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I am having a baby.

It has not been an easy decision, but there are bigger fish to fry than uneasy fears of lapsing into obscurity and social irrelevance. From some spheres, I have already conducted general movements of withdrawal; these days, succumbing only to Pessoa’s “Book of Disquiet.” Perhaps I shall finish writing the last 700 pages of “In a Bar Called Mexico” ¹ and finally be able to dispense, once and for all, with that genre, the hardest and most treacherous of epics—the autobiography. Anyhow, laying low for a while—but not for too long. 

“It is no accident that I finally accepted feminism during a period spent alone with my five-year-old son in a fishing village in a foreign country, good and far away from the art world. I had retreated to write fiction—” 

 Lucy Lippard

¹

Sunset along the Corniche, Beirut.

A few days ago, Willie Brisco², friend, fellow Canadian artist, writer, curator, and self-contained enterprise, sent me an email quoting Adorno, attached to the note, “Menippean Satire.” Of course, as the story goes, Willie also writes an autobiography. We had even sworn to publish them together, a split-novel, like a split-LP. Our promise has since derailed into a year of silence and willful separation. And, down this withering trail of oblivion, the opening remarks (quote) to my novel followed, forgotten:

“The neon lights which hang over our cities and outshine the natural light of the night with their own are comets presaging the natural disaster of society, its frozen death. Yet they do not come from the sky. They are controlled from earth. It depends upon human beings themselves whether they will extinguish these lights and awake from a nightmare which only threatens to become actual as long as men believe in it.”

 Adorno

… whose wholesale judgments and schema of mass culture I have long resented and fought tooth and nail to prove wrong. 

2

Now, since I was foolishly holed up in Beirut, writing in a deaf, insular bubble, there remain only travel guides, maps and tourist pamphlets to flesh out the missing imagery, to offer my book the reality I was myself denied.

Postcard c. 1980.

End to chapter, “On Consummation”:

Film stills from “Holiday: A Feature Length”
2011 

Mid-Career Retrospective: The Only Way Is Up
Liste 16, Basel
2011

Photo: Gunnar Meier

deep sea adventure

my mother’s masseur — unpublished notes

Things seen / unseen

Djibouti City:
To the undiscerning foreigner, a culture of colonial residue permeates
Military ethos 
Nomads, Somalis in self-imposed exile, French soldiers
Ghost town at night, the garish lights of the arcades  
Heat

Djibouti Kempinski Palace:
Unchecked luxury
More United Arab Emirates than “Africa”
Myth of the spy
Weekend playground for French military
Self-contained paradise
Property extends far beyond the brick walls that enclose, or the winding palm tree-lined driveway – prized real estate – a whole peninsula (the only decent beach), psychological rift in / out

Addis Ababa waste disposal:
Disorganized infrastructure leads to improper waste disposal
Complex, informal structures sprout up, feeding a mass culture of bricolage (“making-do”) 
A choreography based on the different phases of the recovery of disused objects 

My ex-lover:
First boyfriend 
We both suffer from a general inclination towards inertia 

Trash:
The treatment / disappearance of which can also be read metaphorically in light of human waste (abject subjectivities, junkies, prostitutes, white trash)
Ambiguous signifier: excess or scarcity
“Redemption”
The Index par excellence 

Time:
There is a trace of morbidity in every act of decadence 
Death can be postponed 
Projections of the future inevitably involve the fetishistic freezing of an image (a becoming-static) – death drive / necrophilia 
Every body in motion stays in motion – every body at rest stays in rest

“the social ladder, a subject on which it was the done thing to joke; and the more serious possibility of being ruined”