[a wig of my own hair: before photo au naturel + after photo wearing cranial hair prosthesis]
Starting today, I’ll use the Random Integer Generator to choose projects from the list. (Months ago, the bingo lottery machine arrived broken and most of its 49 pea-sized balls rolled under major appliances.)
This one was conceived in the spirit of painting wood grain on wood or handcrafting trash. A sort of trompe l’oeil of the scalp. I’ve since read that Muslims are forbidden to join hair with the hair of another human, married Orthodox Jewish women have sheitels made of their own hair, and cancer patients are encouraged to save their shorn locks to be woven into wigs after chemotherapy.
It’s the same price* to have it made or learn to make it myself.
1. DePaul University’s Wigs and Hair Production Certificate Program
Cost: $1,575 + $150 lab fee + $80 CTA pass = $1,805
2. Aura Custom Wig from Savvy Sheitels
Cost: $2,200 – $440 (20% discount for sending my own hair) = 1,760
If you give me $17 or more, I’ll send you prints of the before and after photos. I didn’t factor in the cost of paper and mailing tubes and postage, but we’ll let my “Creativity Sergeant” work that out.
If you give me $1,760, you get the wig.
If you give me $81,760 you get the wig and, after death, my cryonically preserved head.
Otherwise, the wig gets donated to a cancer patient.
Unless I become a cancer patient.
If you (collectively) give me more than $1,760, I’ll replace the camera David Horvitz lost at sea.
*It would be awfully funny if I funded this project by selling my ponytails year after year for $25-50 each (the going rate.) Unfortunately, that would take 34-68 years. Quality of my hair notwithstanding, I think we can all imagine the quality of a post-peak custom wig. Shabby sheitel.
Filed under: 192, prithee, thinking about working | Tags: entrepreneurship, peak oil, recession, symbiosis, tithe, unemployment
In honor of this humbled nation’s unemployment rate ascending beyond the tenth percent and my own six months and more service to that figure, I propose this MUTUALLY BENEFICIAL – even SYMBIOTIC – association:
IF, in your tender benevolences, you see fit to suggest a lead that results in paying work*, I will tithe TEN PERCENT (10%) of my income before taxes to you.
Yes.
For, having juiced to pulp my own imagination, I must [forthwith] call upon the stalwart forces of the American Entrepreneurial Spirit, which gives rise to a WILLINGNESS to gamble, gambol in amber fields of schemes, Pull Oneself Up By One’s Bandwidth.
“She very well may keep her word, but not amiably. By-and-by she’ll begrudge that sliver of (cherry) pie. A pity, as it’s a pleasure to serve – and instinct to pocket a dime.”
It pains me to project the indignity of a specious logic upon you, but let not the skeptic spoil the barrel. Whether DIRECTLY as employer or INDIRECTLY as pecuniary matchmaker, you will be Quite Canonized, a Veritable EMT of the Purse. Hot(t) with gratitude, it will be all I can do not to saddle you with the full sum of my earnings forever and anon.
A Fixed Income, may it please your reverences, for the duration of my bloody hold upon the deck. To wit: I am offering you work! If said covenant is carried to execution, expect to adorn your curriculum vitae with “freelance employment counselor” or some such fawning flourish.
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* I conceive of “paying work” as that which pays devalued American post-peak petro-dollars, but would not discount an opportunity to earn shoes, digestibles, dental work, or a vacuum cleaner. I’m not sure what ten percent of a root canal would be though, and I’m not sure you’d want it.
Filed under: 185, thinking about working | Tags: interviews, peak oil, performance, pink collar work, recession, unemployment
In the desperation that attends chronic unemployment, one resorts to the exhortations of “experts,” for example, websites compiling typical interview questions and “sample excellent responses.”
Like the offices to which they aspire, “excellent responses” are cultish, bootlicking, and necessary if you expect to land even the shittiest service job in this country. Reading them, I experienced an emotional return to my fifth temp agency intake last summer, administered by a kind of clerical sadist, as well as writing the ’sample excellent’ proposals preferred by administrators of academic art. In this video, which spans several hours, I aimed to recite a script that violated my integrity to the point of collapse.
Filed under: 173, thinking about working | Tags: beach, meditation, peak oil, performance, pink collar work, recession, unemployment
This project is one in a series, Thinking About Working. In the current job market, many of us do a good deal more thinking about working than working, alas. Though I don’t feel any particular attachment to my undergraduate degree in Philosophy or my extensive employment history in retail, my paper identity (on a resume or application) is defined by their weird contradiction.
For eight hours, the length of an average workday at an office in the U.S., I sat on the beach in my suit, exhibiting that characteristic at the heart of both meditation practice and customer service/ sales “philosophy:” attentive listening. With the costume of the pink collar worker in the environment of the yoga instructional video, I attempted a telekinetic cover letter, refusing productivity while maintaining discipline.
The first slide was taken at 9am, the second at 6pm.
[Send me a list of three artists (any discipline) to whom you’ve been compared/ referred, and I will make/ propose three works you can absorb into your oeuvre.]
Turns out it’s easier to divide than suture, e.g. “as if Karl Marx and Carl Sagan had hired John Lennon from his Imagine days to do no less than redesign the underlying structures of planetary life.”
ST is: Theodor Adorno, Ella Fitzgerald, Eva Hesse (Earth signs, all)
1. sing If bad boys should tempt you in a perfect vacuum
2. book sleeve: most of her favored revolutionary moments aged badly, despite rhythmic perfection and an unmistakable whiff of eroticism
3. Stolen Social Theory, 2009: electrical wire, horns
This project – proposing I be accepted to a residency in order to stage a collaborative inquiry into the question of whether or not artists are narcissists – completed itself this afternoon, with my receipt of rejection.
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Filed under: 179
[work Facebook like a job, after Gary Sullivan's "Television"]
9:07
In an effort to have some reaction to the first status update, I discover that John “Cougar” Mellencamp smoked 80 cigarettes a day.
9:22
I can’t stop taking quizzes. My real and REAL age is 28, and I belong in Hawaii. I am James Joyce; I am Bernard Gui. My soulmate is a Pisces or Colin Farrell. I am Lester Freamon; I am Bobby Burg; I am Sartre. I am a Chuck Taylor; I am a hummingbird – “like all the homos.”
10:00
I am now “in a relationship,” the broadcast of which surely ensures demise of said relationship.
10:14
AB is married. MV is engaged. All my friends from middle school are married. A high-school roommate has an ex-husband, a husband, and two children. JP has a child old enough to catch and kiss snakes.
10:38
ER has a backache from a car accident. AW has collapsed after a reaction to antibiotics. OC is hungover; MM has a chronic headache.
[lunch break]
1:45
Freshly uploaded photos starkly reveal: the exes are not aging well.
2:10
Chat with JM: she’s not going to jail until next month. Chat with JR: he supplements NPR income by delivering burritos. “Everyone I know is a bartender.” “Everyone I know lost their jobs.” Chat with KM: “any good gossip?” “No.”
2:38
“It was nice knowing you before I die.”
2:47
I find myself obligated to send handmade gifts to six people, conduct two reading groups, donate $29 to a childhood diabetes fund, collaborate on a Twitter performance, go to New York and California, and make three long-distance telephone calls.
3:58
LT sends galleys of her magazine featuring me in my panties.
4:30
MV sends wedding invitation plus photo of projected wedding dress.
4:43
SK (staunch non-member) calls to tell me Facebook owns all photos, messages, chats, etc. and saves them for dubious purposes. TK (staunch non-member) tells me it’s no surprise public social networking became popular immediately after terrorist cells were uncovered. Is it too late for us to rescind our identifying information? Yes.
Unlike Gary S and the endlessness of a TV workday, I wonder where the time went. Facebook is like sleeping like the dead, with the dead (suspended in “memorialization state”), and the living dead of tedium-normativity. I only wish someone would defy the crapshoot of popularity and say the thing that blasts the network clear – no comments, messages, updates, likes, wall-to-wall. Just the squeaking of chair-springs as 175 million rise and run outside (of language) (of surveillance.)
Filed under: 180
I thought I would transcribe a published book on a page, but reconsidered in terms of risk and secrecy and handwriting, choosing instead to transcribe my 2001 diary.
I conclude that the young are terrifying.
Some (heavily edited yet still mortifying) bits from the obscured.
Call me sometime. At the moment I answer and we are connected, we’ll each photograph what we’re looking at. So, if you are draped over your divan, photograph the ceiling. If I’m beachcombing, I’ll photograph the horizon. Then we can chat, and later our landscapes can commune in fantasy panorama.
If you don’t have a camera, just describe it to me in a rectangle.
Filed under: 155
A few weeks ago, Tim and I read aloud different translations of The Duino Elegies simultaneously. It sounded great. So, it beats me why I would make a real-time silent video of a simultaneous reading of page 212 of Proust. Nevertheless, here it is. Tim said, “this is just to prove you read faster than me,” but, actually, I think it proves that Lydia Davis’ translation is more accessible to the contemporary reader.
Since there’s no reason the pagination of two printings would match, we described to one another our scenes: his, rain and a cathedral; mine, “joy” and decorating.
Filed under: 172
When my advisers forbade reading, I went on a binge, finishing four books in a week. For today’s potentially mind-expanding waste of time, I took the “addiction self tests,” replacing their behavioral addictions of choice with READING in order to assess my condition. Ah, the American way, to diagnose our greatest passions as disease.
1. Do you often find yourself spending more time and/or money READING than you wanted to?
Last weekend I got the idea I should read the new translation of Proust along with an old translation of Proust along with the French original.
2. Do you often go on READING binges?
This morning I read Wallace Shawn’s collected plays, the memoir of the fellow without proprioception, Lesbian Nation, and the ingredients of a granola bar simultaneously.
3. Has excessive READING resulted in financial difficulties for you?
My only budgetary rebellion last year was to purchase books not available from the 76 libraries belonging to the Consortium of Academic & Research Libraries in Illinois.
4. Do you sometimes feel that something inside you, beyond your control, pushes you to READ?
Old dad foisting me off on the encyclopedia.
5. Do you hide your BOOKS and READING habits from family or friends?
It is pretty embarrassing. I mean, my studio-mate is building a collapsible house, for christ’s sake.
6. Are your relationships with family and/or friends suffering because of your READING habits?
I have been known to use A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again to body-block my boyfriend.
7. Do you feel “high” when you go on a READING binge?
Certainly, when combined with psychotropic drugs.
8. Have you tried to stop over-READING but been unable to?
Like now, you quacks?
9. Do you often feel compelled to READ something even though you really don’t need MORE INFORMATION and can’t afford the PSYCHIC SPACE?
“Getting Prepared for the Great Collapse” fulfills this requirement – kudos, Tim.
10. Do you go on READING binges when you’re lonely, anxious, disappointed, depressed, or angry?
Yes, and also when I’m happy, bored, manic.
11. Do you find yourself making more and more use of INTERLIBRARY LOAN to shop for BOOKS you really don’t need?
I most recently ordered a crime novel recommended by a grill cook at the school cafeteria.
12. Has your excessive READING ever resulted in problems with your bank or the legal system?
The New York Public Library sent my fine to a credit agency staffed by ex-cons.
13. Has excessive READING interfered with your job?
No, it was the photocopies of Marx I distributed.
14. Do you feel anxious, guilty, or ashamed after you go on a READING binge?
I always feel anxious, guilty, and ashamed.
15. Are you not opening your mail or answering your phone because you don’t want to face the consequences of your READING?
If by ‘consequences’ you mean crippling ambivalence, than yes.
Level of Concern for Compulsive READING: Substantial Concerns
Send me a list of three artists (any discipline) to whom you’ve been compared/ referred, and I will make/ propose three works you can absorb into your oeuvre.
Here, a student’s work is catalogued in the twinkling of a viewing eye. It’s an irresistible tic, collapsing everyone into someone else – but not anyone else! Someone illustrious and illustrative.
Mine own: Samuel Beckett, Sophie Calle, Marizio Cattelan
Cranked through my machine:
1. 107 women bury their heads in the ground for 25 seconds
2. my ex-lover wears a Disney-mascot-sized replica of my head while standing in a pool that recedes when she stoops to drink, under a tree that lifts its branches when she reaches for fruit
3. a failed suicide unpacks the suitcases of tourists and refills them with the rubbish they tried to leave behind
Filed under: 004
This project – proposing the Student Association award me a grant to install an LED screen of the capitalizing interest of our student loan debt in the main lobby – completed itself this afternoon, with my receipt of rejection.
_______________________________
_______________________________
Filed under: 160
[dedicate a plot to the deliberation of a single, meaningless choice]
I expect you’ll agree: during any protest, a man must drive by and bark, “if you hate this country so goddamn much, move to [Afghanistan, Iraq, Mexico, France, etc.]!”
Not at all unreasonable, sir. As Wallace Shawn says in the appendix to Aunt Dan and Lemon, I simply cannot achieve the comfort I desire while knowing a goodly portion of my paycheck employs the government of my country “to preserve the international structure of the world more or less as it is, so that next year it will not suddenly be I who is working a seventy-hour week in some God-forsaken pit or digging in some field under the burning sun.”
The hitch, I fear, is that I’ll arrive in my new country, and before I’ve hung my coat on its nail, some moral outrage will send me packing. In a second country, I may have only one shoe untied when the report or commission, radio, TV, newspaper, announces a horror not to be borne. And so I’m descending to the third, but the plane can’t land for a strike, and so off to a fourth, but rumors of corruption precede our arrival, and so on until my passport is a greasy, dog-eared thing, black with stamps, and I’ve exhausted the possibility of living a life free of contradiction.
That’s why I’d like to take that barking man aside, that strange and perfect obverse of my barking conscience, and tell him mine is a transnational, transcendental outrage and ask may I stay?
Which is to say that one result of my little experiment is simply the suspicion that there isn’t a single meaningless choice unless it’s being made by an amoral person. Any choice debated by a person with some investment in moral questions is meaningful, and, what’s more and rather shocking: its unending deliberation justifiable.
Filed under: 160
[dedicate a plot to the deliberation of a single, meaningless choice]
Between depressions, it was possible for some not to choose, to buy both and store the rest in a temperature-controlled unit, serial superstars with a Blahnik in every shade.
If thinking makes our bones brittle:
that which is not and has none
that which is not and has some
that which is made by a weapons manufacturer, mistakenly enjoying popularity among lifestyle communities
Whether she’s looking through a curtain or a curtain of hair, since her scalp is the ceiling
Behind the tub a black mildew so thick you could spread it on a sandwich
Filed under: 160
[dedicate a plot to the deliberation of a single, meaningless choice]
The cosmos, constellations, sun, sum and summit of human achievement up to and including a boot in the splash of my own filthy puddle, brimming to future gasps, retreating to past sighs, an infinity surf lathered from an infinity wave spilled on an infinity beach: these million hands poised and trembling before three million cool, brushed-metal pitchers harboring cool columns of regret.
*
Update 4/13: This urgently requires defacement. I’ll try replacing every noun and verb with its second synonym entry in the thesaurus.
The galaxy, afterlife, fever, all and apex of anthropoid acquirement up to and including a galosh in the burble of my own black bath, overflowing booked ejaculations, avoiding ancient whispers, a boundless breaking wave foaming from a boundless billow disgorged on a boundless coast: these million fins cinched and shaking before three million biting alloy bottles covering biting buttresses of anguish.
Filed under: 160
[dedicate a plot to the deliberation of a single, meaningless choice]
Yesterday I listened to a radio interview with Jonah Lehrer, author of How We Decide, in which he claimed to be chronically indecisive, deliberating even the most inconsequential choices – Honey Nut or Apple Cinnamon Cheerios, for example.
If only it were always merely a breakfast quandary.
Checked out from all libraries participating in interlibrary loan, I was inexorably drawn to the little lotus of indecision regarding whether or not to buy an overpriced hardcover copy – resolved at last, as Lehrer might expect, when rational problem-solving was short-circuited by the emotional terrorism of Diva on repeat at Barnes and Noble.
Before we fled, I ascertained that Lehrer pursues the question largely from a neuroscientific angle, with robust examples from sport and the stock market. I am, predictably, more interested in strategies based on other criteria: could indecision be a symptom of too many meaningless choices proliferating in the gaps between too few meaningful ones?
Filed under: 139
When Tim asked me to be in the show he was curating, I think he hoped I’d project or hang something on the wall. But this is just the kind of situation to inflame my incorrigibility, so I decided actors in a plexiglass box should grapple over a copy of Totality and Infinity or a Golden Age still life should be crushed by an enormous metal slab or the whole space should be bisected by a tarp with a kneeling audience watching kneeling bands with sawed-off mic stands. Actors, beams, and knees can thank my inertia for their present structural integrity.
Delighted by Lawrence Weiner’s Square Removal from a Rug in Use in which he cut a square from a rug in a collector’s home, I decided to perform a subtractive sculpture that was gendered without requiring exposure or destruction of my body (Antin’s Carving, for example, in which she photographs the results of a crash diet.) No endurance performance here: I conceived a way to ease the feminine accessory, with the suggestion but not the imperative to be beautiful and be in pain.
The only interesting result of googling “subtractive performance” is on page ten, from The New Science of Possibilities Management.
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Appropriating business-speak, I could be the depressive complement to my exemplary beloved. Indeed, the re-creation of a conceptual experiment cannot be experimental, only cynical.
Most people thought the heel displayed on the plinth was the work. This was not my idea, and grudgingly approved. Ultimately, I accepted the heel, like Weiner’s wall texts, as a last remains of the act.
I was perhaps most pleased that a number of people saw neither the heel on the plinth nor the shoe on my foot and asked, “Jennifer, where is your work?” I didn’t tell them; perhaps they never found it.
Shipped from California for poetry, she proved a master of improv – here before Jeremy Boyle’s White Noise with a conversation heart bearing one of the original 1902 sayings: “BE GOOD.”
Filed under: 147
[deface the "women" cards by carving new messages from existing letters]
These cards appeared a week ago. The first I noticed was on the bulletin board above the water fountain by my studio. Besides the gloom of predictable betrayals (violence against women by women OK if justified by loosely progressive shock value), I fretted: would I be forced to verify the title’s claim by censoring the fliers (curators and artists are women) or would I be forced to verify the title’s claim by enduring the steady presence of the slogan? I settled upon gentle defacement, but by the time I set forth with exacto knife (heavy rains), many of the cards had been removed. I snatched this one but found my revisions nearly as dismal as the original:
–men get fucked
women — fuck–
women get f—ed
-om– — ——
I finally decided upon what is at least a decent band name for — fusion paranoia crossover thrash?
Filed under: 151
[outline three perfect days: one according to popular medical guidelines, one according to Lou Reed, and one of your own devising]
_______________________________
1. popular medical guidelines:
- drink eight 8-ounce glasses of water (Mayo Clinic)
- get a minimum of 30 minutes moderate-intensity exercise (American College of Sports Medicine)
- eat a 2000 calorie diet: 6 oz grains, 2.5 cups veggies, 2 cups fruit, 3 cups milk, 5.5 meat & beans, 6 tsps oil, limit extras to 265 calories (USDA Food Guidance System)
- sleep 7-8 hours; 15 minutes sunshine; no booze or smokes; a pet; a hobby; contemplation (American Psychological Association)
2. Lou Reed:
- drink sangria in the park
- feed animals in the zoo
- watch a movie
(with you)
3. me:
Wake before sun-up for a two hour writing discipline, no coffee. Maybe a piece of dry toast, sprouted whole grain. This will require a different attitude and character entirely, maybe even the GI tract of another species, so perhaps I’d better start with an hour of psychotherapy and the sort of personal training modeled after military drills. I can’t afford a decent analyst, so I’ll hunt for a second job; I’d better take my suit to the cleaner. On the way, I’ll be distracted by hunger and chills unless my body is trained to self-regulate, so perhaps walking meditation is in order. It occurs to me that any sort of meditation might be easier without a persistent itch, so it’s back home for a scrub. Yes, of course, a day begins with a bath. And a fresh change of clothes – clean panties, no soggy sneakers. Though I fear these many stalled efforts have shunted dawn to dusk. Living in and responding to the present as I undoubtedly would, I’d pick up a text on time management. The proper place to find such a manual is an airport newsstand, and mercifully, for spontaneous transposition is in order – via courier plane, let’s say, in keeping with the budget I never violate. What’s more, this aircraft flies against time, making infinite permutations of perfection possible, a Hundred Thousand Billion Revisions, as it were.
Filed under: 146
[catalogue my sweetheart's library according to a private system]
Beginning with a title within titles:
[zine with black spine]
[zine with black spine]
[zine with black spine]
The Winter of Our Discontent
The Winter of Our Discontent
Weekend
The Fire of Love
Infinite Love is the Only Truth, Everything Else Is Illusion
The Man Who Fell In Love With the Moon
The Art of Courtly Love
The Book Lover’s Guide to Chicagoland
Geek Love
The Tao of Love and Sex
Islets/ Irritations
Improvisation
Interior With Sudden Joy
The Norton Book of Interviews
A Handbook to Literature
Stylebook
Booknotes
The Notebooks of Malte Laurides Brigge
[zine with gray spine]
[zine with gray spine]
[zine with gray spine]
going on to give an impressionistic narration of our romance. Perhaps one day there will be a photograph so huge and clear you can scan our spines.
