The boundaries of reality are the area of play…

I was instructed to use only song titles from ONE ARTIST/BAND/COMPOSER and answer
the following questions and pass it on to people. Somehow, in my usual haste and carelessness, I had read “use lyrics from one song” and answered accordingly (I know I have difficulty following instructions, sigh). I still like the answers - the song is Falling Away with You from the album Absolution:

Pick your Artist:
MUSE

Are you a male or female:
MAYBE I JUST MISUNDERSTOOD…

Describe yourself:
STAYING AWAKE TO CHASE A DREAM

How do you feel:
I THINK OUR LIVES HAVE JUST BEGUN

Describe where you currently live?
MEMORIES I WILL NEVER FIND

If you could go anywhere, where would you go:
ALL OF THE LOVE WE LEFT BEHIND

Your favorite form of transportation:
THE AIR YOUR ARE BREATHING IN

Your best friend is:
IN SPITE OF WHATEVER YOU BECOME

You and your best friends are:
WATCHING OUR FLASHBACKS INTERTWINE

What’s the weather like:
TASTING THE AIR

If your life was a TV show, what would it be called:
I HOPE I WON’T FORGET A THING

What is life to you:
NOTHING WILL EVER STAY THE SAME

Your relationship:
MOMENTS OF HAPPINESS IN BLOOM

What is the best advice you have to give:
FORGET THAT RECKLESS THING TURNED ON

Thought for the Day:
I CAN’T REMEMBER

How I would like to die:
FALLING AWAY WITH YOU

My soul’s present condition:
CRUMBLING AWAY

My motto:
MAKING THE SAME MISTAKES AGAIN

前几天千儿告诉我, 记得她小的时候大家都管喜欢漂亮女孩的女孩叫”花痴”。这是我听到过的最美的称呼。

“都云作者痴，谁解其中味？”

想来能体会”花痴”二字的真谛的，也应该是上上品，不管他/她是男的还是女的。。。

I can’t help but to be totally delighted by my brilliant friend Pierrot’s theoretical musings every single time (I definitely won’t fail to bring a notebook for our date on Wednsday!). This one on the title of my series “Vis-à-vis”:

dimanche 1 juin 2008

Tathata / sur Chin-Chin Wu

” Pour désigner la réalité, le bouddhisme dit sunya, le vide ; mais encore mieux : tathata, le fait d’être tel, d’être ainsi, d’être cela ; tat veut dire en sanskrit cela et ferait penser au geste du petit enfant qui désigne une chose du doigt et dit : ta, da, ça ! Une photographie se trouve toujours au bout de ce geste. Elle dit : ça, c’est ça, c’est tel ! […] La photographie n’est jamais qu’un chant alterné de “voyez”, “vois”, “voici” ; elle pointe du doigt un certain vis-à-vis, et ne peut se sortir de ce pur langage déïctique.”

Barthes, Roland, La chambre claire, Paris, Cahiers du cinéma, Gallimard, 1980, p.15-16

Extrait de la série “Vis-à-vis”, Chin-Chin Wu, 2006-08

Mon amie Chin-Chin Wu est l’auteur d’une série de photographies qu’elle a rebaptisé récemment “Vis-à-vis”. Je m’interrogeais jusqu’à ce matin sur ce nouveau titre sans trouver de réponse particulière. Connaissant le grand soin qu’apporte cette artiste à fonder son propos sur une série de photographies qui rencontre, j’en suis certain, des réactions très variées, je déduis que ce titre fonctionne comme une petite annexe, une note de bas de page. Sans chercher à l’enfermer dans un sens particulier, ce qui serait de mon point de vue réducteur pour la série, le titre “Vis-à-vis” me semble être néanmoins un indice donné par Chin Chin sur les spécificités photographiques de son travail. Car il s’agit bien d’un pur travail photographique ; inscrit dans son histoire, conscient de ses codes, malmenant une tradition picturale, et jouant avec ce que l’outil photographie peut faire de mieux : brouiller les pistes, faire se superposer les grilles d’analyse du spectateur. L’érotique (la pulsion libidinale au centre de l’acte photographique), le pornographique (la tristesse de la chair offerte dans un éclairage uniforme, morcelée, défigurée), le médical (le point de vue clinique sur la femme et son appareil génital) et le politique (la connaissance des femmes de leur sexe, dans une approche féministe) dialoguent pour une fois dans un travail qui n’exclue aucun de ces champs, qui au contraire s’appuie sur la force polysémique de la photographie et s’enrichie par tous les discours qui y cohabitent.

Vis-à-vis, donc, est un terme qui suppose un échange, un dialogue, fait intervenir la notion du spectateur, du regardé-regardant plus précisément. On dit d’une vue qu’elle est sans vis-à-vis pour marquer l’absence d’un regard de l’extérieur vers l’intérieur, mais aussi pour signifier l’impossibilité de notre regard (puisque supposé voyeuriste) à pénétrer chez l’autre. Le vis-à-vis est un pacte silencieux du regard.

Et c’est précisément le regard, plus que le sexe, qui est au centre de cette oeuvre “Vis-à-vis”.

Currently listening :
Beethoven: Complete Sonatas for Pianoforte & Cello
Peter Wispelwey, Paul Komen
Release date: 1993-08-17

I HATE it when people show up at my apartment uninvited. If I have invited Joe Blob, it does not mean that I have invited his secret girlfriend, roommate, or dog.

Whatever has happened to etiquettes? People should at least have the decency to pick up the phone and call me ahead of time to ask if it’s ok, so that I’d have the opportunity to tell them “no it’s not OK”! Unless of course if it is.

Even if it is, it’s still much more pleasant to get an advanced notice. That’s the way I conceive social interactions, and I was brought up in boarding schools - the most un-private of all places. So I don’t care for your excuses. Next time, I will only let in whoever is invited, period.

And that statement is categorical.

Currently reading : Orlan: The Narrative By Lorand Hegyi Release date: 01 January, 2008

 

LES RENCONTRES INTERNATIONALES DE LA PHOTOGRAPHIE D’ARLES 2007

Projections of photographic series, at the international photography festival in Arles, France, July 2007.
Series by JM Babonneau aka. Better_World_Inc.
and by Chin-Chin Wu aka. Post-Modern China Doll.

We made this video with my coolpix camera and Better World Inc. did the editing. The choice of music is really eerie, which sort of transformed the whole experience for me. I dig it!

On the edge of perceptibility,
Subcutaneous tickles -
I exchange my brightest hair ribbon for a soft kiss,
I tilt recklessly for you.

Each day I get a mili-inch closer,
No need to push further -
Both you and I know,
I tilt at a dizzying angle.

We sit next to the kitchen table,
As I watch you chop the water spinach -
At the rim of sharpness,
I tilt to cut through…

© Post-Modern China Doll

Currently reading : Chimpanzee Politics: Power and Sex among Apes By Frans de Waal Release date: By 10 April, 2000

I finally met M this past Tuesday over what was supposed to be coffee and cigarettes. It turned out to be a 7-hour-long conversation over couscous, vins chaud, rum, and calvados.

We shared the mutual intellectual interest of filming/photographing sex in a way that breaks away from sexual clichés - he’s a pornographer trying to do art, I’m an artist wanting to do pornography (sorry that’s the very short and simplified version). A lot of what he said got stuck in my head, as I have been asking myself some of the same questions. So here you go, for those who are willing to go beyond cream-and-vanilla, or at least figure things out in their heads:

1. The monogamy/polygamy dichotomy.

2. The male/female dichotomy.

3. The same-sex/opposite-sex dichotomy

…

I found this on Exquisitely Me’s blog. I never thought about creating links between the Seven Deadly Sins, but this one does a pretty good job.

Anita read this to me over the phone from Jordan in December. I was going through some difficult times, and she always finds the perfect words to sooth my soul:

Meditation At Lagunitas - by Robert Hass

All the new thinking is about loss.
In this it resembles the old thinking.
The idea, for example, that each particular erases
the luminous clarity of a general idea. That the clown-
faced woodpecker probing the dead sculpted trunk
of that black birch is, by his presence,
some tragic falling off from a first world
of undivided light. Or the other notion that,
because there is in this world no one thing
to which the bramble of blackberry corresponds,
a word is elegy to what it signifies.
We talked about it late last night and in the voice
of my friend, there was a thin wire of grief, a tone
almost querulous. After a while I understood that,
talking this way, everything dissolves: justice,
pine, hair, woman, you and I. There was a woman
I made love to and I remembered how, holding
her small shoulders in my hands sometimes,
I felt a violent wonder at her presence
like a thirst for salt, for my childhood river
with its island willows, silly music from the pleasure boat,
muddy places where we caught the little orange-silver fish
called pumpkinseed. It hardly had to do with her.
Longing, we say, because desire is full
of endless distances. I must have been the same to her.
But I remember so much, the way her hands dismantled bread,
the thing her father said that hurt her, what
she dreamed. There are moments when the body is as numinous
as words, days that are the good flesh continuing.
Such tenderness, those afternoons and evenings,
saying blackberry, blackberry, blackberry.