i started writing a blog
in my head the day Brittany Dennison1 and i were messaging about the word.
(i have decided that i will no longer use capitals the way this autocorrect algorithm tries to make me do)
most cis men of a certain age keep telling me about the old internet (think eighties, nineties, early aughts)
i was telling her how much i loved her blog and then she asked where it came from
the word, that is
and i laughed out loud when she dm’d back, oh duh. web logging.
Hello new internet. Where I write about things that I like. (Honestly never cool enough to have had a MySpace page. I didn’t really grow up with the internet in my
(oh i just realized that this “space” of page will also not let me break words in half with a hyphen.
I could probably change this in my settings, but honestly i just prefer writing.)
house, since my sister had the computer in her bedroom and i didn’t get a smartphone until my late twenties. So please forgive me if it is outdated to think meaning is necessary.
There is this “beautiful energy” this week in the happy valley, (i am not kidding. that is what we call it) Jake said. He is right. We were at a performance that LOCULUS Collective had put together for their festival, which I am attending this weekend.
I had been to PULP before, a few years ago. Found out about it on the internet via Instagram. (Not suggested by Instagram—to be clear.) Someday I want to write about this whole gallery, the space it holds. But for now, I will just say this: this gallery lets folks buy art in installments (!), and so, I saved up and over time (instead of saving up over time, a thing i haven’t figured out how to do totally yet), I bought a painting by Alexandra Duprez. It is next to Ursula’s. It is her favorite place to sit, the stairs, which are right below this picture (not pictured):
Anyway, I am at the first night of the festival. And I go alone, together.2
And together we were sitting in front of two people, white pink balloons and whispers, air being sucked into lungs and blown out again. Into rubber in a darkly lit room. It simultaneously felt as as familiar as a living room performance in your own living room and preternatural.
And then there rose a hum from the back of my brain, where a speaker was carefully placed, where field recordings began to take shape. And light in the dark, on a white wall projected, and Julia Handshuh and Anna Hendricks in round silhouettes against experiential fractals, layered videos on videos, used to make the soundscape behind me.
I am trying to get out from behind my computer after 2020, a year that engulfs all the years ahead of it, eternally present. Also at the back of my brain, and teased out from this picture above, a weathered Palestinian flag, but upon closer (albeit pixelated) examination I realize that it is a red balloon maybe….tied to a tree, above a white shopping bag, above two field markers, a made flag for a Free Palestine. And as the sound fragments expand, lunglike, I hear whole sentences of expression and Maggie Nelson’s name, in conversation or perhaps quoted (so fleeting, sound!), and the balloons take on new shapes in the mind, as I remember the word breathtaking, which triggers the memory of the murder of George Floyd by the police3.
Trigger warning: police brutality. Above is a video I took in April of 2020 in Downtown Seattle. I am holding the camera, and I dropped it when we got pepper sprayed in the face. Luckily, there was a person behind me, who was ready with a gallon of milk to pour over my face and a fresh mask.
This is to say, this first performance moved me in uncomfortable, productive, and (un)recognizable ways that I have a difficult time articulating. It was an experience, which is perhaps the most accurate thing anyone can say about art.
And synchronicity is a strange phenomenon4, that also feels like home in space. I meant to ask the performers about their choice in footage, sound, excerpts, movements, but the night was full of other conversation and gathering. In a physical space, with our technologies, yes, but four, almost five years later in-person.
During the second performance, I closed my eyes halfway through to fully hear the sounds of Greg Kelley on the trumpet & Yoona Kim (pictured below) on the Ajaeng, which is a type of zither from Korea.
photo credit: Jake Meginsky5
To me, in this section of the composition, Greg Kelley seemed to reference Pauline Oliveros’s “The Longest Song in the World.” I wonder whether Joona Kim counts Thurston Moore and Okkjung Lee among her inspirations. It would make sense, given that Thurston spent some years in Western, MA, frequenting Flying Object and Okkjung lived for a while in Boston in the nineties before moving to New York. Using her bow as a saw, she shredded sound in the air.
I am just realizing that synchronicity is a small city, miles apart, which is why this keeps happening, when I realize that Ron Schneiderman, the third performer, gave a lecture on the Estey Field Organ.
When I moved back to Western, MA, I had originally moved into an apartment that was in the old Estey Organ Factory in Brattleboro, Vermont, before falling in love and moving to Massachusetts. Ron made it very clear that he is only interested in the Estey Field Organ, not the Estey Pipe Organ at Epsilon Spires, another amazing space in Brattleboro, so don’t ask him.
What Ron is interested in, however, is the psychology of reverb. In other words (by accident i wrote worlds, and i love slippages), the concept that when we listen to music, we are not ever listening to the same music, which is reverberating off the walls, chairs, floors, and other listeners, who are also tuning into their private symphony. After giving his talk6, we were given QR codes (ha!), and asked to download the sound of the field organ being played so that we could sync (or not) to the various and plenty bluetooth speakers around the room, and we were told to walk around and experience our concert. At one point, I had paused, with my eyes nearly closed. I must have been smiling because a person walked up to me and created a sound bath over my head as she held the speaker to my left ear and then over my head to the right ear.
As the ensemble of voices, chairs, digitized organ notes, were <POWERING DOWN> we laughed as LOCULUS took to the center of the space.
LOCULUS is a collective of Olana Z. Flynn and Maddison Pallfy and company7. I had seen them perform before, but to see them perform is always for the first time. Years ago, I had begun following them on the internet when a former lover had told me about a class they had taken at The School for Contemporary Dance and Thought in Northampton, MA. I think I became aware of LOCULUS after a HUT performance. But they’ve performed in many spaces including Audible Bite and recently at Unnameable Books (MA).
These bodies understand space as a body, too. Which is why each performance is unique8, as they interact with and inhabit their surroundings. As their bodies undulated clockwise around the poles, I was reminded of Félix González-Torres’s Perfect Lovers.
As if planning an entire festival wasn’t enough, these extremely talented people also had the energy to perform.
I am thinking now of time, how I have been writing nearly all day and I have one more performance to write about before I go off to night two of this festival and how I wish it were endless, and I am grateful for LOCULUS for reminding me that it can be. And now Substack tells me I am “near email length limit,” which is an embarrassing way for my computer to tell me to shut up. So I will leave you with a glimpse of the last performance, which I like to think of in relation to my experience of 2020.
Pictured: Jimena Bermejo + Jeff Huckleberry. Video credit: Jake Meginsky.
Brittany Dennison was the publicist at Wave when I was an intern. She is really talented in so many ways and her blog is Say When.
Adam, if you are reading this, I miss you and wish you didn’t have to work at the bookstore all the time because you would love this.
Atatiana Jefferson, Andre Hill, Manuel Ellis, Breonna Taylor, Daniel Prude, Rayshard Brooks, Daunte Wright (with exception to George Floyd, chronologically from 2019-2021, not to mention the years before.)
See footnote one. Maggie Nelson wrote Bluets (Wave Books, 2009).
A really good musician in his own right. I recently saw him play something like a glass harmonica inside an abandoned silo.
…with the audience, as he put it.
See pole.
It is unclear whether they are improvising or this is choreographed, but it is somewhere likely in between, as they have been performing together since 2015.