“You made me drink a Purée of Lizard Hearts.”
On and on and on this statement, said in the voice your none other than yours truly, echoed inside my cranium as I woke up in the hot morning sun. Indeed, in a dream Armando had concocted a bright red smoothy in super hearty portion for me, as a way of winning my heart back. Enough puns there. There was also a train, a green Nicole Kidman, and a woman with long and curly blond hair. Don’t ask.
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Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club, curated by Anne Colvin, presents:
Stefanie L. Ku performing
unraveling the trailokyan selvage + plummet inversion of a lilliputian asurawith XXX_LIVE_NUDE_GIRLS!!!
a video by Jennifer Walshe Friday, March 27
unraveling the trailokyan selvage (2009) plummet inversion of a lilliputian asura (2008) piLPA is a dance of light and noise. Layers upon layers of carefully manipulated noise morph in and out of one another, their motion not unlike that of spiraling vortices and gusty winds. Interspersed are processed samples of huluci (Chinese reed instrument), alto saxophone, and bass guitar. Certain type of temporal manipulation convey a sense of claustrophobia, as if they are sirens muted by a numbness often observed in modern day society, perhaps signifying the arrival of a dystopian society laden with invisible yet ubiquitous surveillance on all its denizens. The visual aspect of piLPA is constructed mainly out of light; light from a halogen bulb refracted by irregularly faceted glass was filmed then put through a feedback loop until a certain consistency of flickering texture is achieved. Artificial shapes (from architecture) is manipulated and composited in order to break up the homogeneity and support the claustrophobic dystopia portrayed by the audio component. XXX_LIVE_NUDE_GIRLS!!! is a music theatre piece in the marionette opera tradition. In this case, the marionettes are fashion dolls of the Barbie or Sindy type and their “theatre” is a large doll house. Two puppeteers work in and around the doll house to manipulate the dolls through their story. The musicians are scattered on the stage, surrounding the house. Two singers cover all the vocal parts. The libretto of XXX_LIVE_NUDE_GIRLS!!! takes the thesis of Aristophanes’ Lysistrata as a jumping-off point, following three women and their boyfriends through a tragic narrative. XXX_LIVE_NUDE_GIRLS!!! was recently performed in the Auditorium Parco Della Musica, Rome. Jennifer Walshe is a composer and singer, born in Dublin, Ireland in 1974 and currently lives in NYC. Jennifer’s work has been performed throughout Europe, the U.S. and Canada by numerous ensembles. Jennifer is also active as an improviser, performing regularly with musicians in Europe and the U.S. ************************************************** New Langton Arts *************************************************** |
As one of the audio contributors of Sommeil, I would like to share the following concert information with you.
Sommeil: A Concert for Sleep will be Menard’s reinterpretation of the sleep concert experiment, first created by Robert Rich in 1982 and will be presented at the Antenna Gallery 3161 Burgundy St New Orleans, LA 70117 in the heart of the St Claude Arts District. The concert will be realized with Rich’s permission and guidance. Sleep concerts are all-night events in which the audience is asked to attend the concert with a sleeping bag and pillow and to fall asleep while a slowly unfolding sonic texture evolves over the course of the night and into the morning. People attending the event are asked to be willing to sleep during the event or at least to remain silent during the course of the nine hour experience. Not merely a recreation of Rich’s original idea, Sommeil is a conceptual, global remix of a performance type that addresses one of the most basic functionalities of ambient and environmental sound; music by which to sleep. international community of artists. We are asking $5 per hour to experience the meditative environment of the sleep space and $3 per half an hour from noon to 9:00 pm on Saturday April 11th. At 6 pm we will also be participating in the St Claude Gallery Opening that falls on the second Saturday of each month. All proceeds will benefit Antenna Gallery. Please visit the following site to follow the event as it unfolds:
“Today Mercury is part of a mystical pattern that puts you in contact with parallel universes. Keep in mind that if you try to get overly scientific, your logical analysis can be enough to close the inter-dimensional portal. You don’t need to do anything special except acknowledge the possibility of things you don’t understand.” Or so my daily horoscope tells me. My feelings toward this prediction is but neutral, although it did make me reminisce my dream early this morning.
In dream, I was on a quest for knowledge that is locked away in the space that exists between the two brain hemispheres. The narrow space in between every brain that ever existed and will ever exist operates like a hologram; once you unlock your own, you gain access to all. It’s a long quest, I had to travel from continents to continents, from time to time, and I had to learn many languages, most important of all Spanish. SV took on the part of a mentor in my dream, she would show up once in a while and give me a clue as to where to go, in the event I got stuck.
After I learned Spanish I longed to communicate with my love AJ, but he was nowhere to be found. I looked everywhere, and when there’s no sign of him having ever existed and that I started to tumble down the rabbit hole, SV showed up to give me a clue.
“Go see the giant prophet who rests below the water wheel,” said she.
The clue took me on a journey. At the end, I found what I was looking for. There is a giant fish, who lives in the very bottom of a giant, ridiculously tall cylindrical plexiglas tank. It’s so deep that you have to take an elevator down just to get a glimpse of it. At the top of the tank is a giant ever-churning wheel, where tons of fish are dumped in every hour of the day to sustain the life of this fish prophet. I brought him a lot of fish to eat, but at the end he did not tell me a word of truth. As with most prophets, he spoke in riddles. Although I do not remember exactly what he said, it became clear to me that he was lying through his teeth and that he had eaten AJ when he set out to look for me long ago. The disgusting blob of fish flesh hinted that he himself is nothing but an “assimilator,” who takes what he devours and propel the memories of the flesh into that space that exists between the two brain hemispheres. But I was not too keen that my love has become immortal by way of ichthyic digestive glory. In fact, I was absolutely devastated by the idea. I don’t care that AJ might be dreaming the eternal sweet dream, I want him warm, alive, in the flesh!
I manufactured a disease and gave it to all the fish in the world. As the prophet beneath the water wheel slowly ingested all the fish population on earth, he too became diseased, and eventually died. The final descent of the subject of my revenge woke me up, and I realized in that clarity between dream and sleep that by destroying the giant fish I had burned forever the path that bridges my existence with my love AJ’s. I could have found AJ’s embrace if I were to have chosen to feed myself to the fish prophet, but now that he is dead the separation between AJ and I is set in stone.
What is the moral of the story? That we are all eternal in the collective brain soup? That if I fight the assimilation I will become vengeance-reincarnate and be forever haunted, utterly alone, and stuck in a vicious cycle of regret?!
Sometimes, enlightenment is a real bitch.
Kyle, AJ and I were involved in a high school play competition. Having been inspired by a recently acquired iPhone’s ability to GPS-map the origin or anything and everything, we decided to portray the origin of the stock market… which can be traced along a starry trail in the velvety night sky to a tiny island north of Norway. To make it really over the top, we decided that we’re actually going to film the play on the very island, and simulcast it to our high school.
The island was eerie. There is one grocer, one cafe / restaurant, and one gas station. They’re all in the same place, owned by the same person, a Spaniard, and run by his daughter.
The actual play went really well. We dressed the island up in props, and we acted out the origin of the stock market and it was glorious, complete with costumes in such vivid colors that the rainbow would shy in comparison.
First dream entry of 2009! This is supposed to go into the awesome Indonesian leaf book AJ got me… but I’m not in my realm right now, so things don’t go where they are supposed to go.
I slept in a upstairs bedroom of my mother’s house as she lay in a bed in the hospital’s ICU ward lingering in a state of in-between. Magical creatures came to visit me. From a window that opened outward to a starry sky, came in a peacock and llama. I was composing with a machine borrowed from Curtis, and these two came and took the machine! I rushed to the window in time to catch a glimpse of their fast disappearing back sides… the peacock glided away into the velvety night, utterly silent. It wasn’t even flapping its wings, just glided. It was fat too, so it looked like a jade-turquoise egg, getting smaller and smaller as it got further away. I went out to look for them.
It’s a beach town, somewhere south maybe San Diego or Encinitas. People (tribal spiritual zion people) were out on the boardwalk, and I eventually went inside a house, led by inquiries about a llama with an old synthesizer. The house was empty, people were in the process of moving out. It had in various rooms built-in counters covered with molded crocodile skin, each room also was once painted with vivid façade, but now faded and chipped. Some people came in while I probed around. I asked them if they know of a llama and peacock, and they said “Yes, we see them around. They go to parties sometimes…. here! You might find them at this party later.” I got an invite. On the way to the party, I met some people. Hiroko is the only name I recall. I remember encountering a lot of winding staircases enroute, almost Mediterranean. Then it was a series of me chasing the llama, and the peacock…. it became a dance, we were just tailing one another in circles; I came to enjoy them.
The llama was wise and always smiling…. I think he was really a Tibetan monk, though in reality there are, of course, no llamas in Tibet… only Peru. The peacock was a messenger-type character. I was always silent, a friendly robot glider. Curtis was in the dream too. He was simply there, noticeably older, but he was happy to see me and he radiated love for everything in this universe. I love my magical dream friends, and I wish to see them again. But please… don’t steal a synthesizer from me again.
Now, with this warm and fuzzy feeling of abstractly knowing that I’m not alone, I must return to the hospital and endure the cold…. for I must keep the fire lit, so that my mother can find her way in the dark.
Dearest Dad,
Hope you’re doing well! I just finished a second 3-day seminar with BF. It turns out the rebirthing as taught by BF is his own derivation of a couple of disciplines: Jim Leonard’s Vivation and Warner Erhard’s EST. Schools of thought and organizations that fall under the “human potential movement” of the 70’s often gets the cult reputation. BF strikes me as a good teacher because he is a great filter. After having lived and learned through the midst of all that 70’s stuff, he is well aware of the phony new age-ism and differentiates quite well true knowledge from organizations who were on to something but didn’t quite know what they’re doing.
Rebirthing, as I know it, is a simple yet highly effective kinesthetic method to clean up psychic dirt and one’s self-programmed beliefs about the world that cause one hindrance. The body remembers, and there is a bodily sensation associated with every emotion and feeling. By paying the body and its every little sensation your utmost attention while practicing a certain way of breath, you integrate and resolve unconscious presumptions, beliefs and issues that no longer serve you. There is a comparable method that is widely accepted by the general public, it’s called therapy. But the mind is vast and can be very deceptive. It is much more direct to integrate on the body level, instead of peeling away layers and layers of the mind through psychoanalysis.
The three notions of EST:
1. You’re perfect but there are barriers that prevent you from experiencing and expressing your perfection.
(Such barriers are often incompletion from the past that exist in the body as stuck energy).
2. Resistance leads to persistence.
(This is a function of polarity consciousness. To get rid of something is to let it be. Ignoring, such as feigned optimism, is actually a form of rejection and resistance).
3. The recreation of an experience makes it disappear. Re-experiencing something to completion disappears it.
The five components of rebirthing / vivation:
1. Circular breathing
(A continuous way of breathing that entails purposeful inhales through either the nose or mouth and relaxed exhales).
2. Complete relaxation
3. Awareness and detail
(Allowing yourself to pay the most prominent sensation in the body your utmost attention).
4. Integration into unity
(Unconditional love for oneself. For every sensation that comes up, realize it’s perfect just the way it is by comparing it only to itself).
5. Do whatever you do, willingness is enough
(Trust and let go. You don’t have to stress constantly over whether you’re doing it right).
A lot of these information I have conceptually figured out for myself in the past 20-some years, but it helps immensely to have it laid out in a structured fashion and just hear someone else tell it out loud. Learning the kinesthetic aspect of things gave me a lot to take home to practice.
I think it’s absolutely necessary for me to study these things, because we all have it on some level in our hearts, we just kind of overlook it because it isn’t a knowledge that is taught in schools. One day we should not even have to study it, and will know it just as inherently as we know to wake when we are rested and sleep when we tire. I know that to many people, it seems like I’m just going around learning a bunch of irrelevant and useless stuff. But the truth is, even though this type of wisdom is not a specialized knowledge that will directly make me successful in a certain career, they make me a more successful human being.
P.s. One thing, there was this lady, we’ll call her Ms. D. She has systemic scleroderma. Before Ms. D told me about her disease and before I noticed that three of her fingers on each hand had fused joints, I found her strangely familiar. Despite being a healthy middle age caucasian female, Ms. D just reminded me of 關阿姨 because of her looks and her voice. Ms. D had gone through three major episodes of the same disease and stopped all three episodes herself…. if she had done what her doctors told her to do, Ms. D would have gone through numerous joint replacement surgeries and probably had multiple organ failures, maybe even died, instead of being the physically active, happy, and working for software development company.
love,
s.L.k.
Last night I dreamed of my parent’s child. It’s not clear which parent. The child is not my sibling, just a parent’s offspring. It was on a four poster bed in the middle of a forest by itself when a bear came along. In order to save it, I took it and turned it into a thousand hard-shell worms. Then just to be sure, I stuffed all those worms into a tall glass cylinder so that they wouldn’t scatter…. after all it’s like a puzzle I’ll have to put back together once the bear is out of the picture, if a piece went missing all would go to shit.
The tall glass cylinder was supposed to be filled with an oxygenated liquid, but that’s where things went wrong.
It was wrongfully filled with some extreme alkaloid or acidic (not sure which) fluid. I killed the worms. I killed my parent’s offspring. Then something dawned on me. A realization came, that it was actually my offspring. Then all hell broke loose.
I killed the bear. I tried to revive the worms, reassemble them, but they would just limply fall apart again, halfway transformed between human flesh and insectoid lumps. Come to think of it, worms aren’t even insects. Fragments of many-legged arthropods perhaps. Whatever. That ended the dream. I didn’t know what to think of it….. this particular dream world has always been so visceral, never shy of body parts flying around. Limbs get severed, decapitated heads get weeped on… but never was there any fear in this dream world, only a deep sorrow rooted in love and in passion.
The dream I had so weird that I woke up not knowing what to think. In it, I was visited by a friend who looked a lot like Blanka. She was distraught, so I offered to make her some fish soup. Turns out, in the world of this particular dream, fish soups are made from boiling water with goldfish in it… and the goldfish are little chefs who make the soup inside the soup, and not an actual ingredient of the soup, contrary to popular beliefs. Being resilient to high temperature is obviously a prerequisite for the goldfish so they live to tell the tale, but I guess some just can’t take the heat. As I let the water boil and worked on other things, I heard a little voice.
“Hey, it’s hot!”
Who? What? Then the voice continued:
“Get me out of here! I’m not cut out for this kind of charity work!”
I scooped the goldfish out from the pot, and he turned into a Brazilian. The fish-turned-man swore me friendship and eternal respect, then he handed me a little velvet pouch. I opened it, an array of brilliant gem stones of all different colors and sizes lay before my eyes.
“What is this?” I asked. To which the Brazilian replied:
“These are fish eyeballs…. all the possible size and shape and color my eyes could have been if I were to have grown up into an adult fish.”
So I just unwittingly became the guardian of artifacts from parallel universes, by lending a goldfish a helping hand?! Gnarly!
“They are not just pretty, they are functional.” He continued. “They will come to your aid if you are in need, but beware of the implication your thoughts, as sometimes to aid you is to destroy another.”
This particular dream ended here, cut to another scene
Had a dream.
I was back in the house I lived in Sacramento during high school years, except it is located on the moon. Grandpa had given me a pair of “personal helicoptors,” vespa scooters for the sky, but one was broken and the other one was missing. It turns out my male cousin from my dad’s oldest sister had stolen it. I went to demand a safe return of grandpa’s present, but the culprit’s sister, also my cousin, came out and threatened that if I dare tell grandpa about her brother’s theft of the helicopter, she’s going to make sure I never get a job, ever in my life (I guess because her family owns the world). I had counted on flying back home, but without the helicopter I was trapped in this strange land with all these hostile people that worked for these evil cousins. The sky was grey with pouring rain, and I was stuck at a bus stop with no money to go back to the moon. Then, a bus driver said he would give me a free ride if I were to sing him a song. “But I don’t know any lyrics, to any song.” Then, out of desperation, I sang a song with made up words that told the story of a helicopter who awaits its rescue, for it is imprisoned by thieves who had stolen it from the person that loves it. I guess it was a good song, because I got a ride home. Once back on the moon, I took out my address book to look up grandpa’s address. I was going to ask him to buy me a new helicopter. The next thing I know, Armando was rousing me and asking me to stop crying.
“Why are you crying?”
“I’m dreaming about my grandpa.”
“But your grandpa’s dead.”
“I know…. I just forgot.”
So I told grandpa about the dream and my interpretation of it when I visited his grave just now. For my dream character, the helicopter symbolized freedom and the means to obtain / acquire freedom. It has been taken and kept away from me. Robbed of my natural rights, I am engulfed in feelings of isolation and helplessness. Then, through utilizing my musical skills, I let the truth be heard by anyone and everyone who had means to hear, and found a way out of this state of despair. Filled with confidence from my latest breakthrough, I took the step to ask for what I want and what I think I deserve. I told all this to grandpa, assuring him that I was happy about this dream in retrospect because I see it as my own readiness to open up and accept the notion that it is okay to ask for things, have partners, and not always do everything by myself. Let’s see if he gives me that helicopter ^_^
