note_12 Kandahari Cramps? A human fly linking Busheyr, Bandar Abbas, Bhuj in Kachhch and Dubai -of course…
Desert Terror
Creech Air Force Base, Nevada, 45 miles N of Las Vegas, home of the MQ1 Predator Drone
Five years after writing this short story, Buzz, Buzz, Buzzzzz, it feels timely to share it here (below). It describes drone flights over Herat, Khorasan and Iran’s central plateau across to Bushehr and Bandar Abbas where the drone tracks back east again. I wrote it in the voice of the drone (mad thought obviously), which begins in the kind of (monstrously violent/ deeply racist) formulaic AI-speak of its makers -also in Nevada- but changes when brought down to earth in Iran, as the RQ-170 actually was, where it encounters people and place, face-to-face…
Commissioned in London, written and submitted from Bhuj in Kachhch in December through January 2012-13 -where I was also in March 2003, incidentally, when the declining US Imperium unleashed shock ‘n awe/invasion ‘n occupation on Iraq, making the ground move where I was standing too- to be published and launched at Dubai in March 2013. Continue reading “note_12 Kandahari Cramps? A human fly linking Busheyr, Bandar Abbas, Bhuj in Kachhch and Dubai -of course…”
note_11 Standing not drowning; I’m Green, you’re Green, we’re all Green | 3 May 2018
I am standing as a Green Party candidate in local elections in the North Walworth Ward where I live -and where once I articulated or ‘led’ what became a community campaign to rescue an urban forest and its unrecognised commons value. A campaign (2010-2013) which achieved ‘major development’ planning precedents (now in the new London Plan), a redrawn Masterplan around retained trees, removed roads and a park (albeit not yet* public), and the replanting of about 1600 trees all around the Elephant and Castle (albeit not yet* linked closely enough to it).
I agreed to stand with no illusions Continue reading “note_11 Standing not drowning; I’m Green, you’re Green, we’re all Green | 3 May 2018”
note_10 Rose, Feet First – Roy Oxlade catalogue, Odette Gilbert Gallery, 1987
Feet First Roy Oxlade 48×60 1986
I stumbled upon two folders that I have not seen/touched for maybe 15 years and found a lot of nice things; postings from Sebastian Horsley, exhibition cards/list from Birch & Conran, the Basquiat publications from Serpentine Gallery 1996, a letter of departure from Grant Watson, a copy of UNDERCUT the London Filmmakers’ Coop magazine, number 17 with transcriptions of the entire Cultural Identities 4-day screenings/discussion from 1986 (w Jean Rouch, Black Audio, Sankofa, Rose, Spivak, Mercer, Gidal…), other catalogues of The Music of Cornelius Cardew at SBC (Fri. 13 Dec 1991), from Nicola Durvasula and Liza May Post…
Plus! a 1987 catalogue from Odette Gilbert Gallery on Cork Street of a Roy Oxlade show. I can only share this out of an enthusiastic rescratching-back-together of things. Of course the paintings contain Rose Wylie Continue reading “note_10 Rose, Feet First – Roy Oxlade catalogue, Odette Gilbert Gallery, 1987”
note_09 “It may require courage (but) take these marvelous essays to heart” Mezzaterra, Ahdaf Soueif
Take these essays at difficult things inside you, let them pulse through your body and mind. And to your heart, yes. It may require more courage – in Britain, in English- than even I conceived in the last months of 2004. Courage and none at all, because these are a range of essays -as the short review below makes very clear.
I’ve been trying to develop a measure of truth in the context of the Persian Gulf and the regime in Abu Dhabi in as universal way as possible from an inventorised location in London and in English. I settled on a millennium-old measure from an Arabic treatise on taste. More on that in links to publications to come, but it reminds me of the increasing difficulty of being able to recognise a Palestinian right to exist in Britain or in English. Continue reading “note_09 “It may require courage (but) take these marvelous essays to heart” Mezzaterra, Ahdaf Soueif”
note_08 From Shumon Basar’s superhuman Couples Format; me on Gertrude & Alice #passionloveandwork
Shumon Basar | Couple Format: The Identity Between Love and Work
“What was the identity between love and work,
or, the love found in working together?”
“Let’s draw focus on their passion: the love and work. The following is from Diana Souhami’s glorious book Gertrude and Alice:
‘“Our pleasure is to do every day the work of that day,’ wrote Gertrude, ‘to cut our hair and not want blue eyes and to be reasonable and obedient … Every day we get up and say we are awake today …’
… So we circle back to The Autobiography of Alice B.Toklas, which wasn’t of course an autobiography. What was it? […] Primarily, it was also an autobiography, but not of Alice. It was a biography: not one authored from outside, but from inside, albeit in another’s voice… I linger with this because while this is one of the most conventional prose-like works of Gertrude’s it is also properly strange. That is, Gertrude adopted Alice’s recognizable voice, exorcising as many Gertrudisms as she could identify, though not all, to write a memoir of her own life and times.”
-extracted from my text/talk COUPLING | Gertrude and Alice | July 2016.
Click through for links to Shumon’s piece and the Superhumanity project above and for the recording of the original event on G&E and Marina Abramovic and Ulay click my Readings_Talks button (where you can click on through to see/hear the other Couple Formats too).
note_07 Fig. 28 Peralu, Ficus indica/ benghalensis, ‘Banyan’, Rolla, Paniana tree…
“… condenses the most interesting currents in the region for at least two hundred years, the most potent of all the residues of port activity across the Gulf, the Arabian Sea, Indian Ocean and beyond…” -from Porting One (DXB)
Coming to a screen near you soonish 😉
note_06 On Edward Said Oct 2000 – At last, a genuine Palestinian authority
This is just a short review of Said’s The End of the Peace Process: Oslo and After published by Granta, and circuitously critiqued and celebrated by me in The Independent, 3 October 2000. This paragraph struck me forcefully when I stumbled upon it; such rare qualities are getting rarer just about everywhere… However, rareness breeds rareness, right? When we lament the loss of Said’s voice, we also attest to it (mind/ rareness/ qualities) and renewed possibilities in the ruins. I am a radical optimist. You?
note_05 Wilson Harris (1921-2018) -an inadequate tribute from 1990 #polyhistoric
Photo Eamonn McCabe (The Guardian)
While adding to Chapters_Essays and Culture_Crit, I’ve been discovering how much material there is -its drives and formations- and came across a very short double review from the New Statesman, September 1990. You can scroll a long way down the Culture-Crit page for those very early pieces. Please! This one (or these short paragraphs), on The Four Banks of the River of Space (the last part of Harris’ Carnival Trilogy published by Faber, like all his books), is not exactly a major critical work but does, in its concentrated little way, resonate with me. The G.’s obituary for Wilson Harris does too.
In 1990 there was still something called Commonwealth Literature, a peculiarly handy way of keeping peoples, histories and cultures in place. It’s tempting to write ‘Foreign and…’. Publishing was on the turn Continue reading “note_05 Wilson Harris (1921-2018) -an inadequate tribute from 1990 #polyhistoric”
note_04 “Mr Steinberg is mistaken.” Hannah Arendt: in witness time begins/ Per 1.1.-1.4
“Harold, that girl in that office is nude!”
Another addition to Art_Work is ‘In witness time begins’ (plus footnoting pamphlets called Per 1.1-1.4) from A Thing at a Time at Witte de With April 2013. They emerged from an obsessive focus on a phrase coined by an Italian theorist (and/or his translator); “immobile anaphoric gesture”. But these texts are different from those I wrote a few years earlier using a Slovenian theorist’s phrase; “imbecilic contingent intrusion” in which I could materialise or exemplify what an ici would be (see Essential Things in Art_Work, for example, which exhibited Cerith Wyn Evans’ neon Lacanian loop between the ‘pages’ of my ici2, about Willie Lloyd Turner and his ‘smile’).
