P I S S S S E R

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Asylum by Christopher Payne

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Check out my video - Centaured

2009-05-20T00:48:00.000-07:00

http://www.downtownhomo.com/718/light-headed.html

Stills From Cruising

2009-05-12T00:33:00.000-07:00

Under My Thumb

2009-04-23T00:26:00.001-07:00

Hypertext

2009-04-23T00:14:00.000-07:00

Psycho-Geography

2009-04-22T23:28:00.001-07:00

Parable of the Madman

2009-04-19T10:04:00.001-07:00

THE MADMAN----Have you not heard of that madman who lit a lantern in the bright morning hours, ran to the market place, and cried incessantly: "I seek God! I seek God!"---As many of those who did not believe in God were standing around just then, he provoked much laughter. Has he got lost? asked one. Did he lose his way like a child? asked another. Or is he hiding? Is he afraid of us? Has he gone on a voyage? emigrated?---Thus they yelled and laughed

The madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with his eyes. "Whither is God?" he cried; "I will tell you. We have killed him---you and I. All of us are his murderers. But how did we do this? How could we drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there still any up or down? Are we not straying, as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night continually closing in on us? Do we not need to light lanterns in the morning? Do we hear nothing as yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God? Do we smell nothing as yet of the divine decomposition? Gods, too, decompose. God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.

"How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it? There has never been a greater deed; and whoever is born after us---for the sake of this deed he will belong to a higher history than all history hitherto."

Here the madman fell silent and looked again at his listeners; and they, too, were silent and stared at him in astonishment. At last he threw his lantern on the ground, and it broke into pieces and went out. "I have come too early," he said then; "my time is not yet. This tremendous event is still on its way, still wandering; it has not yet reached the ears of men. Lightning and thunder require time; the light of the stars requires time; deeds, though done, still require time to be seen and heard. This deed is still more distant from them than most distant stars---and yet they have done it themselves.

It has been related further that on the same day the madman forced his way into several churches and there struck up his requiem aeternam deo. Led out and called to account, he is said always to have replied nothing but: "What after all are these churches now if they are not the tombs and sepulchers of God?"

Source: Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science (1882, 1887) para. 125; Walter Kaufmann ed. (New York: Vintage, 1974), pp.181-82.]

Realness

2009-04-17T14:42:00.000-07:00

Ode to Joy

2009-04-12T22:41:00.001-07:00

Derek Jarman & Coil - Art of Mirrors / I Don't Get It

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tNB-6lHcvFI

Concept Images For Pier Monument

2009-02-20T18:04:00.000-08:00

"Fungi also flourish on decay"
Stills from BBC Planet Earth

Stills of the Piers from Gay Sex in the 70s by Joseph Lovett

2009-02-20T17:25:00.002-08:00

“The waterfront was probably never anything but tough and dangerous [he continued] but now with this long slow transition period has become a veritable muggers’ playground, both for people who go only to enjoy walking there and for a recently popularized sado-masochistic fringe. Since most or all the terminals that are not still in use are standing wide open without no-trespassing signs or public warnings of any kind so that it would seem a state of city condonded anarchy reigns there. If in the midst of this state of affaiars it would seem within the rights of an artist or any other person for that matter to enter such a premises with a desire to imrpove the property, to transform the structure in the midst of its ugly criminal state into a place of interest, fascination and value.

To the police, he presented himself as something of a benefactor to the sexual cruisers - though - it is doubtful how many of them really wanted great floods of light admitted to the space, not to mention hazardous chasms gaping in the floor. To Becker, he casually acknowledged (in a way that would find little favor im artistic circles today) his being in competition for the space with “the teaming [sic] s&m renaissance that cruises the abandoned waterfront.” To some friends in Texas, he described his temporary conquest in even more jocularly combative terms: ”I simply appropriated the pier by keeping my crew of henchmen boarding and barbwiring up all the alternative entrances except for the front door in which i substituted my own lock and bold.” He was also highly conscious of the theatrical potential that lay in the enterprise....”
[Thomas Crow: Gordan Matta Clark page 14-15]

Not too sure who the original photos are by.

2009-02-20T17:25:00.001-08:00

“The flaneur is the priest of the genius loci. This discreet passerby with his priesthood and his detective’s flair...But the dandified figure of the stroller was complemented in Benjamin by another, more subversive image: that of the vagabond who alone, criminal and exiled, possessed the marginal vision that transgressed boundaries and turned them into thresholds, a way of looking that engendered what Benjamin called the “peddling [colportage] of space.”

Anthony Vidler, Warped Space, p. 74

Porn Distortions by James Swain

2009-02-18T17:56:00.000-08:00

Love is the Devil Film Stills

2009-02-18T12:18:00.000-08:00

Iconostasis

2009-02-18T10:48:00.000-08:00

Allen Ginsberg AMERICA

2009-02-15T11:53:00.000-08:00

America I've given you all and now I'm nothing.
America two dollars and twenty-seven cents January 17, 1956.
I can't stand my own mind.
America when will we end the human war?
Go fuck yourself with your atom bomb
I don't feel good don't bother me.
I won't write my poem till I'm in my right mind.
America when will you be angelic?
When will you take off your clothes?
When will you look at yourself through the grave?
When will you be worthy of your million Trotskyites?
America why are your libraries full of tears?
America when will you send your eggs to India?
I'm sick of your insane demands.
When can I go into the supermarket and buy what I need with my good looks?
America after all it is you and I who are perfect not the next world.
Your machinery is too much for me.
You made me want to be a saint.
There must be some other way to settle this argument.
Burroughs is in Tangiers I don't think he'll come back it's sinister.
Are you being sinister or is this some form of practical joke?
I'm trying to come to the point.
I refuse to give up my obsession.
America stop pushing I know what I'm doing.
America the plum blossoms are falling.
I haven't read the newspapers for months, everyday somebody goes on trial for
murder.
America I feel sentimental about the Wobblies.
America I used to be a communist when I was a kid and I'm not sorry.
I smoke marijuana every chance I get.
I sit in my house for days on end and stare at the roses in the closet.
When I go to Chinatown I get drunk and never get laid.
My mind is made up there's going to be trouble.
You should have seen me reading Marx.
My psychoanalyst thinks I'm perfectly right.
I won't say the Lord's Prayer.
I have mystical visions and cosmic vibrations.
America I still haven't told you what you did to Uncle Max after he came over
from Russia.

I'm addressing you.
Are you going to let our emotional life be run by Time Magazine?
I'm obsessed by Time Magazine.
I read it every week.
Its cover stares at me every time I slink past the corner candystore.
I read it in the basement of the Berkeley Public Library.
It's always telling me about responsibility. Businessmen are serious. Movie
producers are serious. Everybody's serious but me.
It occurs to me that I am America.
I am talking to myself again.

Asia is rising against me.
I haven't got a chinaman's chance.
I'd better consider my national resources.
My national resources consist of two joints of marijuana millions of genitals
an unpublishable private literature that goes 1400 miles and hour and
twentyfivethousand mental institutions.
I say nothing about my prisons nor the millions of underpriviliged who live in
my flowerpots under the light of five hundred suns.
I have abolished the whorehouses of France, Tangiers is the next to go.
My ambition is to be President despite the fact that I'm a Catholic.

America how can I write a holy litany in your silly mood?
I will continue like Henry Ford my strophes are as individual as his
automobiles more so they're all different sexes
America I will sell you strophes $2500 apiece $500 down on your old strophe
America free Tom Mooney
America save the Spanish Loyalists
America Sacco & Vanzetti must not die
America I am the Scottsboro boys.
America when I was seven momma took me to Communist Cell meetings they
sold us garbanzos a handful per ticket a ticket costs a nickel and the
speeches were free everybody was angelic and sentimental about the
workers it was all so sincere you have no idea what a good thing the party
was in 1935 Scott Nearing was a grand old man a real mensch Mother
Bloor made me cry I once saw Israel Amter plain. Everybody must have
been a spy.
America you don're really want to go to war.
America it's them bad Russians.
Them Russians them Russians and them Chinamen. And them Russians.
The Russia wants to eat us alive. The Russia's power mad. She wants to take
our cars from out our garages.
Her wants to grab Chicago. Her needs a Red Reader's Digest. her wants our
auto plants in Siberia. Him big bureaucracy running our fillingstations.
That no good. Ugh. Him makes Indians learn read. Him need big black niggers.
Hah. Her make us all work sixteen hours a day. Help.
America this is quite serious.
America this is the impression I get from looking in the television set.
America is this correct?
I'd better get right down to the job.
It's true I don't want to join the Army or turn lathes in precision parts
factories, I'm nearsighted and psychopathic anyway.
America I'm putting my queer shoulder to the wheel.

Violence and the Sacred

2009-02-01T23:28:00.000-08:00

Like all biased pronouncements, Freud's strictures on Greek tragedy ultimately turn against the author. Ultimately it is Freud himself who appears guilty of "refined hypocrisy." And the modern critic in his concerted effort to undermine the structure of all religious, moral, and cultural distinctions ultimately brings these distinctions crashing down on his own head. He sets himself up as the prophet of new insights and new ideas, as the sole posessor of an infallible system of analysis - and finds himself condemned to recapitulate al the age-old distinctions of difference: Tiresias redivivus!

--Rene Girard, Violence & The Sacred

Lewis & Clark Map Arcadia

2009-01-30T03:23:00.001-08:00

James Swain
Lewis & Clark's Mapping of Arcadia
2009
72" x 36" approx.
silkscreen on found sewing board

Joseph Beuys, Or the last of the proletariat by Thierry de Duve

2009-01-28T06:52:00.000-08:00

The ritual, obsessional, and quasi-exhaustive character of this list of the roles he either assumed or impersonated )lacking - and this is significant - only those of factory worker and prostitute) sets up echoes between Beuys’ work and an already extensive litany of similar identifications, all of them allegorical, of the condition of the artist within modernity, and all of them leading directly - more than a century distant - to a mythical country peopled with all the romantic incarnations of the excluded as bearers of social truth. THe name of this country - where strollers and dandies cross paths with peddlers and ragpickers; wehere art students and medical students thumb their noses at philistines; where the sins of the streetwalker are redeemed by the love of a young poet; where humanity is more humane in the brothel than in the church or palace; where the underworld is the true aristocracy, tuberculosis the pardon of syphilis, and talent the only riches - the name of this country is of course bohemia. It is a literary and imaginary country where in a deformed image at once tragic and ideal, there was dreamed a humanity to replace the real humankind that peopled the Europe of the nineteenth century, and that industrial capitalism had pitilessly set against itself by dividing it into two new antagonistic classes, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. Doubtlessly, the real name of bohemia or at least, the name of its correlate within the actual world , is the lumpen proletariat: a no man’s land into which there fell a certain number of people...Dickens nd Zola have described this dark fringe of industrialization, these shady interstices of urbanization. Like Baudelaire, Hugo and many other novelists who hardly professed naturalism, they also poured their inspiration into it, and contributed to the fabrication of the image of this marginal lumen proletariat society transposed into bohemia. Bohemia functions all the more as the figure of a humanity of replacement in that it is a suffering humanity, such that nothing but true human values - liberty, justice, compassion - can survive there, and such that it contains the seeds of a promise of reconciliation.

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2009-01-27T20:28:00.000-08:00

David Wojnarowicz, Rimbaud Mask, 1978

ARTHUR RIMBAUD

“Paul Claudel called Rimbaud “the supreme mystical visionary of France”; his wildly original poetry is inspired throughout by a vision of the alchemical power of words to transform reality by evoking and creating the divine truths latent within it. Rimbaud consciously thought of himself as a prophet and seer and “inaugurator of a new freedom.” Toward the end of his creative life, however, this sometimes vain vision gives way to a more authentically mystical understanding of the necessity for humility and charity. Rimbaud’s quest for a transformatory “magic” became a discovery of the transforming power of love and of the surrender to the mystery of God.

I say that one must be a seer, make oneself a seer. The poet makes himself a seer by a long, prodigious, and rational disordering of all the senses. Every form of love, of suffering, of madness; he searches himself, he consumes all the poisons in him, and keeps only their quintessence. This is an unspeakable torture during which he needs all his faith and superhuman strength, and during which he becomes the great patient, the great criminal, the great accursed - and the great learned one! - among men. - For he arrives at the unknown! Because he has cultivated his own soul - which was rich to begin with - more than any man! He reaches the unknown; and even if, crazed, he ends up by losing the understanding of his visions, at least he has seen them! Let him die charging through those unutterable, unnamable things: other horrible workers will come; they will begin from the horizons where he has succumbed!

From Letters
The Essential Gay Mystics, Page 166 - 167

2009-01-27T20:16:00.000-08:00

2009-01-27T20:11:00.000-08:00

“Alchemy is known as “the Royal Art” (Ars regia). The root of the word is the Arabic al-kimiya, “the black earth,” a literal reference to the alluvial m ud deposited by the Nile to form the soil of Egypt and a symbolic reference to the dark First Matter of the Work. Alternatively, the word Alchemy may derive from the Greek chyma, “smelting” or “casting.”

Alchemy is the precursor of chemistry as well as the repository of the metallurical wisdomm of the ancient world. It encompasses a physical practice, an artisan’s craft in which exquisite alloys of metal, dyes, colored glass, and composite materials are developed. In spiritual terms, Alchemy is the utlimate symbolic description of the transformations from the dark leaden physicality of earthbound conscioussness to the refined gold of the spiritually illuminated being, strictly concerned with inner dynamics resulting in the purification of the body, mind, and soul.

The goal of Alchemy is called the Great Work. It is the purification of the lesser and gross and its elevation to the greater and more refined, whether in metals or in conscioussness. The FIrst Matter, Materia Prima, is the reduced and original substance and condition of each object of the alchemist’s attention. Dark, passive, unformed, virgin, it is the universal field for the imprinting of all forms. Through numerous, time-consuming, and sometimes dangerous processes, the FIrst Matter is transformed into the Philosopher’s Stone. This accomplishment is most commonly symbolized by the transformation of lead into gold: Incarnated Light; the most glittering, luminous, valuable metal; symbol of the Sun and thereby of spiritual conscioussness and attainment.

Alchemical writers were unanimous in preaching and promising the spiritual rewards of the art. Gold as the final goal of the metallic kingdom is a symbol of spiritual illumination, the final goal of human life. In the mineral kingdom, gold represents the perfectly formed offspring of the union of positive and negative, male and female. Gold...is considered an implicit component of all metals in greater or lesser degree, based on their density, much as the illuminated spiritual reality is considered implicit in the soul of each incarnate human, no matter how overlaid with vice and ignorance.

ANother facet of alchemy is the search for the elixer of life, or Vegatable Stone. Known as the Universal Medicine, its properties include the power the heal the sick, improve health, and prolong life. The search for this panacea ultimately resulted in the discovery of several ingredients now included in the modern pharmacopeia.

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