A report on c4 news tonight about  fighters in Afghanistan and their sabotage of US supported (re-)construction efforts. In some place near Kabul  men have come along at night and stolen the trucks  used for building a road. The rest of the machinery they have set on fire. Sundry locals are gathered in the dust, throwing water and gravel from buckets into the flames. Desultory efforts. The report quotes a Taliban saying:

"The American's may have the watches, but we have the time." 

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S and I involved in a complex game of joint story telling involving the characters of an ant eater, a potato and a wolf. Often these are just disguised contests where each of us tries to destroy the character created by the other but this one turns out more complex. Ant eater turns potato into rocket ship so they can all go on an adventure. There is some battle in space against laser armed forces. Then they land on a desert Planet – Planet Doom. The wolf wants to turn into binoculars but Seth (taking over) says the ant eater cannot turn Creatures into Items. He can only turn Items into Items or Items into creatures. Not the other way around. Why not I'm asking, arguing the case of the Wolf that wants to be binoculars. That is the Law says Seth. I say look, the Wolf will settle for only half his dream – can you please have the ant eater turn him into a telescope? No. The Ant Eater cannot turn creatures into Items. The Wolf is disappointed. Ant eater turns the rocket ship that was a potato into a telescope but by then its too late and the bad guys have arrived already and the absence of the rocket ship leaves no means of escape. We are laughing too much. The bad guy has a name that is something like Coffee Table Biscuit Suitcase Mike Emperor of Gallactica. We stop the story in the middle where it belongs.

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Heading up to see the last night (Saturday 3rd) of That Night Follows Day at Tramway in Glasgow. Two further UK performances of the piece next week in Manchester at Contact next Friday and Saturday 9th and 10th of May. Hearing great reports of the piece on tour and looking forward to catching up with it again.

"There are things that you just don't want to see," a policeman at the house said. "The fewer pictures you have in your head, the better."

The weird awful abuse and incarceration shit in Austria continues to produce strange scenes – incomprehensible fragments from the meeting between one world and another.

[Chief inspector of the regional police in Lower Austria] Leopold Etz said that when they emerged from their cellar on Saturday night the boys thought they were in heaven, having always been told by their mother, Elisabeth, "heaven is 'up there'."

At one point, when Felix and his mother waited to be transferred by car, he "found it so strange that he clung to his mother in panic as the door opened, as if he was fearful of what would come out of it"

More in The Guardian here.

Single-channel video. 58 minutes. 2008. A collaboration with Vlatka Horvat.

A man and a woman face the camera for a period of one hour and console, lure, shame, intimidate or tease each other with proposals about future things they might do. Their suggestions – playful as well as apparently sincere, either in relation to each other or in respect of the wider world – range from bringing flowers to behaving badly, from playing safe to smashing up the town.   

Two fragments re what I wrote briefly below on things that cannot be imagined. The first from Vlatka:

"i remember coming across some guy's site – an ongoing list/catalogue he was keeping – along the lines of 'things the internet couldnt find today'. i think it started with a few things he was googling and the search came with 'sorry. no results' – type thing. and then he started trying to come up with things to type into search engines which it would produce no hits for. i dont know why this came to mind – clearly such a different universe from your 'cannot be imagined' things… but the fact that the internet cant come up with it at all, anywhere, must mean that it's somehow not imaginable…

I was also thinking about the relation of what can be imagined to what can be said – is that the same thing necessarily? as in: if you can say it, does that automatically make it imaginable… in the sense that words alone conjure it up, make it happen. or is the 'cannot be imagined' more like something that cant even be put into words… – thus your empty notebook…"

 The second from my friend A.:

Liked a lot your thoughts of the person with the two identical notebooks – especially as I am working on a book/dvd-project titled un_imaginable… I like the clarity of this from a text by Jill Bennet:

"The unimaginable materializes as a condition of shock, trauma or surprise in the face of an event that is unforeseen, hitherto unimagined. As Jacques Ranciere observes, the discourse of the unimaginable is only ever 'authorized' by the event's having happened. Paradoxically, it is named as such only once its occurrence renders it imaginable.  ….There is no recapturing a state of unimaginability; the event, once it has occurred, becomes impossible to reimagine in the terms that rendered it unimaginable.  At no point, then – before or after the fact – is unimaginability concretely knowable and representable…"
 

One of those times when a thought gets into your head as you're waking and won't shake loose. Something on the edge of a dream, but in this case more a semi-conscious linguistic spiral, half-formed in the mind. The thought is of two identical notebooks, one titled/named "things that can be imagined" the other "things which cannot be imagined". As the thought (which owes some money to Borges I guess) unravels (ravels?) it's about a person with these two notebooks, constantly making notes in the former, but with the growing conviction that his best work is in the latter. I'm unclear if this second book – of "things which cannot be imagined" – is just empty or if it contains examples of in some way paradoxical or self-canceling images ("a dull light that is blindingly bright"). More likely it seems that it's empty.

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Vlatka sent me a link to Wiliam Lamson's work. There's so much interesting stuff at his site I can't figure out what might be my favourite piece there – the animations/video loops are very cool – short, fragments many involving a simple action, mechanical trick or camera process that generates an enigmatic or blank event – balloons that burst each other, a foot that seems to be dragging a camera, a body that moves along the ground.

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Awake for more than two hours and still wondering what I am doing exactly.

I liked the 'wrongness' of these images.

Listening to Crystal Castles, esp Alice Practice and Airwar which is helping my feeling of distraction. Also (headed in a more mellow direction) listening to Santogold.

Graham wrote, with some nice thoughts/comments following on from the stuff I posted yesterday about Sight is the Sense…

I liked your notes on the flatness of the narrative and the implications for a performer as flesh and blood archivist of that text. I read the text with a mounting hope that I wouldn't find a narrative presence in the landscape, but be trusted to be present there without signposts – and the text doesn't disappoint for that. No signs in the snow.

One of my favourite, favourite descriptions is from a letter Rimbaud wrote about crossing the Alps on foot:

"No more shadows above, below or on either side, despite the enormous objects all about. No more road, precipices, gorge or sky: nothing but white to dream, to touch, to see or not to see, since it's impossible to look up from the white botheration that one supposes to be the middle of the path….Without the shadow that one is oneself, and without the telegraph poles that mark the hypothetical road, one would be as confused as a sparrow in an oven."

I don't know whether that's more apt for performer or viewer here. Both, hopefully. Fellow travellers.

I was excited to read about this project – TBT [Time Based Text] made by the free software programmer, media artist and activist Jaromil and conceived by Jaromil and the artists group JoDi.

"The emphasis of the software is on the process of writing/typing. TBT is a tool for time-based recording and playback of the process of typing a message, with the accuracy of milliseconds. The basic interface for typing records all typing and plays it back exactly the way the text was typed the first time, including all hesitations and misspellings. It reveals additional information on digital poetry, because the speed of typing and reading it, are visualised… The software has been kept as basic as possible, is free to use and users are encouraged to add functionalities."

In the Nettime list archive there's a short interview with Jaromil about the software which for points the way to a dynamic exploration of writing processes, especially those of editing and rewriting which I've been pursuing to a certain extent, and by other (much less technical) means in projects like Long Relay and City Changes. TBT [Time Based Text] (open source and licensed GNU GPL) can be downloaded from the TBT project page. I'll be curious to give it a go.

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Meanwhile a week or two back Junot Diaz won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction with his novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, which I was enthusing about greatly back here in January. There's a short interview with him at the Amazon blog plus an excerpt from the sci-fi novel he's now writing titled Dark America.

J. describing learning lines for the Sight is the Sense… monologue, during a camping trip in Mexico. Lain sleepless in the desert, in the pitch darkness of a tent next to his daughter, using his cell phone to highlight the text – each brief illumination of the phone's screen enough time for him to read just one line, after which he'd lie there and repeat the phrase again and again, before pressing the keypad once more to find the next part. Piece by piece, the whole emerging, in green insomniac light, and silent repetition.

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A friend wrote:

The meeting was a little strange, they all seemed to be really tired and half ill from all the work..

(The idea of traveling far to a meeting and on arrival finding the place very odd – the people pale, listless, the windows shut. The managing director comes out briefly but the light seems to hurt his eyes. The presentations by his underlings are nervous, distracted, unfocused. On leaving the traveller sees that the secretary has fallen asleep at her typewriter table.)

(Thinking for some reason of Herzog's Heart of Glass with all the hypnotized performers.)

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Excerpt from forthcoming M.E. Smith autobiography Renegade: The Lives and Tales of Mark E Smith at The Guardian. No doubt The Fall are the greatest band since war-time living memory etc, and as lyricist/all round difficult bastard Smith has few rivals. Perhaps because he long ago applied the cut-up technique to his own brain means that as an interview subject – or here as supposedly relaible/ 'realistic' self-portrait artist – he's not always as sharp or as insightful as his persona/s. Might trust Roman Totale's version more than this one. Some great touches though, esp Smith's childhood game 'Japanese Prisoner of War Camp'.