-Exers like Pollock or even in
their patience and glacial sense of time (like a Morty
Feldman). I think Frank O'Hara was drawn to that cult of
The Big Gesture. Franz Kline sed: "You see it in Barney
Newman too, that he knows what a painting should be.
He paints as he thinks painting should be, which is pretty
heroic."
O'Hara hated what followed. He remarked that Warhol
was "killing laughter." Warhol was finding his own
"swerve."[I'm going to keep saying that because
"clinamen" is creepy].

The coral reef of meanings and associations of words is

both a way of understanding where we are now with our
language and a strategy for making abstract poem. The
notion that words accumulate meanings (denotation and
connotation) is familiar. That meaning evolves through
use, that it is colored, shaded, pushed out of plumb we
know not only because we can read etymologies in
Webster, but because we participate daily in the
reinvention of language through use. Dip, according to
my teenage sources, is the new book. By the early 80's,
the word "book" had gone from meaning move really
fast--"He's booking down the field!"--to mean "leave." As
in "Later. We're bookin.'" In the late aughties, if you're
leaving, you're going to "dip." So common words through
imaginative slang obtain new meanings to those in the

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know (and eventually the rest of us...witness "cool").
More interestingly, words in proximity to one another
can color one another and/or cumulatively co-create
synthesized meaning.
I have been thinking about the de-formation of
language. Yes, reading McCaffery's essay "Voice in
Extremis" brought to mind a number of things that have
influenced my thinking on this over the years, but it was
finding James Joyce's Finnegans Wake in the bookshelf
by the bed (i.e. the "good" bookshelf) last week that
brought into focus the fact that we have dropped the
ball on the abstraction/de- and re-formation of language.
Joyce playfully as well as rigorously de-forms words via
distorted dialect primarily (with neologism and elastic
syntax as other weapons in the arsenal). Gertrude Stein
too, through rules she set for herself, as in the universal
use of pronoun to loose poem from it's meaning
moorings, pushes for re-formation of language, dealing
more with abstract use of usual words and experimental
sytax that Joyce's dialect or neologism. Regular
language used irregularly. McCaffery takes us through
Dada and Futurism (Hulsenbeck, Hugo, and Marinetti et
al) and their experiments with deformed/misheard
primitive languages and onomatopoetic neolgisms. And
he points to the Lettrists as those who moved from the
word as unit of experiment to the letter. And for me, at
this point, the experiments go awry, for when we are
talking about phonemic poetry, let's face it, it sounds as
if one were making fun of people who struggle to speak
(watch me struggle to say this in an inoffensive way).
So the veins of the mine that have yet to be fully
explored are those opened by Joyce in particular and
Stein as well in reshaping the word-unit via mishearings,
via slang (neighbor of dialect, really), via unexpected (or
unitended...hello, chance composition) proximities.

I think they were all (Hugo Ball, Joyce—though he never

said so, Stein) turned on by syncopation and the freeing
of meter that jazz wrought. Riff, circularity, humor,
vulgarity, pulse. Check out when Stein writes:

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"All the time that there is use there is use and any time
there is a surface there is a surface, and every time
there is an exception there is an exception and every
time there is a division there is a dividing. Any time
there is a surface there is a surface and every time there
is a suggestion there is a suggestion and every time
there is silence there is silence and every time that is
languid there is that there then and not oftener, not
always, not particular, tender and changing and external
and central and surrounded and singular and simple and
the same and the surface and the circle and the shine
and the succor and the white and the same and the
better and the red and the same and the centre and the
yellow and the tender and the better, and altogether."
That's like a great orchestration—early Ellington. Like
"Harlem Airshaft"—distinctly modern (Duke was going
for a picture of life clustered around the backs of Harlem
tenement buildings, an area that Ellington referred to as
"one big loudspeaker"). It's about having an ear for the
world. Joyce and Stein were deep listeners. Language
that is distracted by the new, by velocity, by technology
—gramaphones, megaphones, mechanized and
syncopated. I don't know if Pound was a listener in the
same way. That and he was batshit crazy (although I still
like the ABCs of Reading and Gd to Kulchur).

I'm glad you quoted this Stein. Listen to it roll. We've

talked about how passages of Jack Kerouac's October in
the Railroad Earth, especiallly as read by him, are as or
more musical, more rhythmic, with more forward
momentum, be it a limping momentum than any capital-
P poem. This too, (the Stein) is a rolling, forward
propelled, delicious bit of prose as poem. You know, TdR,
that for me Sound is King. I love the notion of having an
ear for the world. Yes, what if we listen to language the
way Cage listened to cars driving by in the street.

Ring is what a bell does. (Lew Welch)

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And really, the listening needs to be with ears squinted,
with the radio dialed just between two channels, not
playing static, but intertwining the sounds of each
channel.
The bottom line: the poem is the field in which language
can do or be made to do what it cannot otherwise. It's
made of the same stuff as the phoned-in pizza order, the
legalese contract, the speech, the Dear John. But in the
poem it is permitted, no, more than permitted, it is
required to do more, to be more. If your precious,
shapely note to me about your experience on the bus or
in the backyard, with its subtle, little epiphany is all that
you expect of language, all that you can make with this
stuff, these words, I've no patience. If that poem differs
only in content, really, from the thousand that came
before it, what's the point? Write a little fiction and call it
good. Fiction needs your lilting turn of phrase, your
clever metaphor more than the poem does. She's had
enough.
The poem is experimental ground for every and anything
that can happen with or to word. And that, I think, is my
Manifesto.

This is a similar feeling I have about sounds and the

production of sounds. Eddie Prévost, drummer of AMM,
has a book called No Sound Is Innocent. But they may be
ambiguous, misremembered manifestations, but
everything is fair game. It's about surface studies for me
—drums, cymbals, gongs, even water is about surface
and an extension thereof. Remember the Bosavi Rain
Forest people: LiftUpOverSounding. . .Gone Reflections.
I like "misremembered manifestations." These, of
course, are bean spasms.

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NEXT THOUGHT, BEST THOUGHT
Given that this document was nearly lost or corrupted as
sections Tim wrote disappeared, I'm going to address
the notion of next thought, best thought, the idea that
we can release the ideas rather than grasping them,
with the belief (crazy maybe) that there will always be
another, and another. I'm riffing, of course, on "First
thought, best thought," the Beat dictum that advocated
flow over edit, free expression over convention,
especially of the grammatical or editorial variety.
Kerouac's typewriter roll of a novel as example. "That's
not writing, that's typing!" said Truman Capote. I think
that the metaphor of the rhizome is a good one here—
you and I like to connect ideas, words with instincts,
reflexes —trusting that the hunch will pay off. That
somehow chrome, cor-ten, Marinetti and Rauschenberg
and Maira Kalman can co-exist in space. Riffing is key.
Yes/and.
In an era of The Big Share, in which we think in public or
"mindcast"...

What a ridiculous word—it must have come about

through crowd-sourcing via various electronic tools.

I happen to like the distinction, Tim, between

mindcasting, sharing thoughts and researches, versus
lifecasting, i.e. "I am eating a roast beef sandwich." For
those unfamiliar with these terms, they're used
especially in reference to twitter as communications
tool. Mindcasters share thought, lifecasters share what
they're doing. For those unfamiliar with roast beef
sandwiches...eat one in honor of EIGHT today as I plan to
do. [oops, lifecast]

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...in the era of The Big Share, one can only live in next
thought, best thought mode. Copyright is likely going
away, your intellectual property will all be Creative
Commons, and what's more, your great ideas are going
to go through the great recombinatorial mill of a
thousand thinkers thinking back to you (at you) via a
multitude of channels: blogs, comments on blogs,
reviews, tweets, and on and on. Perhaps, like Bjork,
you'll encourage the remixers to take your ideas (her
songs) and use them as raw materials to create anew.

Umbrage, I take umbrage. Next thought, best thought is

a very pulse-driven instinct for the improviser, but the
recombinatory elements remain—in this musician's case
—my own. The act of making is public, transparent, open
for all, but I'm Captain of my Provenance. I don't have a
shred of original technique or ideas, just a vast array of
means for reorchestrating the delivery.

I think it is worth pointing out to those who don't know

this about TdR that he is a jazz drummer who plays both
straightahead and very out. Improvisation, then, is a key
notion for both his playing and his thinking. Also, the
idea of the improvisational re-interpretation of the
received (a jazz "standard" or song all jazz
musicians/lovers know) is central to the way that jazz is
played/lives/evolves.
To prove how serious I am, I will now quote a
Frenchperson: “Profound changes are impending in the
ancient craft of the Beautiful. In all the arts there is a
physical component which can no longer be considered
or treated as it used to be, which cannot remain
unaffected by our modern knowledge and power. For the
last twenty years neither matter nor space nor time has
been what it was from time immemorial. We must
expect great innovations to transform the entire
technique of the arts, thereby affecting artistic invention
itself and perhaps even bringing about an amazing
change in our very notion of art.” But I'm still in charge.
Paul Valery said that by the way.

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The point remains that attachment to your cultural
product (or the manifestation of your idea) is an
antiquated way of making and thinking in the world. Yes,
when you are playing improvisational, avant-music, you
are next thought, best-thoughting, but once you record
it and put that session out on CD, you are attached to
owning that product. I'm saying that the healthiest
position is to stay in next thought/best thought mode.

But, but, but, but, but, but. We do. Everyone is welcome

to problem-solve—embrace the same set of tools,
constraints, sounds and finite time that I have to make
something. Sure I can be folded, spindled, remixed. . .I
can be "co-authored." But this will not (to paraphrase ol'
Henry Adams) "break my historical neck by the sudden
eruption of forces totally new." I agree with you that the
Big Share is a big deal. It's sad that it's replacing the Big
We/Grand Us/Daily We of that democratic old-growth
media institution known as the Newspaper, but c'est la
guerre.

Your idea of replacing has to do with the tool not the

fundamental nature of communication or creation of
cultural product, be it song, book, work of art. You're
going to either have to explain or distinguish.

It has to do with with the fundamental frame of looking

at information/entertainment and the changing
participatory nature of audience. When you can curate
how/what you pay attention to and are able to filter out
what you don't want—you don't get a full-compass view
of the public realm. Richard Sennett says that the word
"public" has to do (coming from the literal Greek) with
"bringing people together who need each other, but
worship different household gods." Yes cultural creation
is changing, but how it's made public (and whether it
have any type of permanence) is up for debate.

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Perhaps to make my case, I shall now quote an
INFLUENTIAL MODERN POET: "All experience rushes into
this vortex," Pound wrote in l9l4. "All the energized past,
all the past that is living and worthy to live. ALL
MOMENTUM ..., instinct charging the PLACID, NON-
ENERGIZED FUTURE. . . . All the past that is vital, all the
past that is capable of living into the future, is present in
the vortex, now."

Wow, it's amazing how you can just MEMORIZE things

like that and pull them out at will.

I'm badass.

Wait a minute. You have confused two things.

I see my strategy is working.

One is the cultural product.

WAIT.

Wait-er-um-hold-on. . .
1. you're talking about atomization of the news. How we
receive information. "when you curate how/what you pay
attention to and are able to filter out what you don't
want"
2. I am talking about releasing the little white bird of
your cultural product rather than keeping it on a short
lead. I'm talking about affirming the current realities of
the recontextualization/remix of cultural product that
goes on daily via YouTube videos, collage, fan fiction, as
well as the artist remaking the famous artist's art work.

Improvising artists release their little white birds or giant

roaring lions to the public over and over again. What I

21
think might be at odds is that we exist in a different
relationship to cultural dissemination.

Explain.

Our "cultural product" exists for such a small corner of

the world, that perhaps people who enjoy are just fine
with it as it is—it's not somehow worthy of being
fetishized by remixing, sampling, etc. I'm just
"conjecturizing some facticity."

[ASIDE: we now open up off-book discussion of the use

of esoteric, funktastic grad school words thanks to TdR's
"conjecturizing" of "facticity." Example to the positive,
my luscious experience reading Steve McCaffery's "Voice
in Extremis" in Prior to Meaning: The Protosemantic and
Poetics last night at the Tugboat while TdR was playing
music with Dana Reason...speleography, sonosophers,
mimophonic, thanatic...these are some of the words now
circled that will send me joyfully to the dictionary. Just
for fun. McCaffery, god love him, is a project. A Very
Good Project. Example to the negative: overuse, loosey
use of words like agency, hegemony, evidence (as a
verb) in cultural writing, esp. academic arts writing (not,
incidentally, published in academic journals but general
arts pubs. Fun.] Reminds me of Damon Wayan's Oswald
Bates character from In Living Color: "Unfortunately, we
could not impregnate everyone. It is simply beyond our
colonic threshold." "I believe it was Plato...No, excuse
me, I mean Play-Doh...who stuck to the wall when he
said one must not put one's transvestite in jeopardy."

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Athens Not Sparta
And I'm not just talking about the news. When we no
longer have to listen to the voices of those we disagree
with, then we've ceased to be a flowing, healthy
democracy—finally on to Civility and Democracy!!
Wheeeeee. What intrigued me about the recent New
Communicators hootenanny (as well as OR Humanities,
PCS programs and anyone else concerned with
"conversation") was the recognition that we're lacking a
fundamental "commons" for conversation. To pull from
Sennett again, he says that one of the challenges of
urbanism is creating and nurturing the public realm.
That without conversation we have no public realm. We
want Athens (minus the slaves and all the bad things),
not Sparta, where the knuckle-dragging, Oregonian-
comment trolls reign and yell and refuse to engage in
civil dialogue.

Ah. Well this is another matter entirely. This speaks to

the issue of Hmm. You've really tacked in a new
direction here.

This is one of my threads. I'm allowed.

Fine.

But of course, you've brought up transparency and the

fact that anonymity is the enemy of civilized discourse.
And that without civilized discourse, we can't have either
a healthy democracy with citizens committed, having
"bought in," to its institutions if not every policy.

23
This is why one always signs one's Manifesto.
Otherwise it's merely graffiti. I was struck, in reading
Anti-Intellectualism in American Life by Richard
Hofstadter by the fact that this democracy has had to
deal with the negative effects of anonymity since day
one (or day two). That anonymous broadsides smearing
Jefferson and later Adams are the analogue of the
anonymous blog post, or worse, the anonymous
commenter on said post who has no motivation to be
civil and thoughtful when he'll never have to stand
behind those words publicly--in front of his grandmother
and the lady in the checkout line. We think our
technologies have enabled this anonymity and the evils
it permits, but they are only the latest in a long line.

I was struck by a similar we've-been-here-before-ism

when I moderated the panel on the future of journalism
at the library—it dealt with issues of transparency,
liberty/democracy, entitlement, etc. And we realize
whether we want to quote deTocqueville or Liebling,
Jefferson or Hofstadter, we don't learn from history. I
was reading Anti-Intellectualism during the last
presidential election and struck by the florid-yet
accurate parallels between Adlai Stevensonand
Eisenhower/Nixon and Obama and McCain/Palin. Same
with criticisms of blog-osphere that are the neighbor of
those related to late-Gilded Age "yellow journalism."

24
Intimacy in Contemporary Art
I'd been wanting to write about the small, the micro, the
house concert rather than the stadium, the move in
certain circles, away from the dramatic, ovesized
gesture in favor of the personal or human scale. I'd seen
projects here in Portland especially that were making me
feel as if something was happening, something small.
It's soundtrack is lower-case improvisational music or
pop with melodicas. It's commercial success is a return
to a primitive drawing (Marcel Dzama=leader of pack).
It's pocket-sized, ego-less (by which I should clarify that I
mean less ego, not ego free, ha ha), friendly...or at least
it appears to be.
I began collecting examples:
• Kathleen Keogh's solos in her living room
• Pied a Terre gallery, the one-room gallery in
McIntyre Parker's apartment at 20th and Belmont
• any one of a million conversation-based
performances...say Liz Haley's lie detector piece
for PICA's TBA 08
At one point, I thought that it was the domestic that was
the trend. The salon-style delivery of art
product/performance. This was brought to a head by
Open House, the exhibition Karl Burkheimer and Michelle
Ross organized in a house in SE Portland with both site
specific work and regular hangings but all on a domestic
scale.
Then I remembered Tim Etchell's neon installation "WAIT
HERE, I HAVE GONE TO GET HELP." It's a neon sign
installed in a window. It is at once intimate, the artist
talking directly to you, and urgent...something's wrong.
And I realized that intimacy, real, fake, manufactured,
implied, is the stuff of all these works. Reminds me of

25
when Brad Adkins was putting up signs that said "Free
Kitten" around downtown—it touched you in a resonant
way, but it was a fake—getting just the desired
response.
Intimacy implies (most often no doubt fake) familiarity
between artist and viewer as well as the exploration of
something private. Intimacy in art is making public the
personal or the private. It can be done in a craven way,
witness Tracy Emin's tent, or in a subtle way, as when
dancer Kathleen Keogh invites a handful of people to her
small apartment one morning to view an improvised
solo. She is both inviting the public into the private
space and making the private act of process (we watch
her stretch beforehand, watch her gather up some
costumes, blow her nose) public. KK's version of
intimacy is perhaps more ulterior-motive free than
Emin's. There's no gotcha element to KK, it's more a
balancing act with trust, privacy and proximity.Could not
agree more regarding the risk, trust involved in Keogh's
living room solos.
In the case of Pied a Terre, setting up a domestic space
for the viewing of art changes the relationship between
viewer and work. That the gallerist is sitting at his
kitchen table while the visitor views the work both
makes the work less precious, bringing it closer to being
in the world, and opens up possibilities for
conversation...a first step to familiarity/intimacy...that
would not be present in a white box situation.

This also brings up that bit that Adam Gopnik talked

about, relative to families, children and museums:
"developing a casual relationship with the place of art in
our lives." Making it not the grand expectation, or
demanding obeisance and silence in the face of art, but
nurturing a direct, intimate exchange between an object
or performance which gives pause, wonder, begs
questions and the viewer.

26
Intimacy as a work ethic is also interesting—the hand-
made, the fallibly human. It comes back to the primacy
of conversation: you and I. Triangulation, you and I and
another person's ideas (this was one of the key things to
Wm. H. Whyte's Social Life of Small Urban Spaces. .
.being able to have a triangulated conversation—
intimacy within a larger public sphere). Intimacy and
immediacy are related I think. I prefer jazz because it is
about conversation with one, two, three, five others in a
smallish venue for a (one hopes) generously
appreciative, yet modest-sized audience. The
transaction is immediately evident.

In my professional arts-worker life we talk a lot about

"social capital" and recalibrating our relationship to
audience. So much of this seems to be yearning for
small measures of scale. Our metaphors—town square,
main street, backfence,etc.—are rooted in idealizations
of small towns and the "good life", yet we love us some
cities. Portland has it both ways: 200x200 foot blocks
that encourage us to turn corners more frequently,
encounter variety, and discourage the trappings of un-
intimate big cities (big box retail, slabs of brutal gotham
progress).
Brings us to that word that we hear used a lot these
days: authenticity. On second thought, I'm not going to
use the "a" word.

note to self...social practice art, real triangulation vs.

fake intimacy

The difference between art that hectors with a promise

of "social practice" vs. art that is participatory and
civically engaged. The former is a strategy for art-
making, generally double-encoded with a wink—not
necessarily as interested in fostering inclusive access.
No names.

27
Regarding fake intimacy and its opposite, the very real
possibilities for triangulation between art work/performer
and two viewers: this is the crux, I think, or measure of
success of art conceived/executed under the rubric of
"social practice." Successful social practice work
changes the dynamic between, the relationship between
not just artist and viewer, but viewer and viewer. A
situation generated to change the way you and I relate
to each other, often, but not always in less formal
ways...leading to a proto-intimacy between viewers.
Ironically maybe, it's the same sort of intimacy created
in public crisis, a disaster say, in which those
experiencing the crisis (or work of art) share something
(the experience) they didn't before. This becomes a
platform on which to build a different relationship, even
if it lasts only as long as the monkey dances around on
the organ grinders shoulder or until the dust settles.

When one learns to play in the balance between

art/entertainment; distance/proximity; "A violent luck
and a whole sample and even then quiet"—it's a
different thing. The monkey dancing, the dust settling,
the musician playing for diners gets to address a number
of "social practice" strata. I've thought a lot about
intimacy as a tool in music. I've played four feet from a
couple engaged in a romantic dinner, supporting the
"relational aesthetics" of their evening with Rodgers and
Hart or Amos Milburn. The ambiguity of public space and
the introduction of mood-altering elements—voices,
music, tension, food, etc—is continually fascinating. This
is why we've seen a proliferation of "flash mob" activity,
subtle and really-not-so-subtle things that infringe on the
"rules" of public space. I'm much more interested in the
dance that occurs by never letting the fulcrum swing one
way or another. Music can be time-machine, antacid,
attitude adjustment, soundtrack of whatever consensual
crime you may be contemplating. What we don't want is
to toy with that intimacy and lose our covert cover.
I do think it's interesting that we're addressing intimacy
when you mention above, correctly, that you and I are
both interested in art's history of the heroic. I'd say I'm

28
even (and this is really tipping my hand here) nostalgic
for a time in which the idea of working large meant
something. That it was not simply the expected ploy to
advance one's art career by appearing to be serious in
working at scale, but that it was a programmatic
strategy...that scale flowed from ideas like human scale,
the scope of peripheral vision and the envelopment of
the viewer, the field large enough to serve as a platform
for full-body gesture of Pollock's process, for example, or
even subject as in the Serra painting at the Portland Art
Museum. And the notion of heroic isn't only expressed
through scale. The idea that the way an artist works
could change the way humans think and live, as say with
surrealists and awareness of, channeling of the
subconcious (better in principal perhaps, than result).

We need a Manifesto: "We shall sing of the love of

danger, the habit of energy and boldness...we shall extol
agressive movement, feverish insomnia, the double
quick-step, the somersault, the box on the ear, the
fisticuff." —Marinetti
We need work like Serra's that demands that you
acknowledge being in the room with it. That IS about
intimacy. It challenges your distance as a viewer. Cecil
Taylor does that with music. There is nothing passive
about it. Yet it springs from a very idiosyncratic and
intimate relationship with sound, collaboration and time.

Interesting because you're suggesting that being

wrapped in a Rothko or absorbed into a Reinhardt is
every bit as intimate as being required by a work of tiny
scale to approach it to within kissing distance to be able
to experience it at all.

On some level, yes. But on another, it's about audience

—size of audience for the work, and the way in which we
communicate the work to others. It's hard to qualify the
effect of a Rothko, Reinhardt, David S. Ware
performance for those not initiated to the power of it.

29
We generally have to find intimate terms and strata of
emotion to describe the work. Or merely say, "you had
to be there with it." It has to do with the audience's
inability to key into what is incredibly unfamiliar. The
language for understanding it is simply not spoken on a
large scale. The music is played constantly, albeit, to
small audiences, but nonetheless played. The music
lives on, to quote Kirk Varnedoe's visual art related
words, "principally through unrecorded, nonverbal,
subjective responses."

Anxiety of Influence | Singer-not-the-Song | In

Constraints there is Freedom
Two things just happened between now and when I last
typed. In the car on the radio [note: we took a break],
Miles Davis was on—"So What" from Kind of Blue. Big
deal root-checking. I just commented to someone that
for 10 years I listened to Kind of Blue at least once a
week. That was a very liberating record for a lot of
people. Some took it as a road-map, some a springboard
for further excursions into modally-based improv, but
from hearing many young players who studied with the
guy who studied with the guy who studied with Miles'
next door neighbor, many took it as gospel—WWMDD.
Jazz used to exist as a continual form of rebellion—and
yes, the drummer was usually the first in line. These
days, rarely do we feel the need to Kill the Fathers—once
a modernist rite of passage (yes we're back to the
"swerve" of atoms and Lucretian thinking). Now we
venerate and copy. Not everyone, there are many more
influences creeping in, beyond the usual jazz suspects—
enough at least to be able to still proclaim it a
democratic and global form.
The other thing that happened was a talk with Oskar
(our son) about an art assignment. He didn't want to
work on an assignment that dealt with Takeshi Murakami

30
as inspiration/starting point. He doesn't feel good about
Murakami, because he doesn't make his own work. "It's
cheating." I mentioned that Jeff Koons doesn't either
(which I said is too be expected because he's a d-bag in
just about every other way as well). Yet, Oskar still
needed to do the assignment. I muttered something
about "it's the singer, not the song." I went on to explain
that constraints are powerful tools for creativity: how
much of the assignment can you address and still bring
what you want to bring into the work? What do you like
about Murakami (not much), okay, what don't you like?
What if you take his work and interpolate it into your
piece with a commentary addressing how you feel about
an artist who doesn't make his own work—Follow the
rules, but allow your feelings to form a layer of subject
matter/critique. I then told him about how on a gig, you
might get a request for a tune (Satin Doll, Girl from
Ipanema, Climb Every Mountain, etc.) that you might
think is a tired old saw—but then the test is, you want to
be a badass Steve McQueen MF (or Sonny Rollins—
example I used was "How are Things in Glocca Mora"
from Finian's Rainbow) you come out swinging and make
people love the song in a whole new way, in unnatural
ways, in ways they didn't know they could love. That's
what a good artist does. Work with constraints and make
things unexpected happen. McGyver does that too.

31
Education
This brings us back around to one on my list: Education
—how we learn; how we maintain curiosity and wonder
and allow for pathways to new learning.
With all the time I've been spending thinking about arts
education in the last year, it's opened up a lot of
questions in general for how we learn, different styles of
learning—those Gardner Multiple Intelligences, and
certainly watching the kids move forward, made me take
a harder look at assumptions about children and
learning. Oooh the classroom, such a stringent little box.
45 minutes for this, then switch gears. Striking that
balance between nurturing curiosity and sustained
engagement and so-called standards is a sticky wicket.

We've talked a lot about the importance of the arts in

school...the question of what happened to all of those
instruments in elementary schools that were a part of
our music classes, made freely available. I played violin,
viola, flute, drums, xylophone, all but the violin were
made available to me free at school.

Now regarding the arts in schools, besides lamenting our

losses, we talk about an arts experience versus an arts
education. Education implying mastery of skills,
experience suggesting a drive-by, one-time. One of the
things that's frustrating is to see so much time
squandered on trying to convey art’s value through
‘‘hard evidence’’ —data. Yes, we need data, but we need
stories, real stories about real kids engaged, saved from
the brink by the intrinsic value of dance, poetry,
painting. Alvin Ailey was one of those kids.
I'm not sure that data does the job. Do we need to
quantify the number of oboe players that result from a

32
music education program? Can we not agree in a
qualitative value for the experience of (and to some
degree competency with) visual arts, music, dance?
I've been reading Diane Ravitch's book, Left Back, a
history of 100 years of school reform and it would seem
we've never had more than a 20-30 period of any
accepted approach to learning: progressive school
reform of the Dewey era gave way to Life Adjustment
education in the 40s and 50s. NCLB is one more stab at
trying to set some standards. Sad thing is we've got so
many points of entry in this history that we can't figure
out what a "back to basics" approach is. I'll tell you this
—its ringed with music and arts.
Merryl Goldberg, in a piece last year noted that, "As first
introduced into the public schools in Boston in 1837,
music was framed with the following three standards for
its functionality: the teaching of music developed
students’ intellectual capabilities, moral attitudes, and
physical strength. Here are the standards as they were
originally written:
1. Intellectually. Music had its place among the
seven liberal arts, which scholastic ages regarded
as pertaining to humanity. Arithmetic, Geometry,
Astronomy, and Music— these formed the
quadrivium. Memory, comparison, attention,
intellectual faculties— all of them quickened by a
study of its principles. It may be made to some
extent a mental discipline.
2. Morally. Happiness, contentment, cheerfulness,
tranquility—these are the natural effects of music.
It is unphilosophical to say that exercises in vocal
music may notbe so directed and arranged as to
produce those habits of feeling of which these
sounds are the type.
3. 3. Physically. It appears self evident that exercise
in vocal music, when not carried to an
unreasonable excess, must expand the chest and
thereby strengthen the lungs and vital organs.
Judging then by this triple standard, intellectually,
morally, and physically, vocal music seems to

33
 have a natural place in every system of
instruction which aspires, as should every system,
to develop man’s whole nature.
Time for an inspirational quote: Rebbe Nachman of
Bratslov once said, “The antidote to despair is to
remember the world to come.”
Diane Ravitch commented on a recent report connecting
graduation rates in high schools with access to arts
education, "Young people are more likely to stay in high
school when the school offers a solid program in the
arts. It also shows the inequitable distribution of access
to the arts among children in different communities. The
report cries out for immediate action. Is anyone
listening?”
The report she mentioned was striking. It doesn't tell us
anything we didn't already assume to be true, but it told
the story with rope-a-dope bluntness, data, story (and an
undercurrent about equity and social justice) brought
the point home:
• High schools in the top third of graduation rates
had almost 40 percent more certified arts
teachers per student than schools in the bottom
third—or, on average, one additional arts teacher
per school.
• High schools in the top third of graduation rates
had almost 40 percent more physical spaces
dedicated to arts learning per student than
schools in the bottom third.
• High schools in the top third of graduation rates
had 35 percent more graduates completing three
or more arts courses than schools in the bottom
third.
Who's going to argue with that?

I love that "happiness, contentment, cheerfulness,

tranquility" are considered states that are worth
engendering through the pursuit of teaching music.

34
Well, PPS's mission is "to support all students in
achieving their very highest educational and personal
potential, to inspire in them an enduring love for
learning, and prepare them to contribute as citizens of a
diverse, multicultural and international community." Can
you honestly tell me that stripping music, art, PE, adding
blocks of classroom time dedicated to a dulled down
notion of literacy are going to meet that goal? A more
reflexive "Cultural Competency" recognizes that the arts
are a bridging tool, something that builds empathy—and
as we become a more "diverse, multi-culti/int'l
community" something that will be vital to translate who
we are/how we learn/how we connect/and how we
maintain intercultural understanding. It is not enough to
say that the arts teach "how to paint or draw" or that the
arts teach creative expression. We need to go beneath
the surface and discover what underlying cognitive and
social skills are imparted to students when the arts are
taught well.
There many kinds of thinking dispositions that get
inculcated as students study arts techniques. Arts is part
of a “hidden curriculum” that nurtures habits of mind:
skills, alertness to opportunities to use these skills, and
the inclination to use them. We want better thinkers.
Until we advocate, make the case for the value of arts,
we can't get kids, humans, where they need to be.
"Achieving...personal potential," and inspiring a "love for
learning" are lofty goals, and aimed exactly as high as
they ought to be.

I'm going to switch gears and talk about how we learn,

specifically how we learn language. First of all education
and learning are two very different things. One is
programmatic, top down, the other is organic, bottom
up. You and I are testament to the fact that learning
continues when education ends. Our kids are testament
to the fact that learning for children happens before and
outside of school, outside of the traditional American
models for education as much as it happens within
them.

35
The striking thing about how children learn language is
that it's based on imitation and on the idea of aiming in
the general direction of the thing without worrying
whether or not you're going to hit the target. So mushy
pronunciations are par for the course. And those aimings
in the general direction are celebrated by that facilitator
of learning (not a teacher in the traditional sense) the
parent. If the word pronounced is in the general vicinity
of the word the child is aiming for, the parent is likely to
be overjoyed, praising the effort not criticizing the result.
Brilliant education reformer, homeschooling
apologist/theorist John Holt (How Children Learn, How
Children Fail) has a lot to say about how absurd it would
be if we taught speech the way we teach children to
write. The analytical methods we use to teach the what
of language confound the how of it, the request for the
cookie, for example (in early years it sounds like "Dat"
with a pointing finger..."Oh you want 'that'? That's a
cookie."). There's no graphing of a one word sentence
like, "Dat." There's no need for verb tense, pronoun,
adverb...he knows the cookie is "in" the jar or "on" the
plate but doesn't need to know those words are called
prepositions. The point is that the teaching can get in
the way of the learning in myriad ways.
In the field of the poem, I'm interested in unlearning
what I've learned about language. About that early
aiming toward the word that communicates the thing by
shaping the mouth in a way that produces an
approximation of the word. Again, it's a slight tuning out
of the word, tuning between the frequencies, to hear
what might be there. I think I need to hang around some
toddlers again for a while.

36
The Future of the Book
Let me tell you about my relationship with important
books. Not just any books, and not just any books we
live with here (because we live with a LOT of books.)
Let's start with my relationship with McCaffery's Prior to
Meaning, since I just picked it up again yesterday, and
as it's a good example of an Important Book. Here's how
it happens: I find the book, in this case because of
McCaffery and the Google, in other cases because of
bibliographies, recommendations from acquaintances
and other smart people. I check it out from the library (I
love you Multcolib and interlibrary loan). And I realize
after a first reading that this is important. It's something
that touches on/informs a thousand preexisting threads
of my thought, and it's something to which I'm going to
return again and again. Because I need to interact with
the book more extensively, I buy the book. And I read it
again with pencil in hand, dogearing the good bits with
larger and smaller dogears for emphasis. Perhaps, as
with McCaffery, I look up some of his more esoteric
terms in the dictionary and write my own glossary in the
back.

Let's not forget the bibliography—this is the wonderful

vortex that leads to more tendrils.

Now, how will this translate to the electronically

delivered book? I am a big advocate of acesss to books. I
was raised in a little town with a little library and access
was sorely limited. So the fact that I can find even
selected pages of books on Google Books is something I
value highly. There are still kids out in the middle of
nowhere with no access to the actual book (sure you can
buy any book via the internet, but let's assume a kid

37
with limited means, shall we?), but now they can at least
gain introduction to the ideas therein.
I am also thrilled by the searchability of scanned books.
That I can find reference to an idea embedded in a book
I'm not familiar with is the gift of a thousand research
librarians.
But in our list of requirements for the digital book of the
future now, and besides the obvious requirements of a
low-light solution (that won't kill our eyes as monitors do
with their little pin-prick flashlights pointed at our
retinas), let us include the possibility of annotation...I
need to be able to underline, circle, question in the
margin, write "Ha!" beside an absurd connection or
claim. And let us include the functionality of the dog ear,
a page marking mechanism that will allow me to quickly
get to the good stuff. And don't tell me that search
solves that, it doesn't.

Amen, Sister!!

I may not remember exactly what I dogeared and so

cannot search for it, but I can flip through the dogears
and be reminded.

Testify!!

38
The future of the book is secure—as long as you
can find it.
One of the frustrations in our house is that I don't
necessarily care if the books are in any order. I know
where they all are, because I've got a freakish memory. I
also remember what pages things are on in those books.
This is not okay with some people. I think it lends itself
to a more nonlinear approach to ideas and connections—
it's all about the "rhizome". An approach to knowledge
that allows for "multiple, non-hierarchical entry and exit
points in data representation and interpretation." It also
means I don't have to alphabetize a bunch of things in
categories. I like the red books next to the other red
books. This says a lot about how I like to process
information—and The Way Things Work. If I'm writing
about jazz and get stuck, I might look at something
about urban planning or medieval history, AJ Liebling or
something that jars loose something else. If I put
everything where it "belongs" it's all over. Steve
McCaffery would approve.
This proximity of book on shelf is something we lose with
the digital because then we're relying for that happy
accident on an algorithm on the Powell's website or a
random search result. It's the same thing I think about
the encyclopedia...how many times did you look
something up and become entranced by the thing next
to the thing, a couple of pages or columns over that
might have introduced you to a new piece of information
or...think about things in a whole new way. I definitely
will just go to a call number to check out what's in
proximity to that great book I read. What's the future of
this experience? I don't know.
Case in point: Interior Design since 1900 is next to Ed
Dorn's Gunslinger, which is next to the Penguin book of
Victorian Verse, which (this makes some sense) is

39
followed by Kerouac's Subterraneans, Frank O'Hara's
Selected Plays, poems by my pal Eugene B. Redmond,
some Charles Bernstein and the Modern Library Greek
Poets collection. All kinds of connections and
sympathetic magic can arise from things being
neighbors. Common denominator: that funky PreSocrat
Heraclitus, I'm sure. You can't cross the same river
twice.

We still have to make the book titled: Bibliography that

can trace either simply the books on our shelves or our
reading paths. I regret that I hadn't asked Multcolib to
trace my reading history. Their website has that
functionality. I didn't know.

I started doing it. Mainly to confound the Feds.

Very funny.

This has been a mighty fine way to spend some quality

thinking time. Rhizomatic, fast and loose.

Did you ever define rhizome or rhizomatic?

Yes I did—see a couple paragraphs up. . it's more about

the tendrils and the roots crisscrossing, burrowing and
emerging into the light at unexpected points—allowing
for unintended connections to arise; or as you might say:
"unscheduled lane changes."

40