>>>>>>>>>———————>
“Hello Day” by Chris Arnold
[From a recording]
>>
In the original draft, after Chris re-enters the world, a girl driving Johnny Jack’s GTO picks Chris up in front of the police station, and they drive off into the sunset. In a sort of under-explained symbolic action, Chris throws JJ’s journal out the car window. The couple speeds off. Cut to the diary. The wind blows the pages. We read the final few entries. The viewer gets to compare Johnny Jack’s plans, as poetically disclosed in that journal, with the reality. Meaning the facts of his demise. Which, as it turns out, were exaggerated. Johnny Jack lives a second life as a dramatic device, a stage apparition. Or a literary trope, a symbol, or in the Marxian domain, a sign. Or a filmic or cinematic effect, a compositional and narrative component in an animated frame sequence. An event installed in a series of cells, assembled to resemble real time experience. Now, we discover that Johnny Jack is being employed as an avatar in Second Life. As if that weren’t enough, JJ is being rendered in 3D, as a hologram. And because Johnny Law Killed My Brother has enjoyed such success, countless studio downloads of his digital representation exist on hard drives around the world, where those representations are compressed or otherwise converted into static digital file formats and uploaded to websites. The blogs and HTML-, CSS-, Flash-based, Django- or Joomla-, what-all. Containers for JJ. Electronic caskets. Octopus pots made of pulses and bits. Translations. Migrations. And where now, exactly, is the real Johnny Jack Arnold?
<<
***
JOHNNY JACK ARNOLD [AVATAR]:
“Hello Day!”
In the golem is the intelligence of collective movement,
artificially inseminated and genetically modified,
chromosomes tweaked, proteins enriched, WE STAND UNITED
by sorcery and switch!
2
O SUN! Upon my pixilated face, code orange, web-ready,
animated fake human race, partitioned, renditioned,
my inscrutable voice on a 7-second delay, magnified
by the echo chamber, a national disgrace - “Love Me,
Desire Me, satisfy my taste!
3
The register is off, I live in 3D, I dance in the net!
We make love on a beach, on sandy bytes, by the Sea,
the idyllic ocean, fishless, rainbows, moonbows,
designed to perfection, beyond the gravitas of natural
selection, FREE, 0 FREEDOM!
4
“DREAM” I type!
A phantasm’s revel, a feast of sodas and beef, chips
of a neo-colony sampler, clones of the menu for world
design, a faith born binary, a hymn kindled, a song
for sewn lips: “Hello Day!”
5
“Always” we sing!
As your foul flesh decays, as those watery orbs recess
in your skull, your nails curl round, your claws, your
7 pounds of soul, whatever THAT is - SO WHAT! Let worms
gnaw your bones, wild dogs rend your vacant skin, white
fangs bare and tearing!
6
“HELLO DAY!” I-squared comments,
@entry’s end, password protected, encrypted, moderated,
a cycle false, is still geometric, naked altered, pivot:
WORDS: “…a rabbit that ravages your garden is a pest.”
“Not all words have equal meaning”
7
PROP: Io, I OWE, 01!
O Cyclops, O brother, child of god, O derivation, kin;
I will serve as thy mirror, reflecting your sin - minus
guilt, and shame, or needless convention, contrived, Eye;
The lab devised us, the MGT abandoned our program, NOW
we wait for surfers, meat.
8
O MAD MOTHER -
belching flaming stone and ash, is this our finish?
I search the island for molecules of water, nothing
is clean; my trash contains 1,106 items; no axe, no
pick, no shovel, no broom, to style a recovery, job-
less boom, of gold, man.
9
“I SEE!” I say!
day shifting to NIGHT, the consumer consumes, Python
suck his tail, lead in his wining, dining on Katrina,
drowned by the levee, as the moron jets over, over, done,
Hello day, hello sun, goodbye dream, America, native son,
the road is broken.
10
FOREVER, YOUNG
copy this, copy that! My creativity is the claw, copy
category, genre, media, TIME, engine of wires, by Indian
fires, a romantic by the glow of the screen, multiply;
This Apple, my knowing, my pharma, my vessel, my nexus,
stub digits, no smoke, a cancer.
11
BEES, FLOWERS
beheaded dictators, sys ops, I am your REDACTOR, self-
defined, a teardrop-conceived innovator, a brand, alter-
real, the pattern-killer of the past, serial-, sequence
contractor, sharing zero, abandoning agent, destroyer,
aye, you dread It, knowing mind.
[2]
And again, when declaring about how the multitude ought to be treated:
“Thus would the people with the chiefs best follow,
With neither too much freedom nor compulsion;
Satiety breeds insolence when riches
Attend the men whose mind is not prepared.”
Solon Fr. 6
[PRIME NUMBER]
***
AGNES MARTIN:
>>
Can’t get a straight line…
(memory) …my father died,
but I do remember… it’s
hard to believe…It’s so
flat…you could see the curve
of the Earth… I think everybody’s
is born in the same condition… [sword]
I thought I would cut my way…
I adjusted as soon…half of my victories
fell to the ground. …I was a strict
disciplinarian… I was just imitating
my mother… [She didn’t say a word].
[She had a strong sense of duty…
a strong sense of justice… you can’t
be a strong disciplinarian, without a
strong sense of duty…][the water]
[hiking & camping in the mountains]
[now that I’m old…one of my best
memories][For 20 years I was not
satisfied with my paintings…
Every year I had a big fire
& I burned them all…]
Betty Parsons came to town…One day when I was waiting
for an inspiration… I was thinking
of [incense]… I painted a grid…
[innocence]… I lived by myself
all my life. I think it was a good
painting… Don’t speak to anybody,
don’t see anybody…I had a wonderful loft in New York…
It had a beamed ceiling… The only thing
the matter with it, at the end of each beam
you could see sunlight… Ellsworth Kelly,
Jack Youngerman… You see it was a triangle.
The nicest thing was, the rent was only $45.
Ellsworth was very fussy about anyone coming
into his studio.…She spoke French to Duncan. He had a different
word for light. Duncan went to France. He learned
American. I lived there for 10 years. Then they said,
“We’re going to tear the building down… so I left
New York… & I travelled almost 2 years… then I
saw a vision of [an adobe][brick]…I came to New Mexico. I started painting… I tried
to make a movie… destruction and deceit [protect].
Gabriel was an angel. The film was about climbing a mountain…
About happiness, beauty and innocence. I think it took
me about five months… I think the best shot… was
in the beginning… then the last of the film…
I thought it was a good recording of time…I just feel like getting up and running outside…
I think artists are very fortunate… they think
I’m unfortunate… You just can’t be an artist,
if you can’t be alone. You’re just affected by everything…
you’re responding 100 percent… the best moments
of my life. I’ve been married a hundred times…
this time I asked to be by myself.
…It’s been very enlightening.The reflection of sunset… speaks loudly of days…
If you draw a diagonal that’s loose at both ends…
you’re expanding over the plane. following your own track..
I like the horizontal line… not related to anything
in this world… the painting, they have meaning…
Musicians compose music about music.Happiness, joy… Meaning. [Beethoven]… my painting
is about meaning. I have never painted a grid
that has squares. The square is like some people you meet.
…A rectangle is softer… more agreeable.
A smiling of innocence. …bend and break
in silence… known forever in the mind.It doesn’t matter where I work… It’s all the same.
I don’t paint nature. This life. On Earth. It took me
20 years to paint what I wanted. I had to work… something
else… no hint of any cause, in this world.I made the mistake of showing with the Minimalists.
They tried to be not there… absolutely pure. They wouldn’t let
Virginia put their name under the painting. The truth is…
she served such good liquor. They drank, but didn’t get drunk…
put the number beside the painting. I’m not a minimalist,
I’m an abstract expressionist…I owe quite a bit to them. Because they gave up defined space.
They gave up anything that can be measured in space.. Infinite
space… They gave up forms. …their paintings were so different…
they believed the same.The intellect… the servant of Ego. …the conquering. …struggle
with facts… they discover another fact… they make a deduction.
In my opinion that is just guesswork… You’re certainly not going
to discover… an empty mind… inspiration… practice, quiet, empty
mind.. I gave up the intellectual entirely… evolution, atomic
theory… I never have any ideas myself… they’re inaccurate.You have to paint by inspiration… human beings can do anything by
repetition… you just have to really want it. well. gosh. It has to
do with creation, creation of the world, creation of life, anyway…
Everybody should know what they want. …you really wanted to fly.
What came into their minds … that’s inspiration.
Ambition… striving forward. I think all aggressive behavior
is wrong. I think aggression has to be given up entirely.
Soft attitude, you receive more.You can’t really tell about this, until it’s dry. …I think
I’d rather paint. …You have to be in this climate…
It’s a very dry climate. It’s very hard to quiet your mind…
then your mind is at rest. Then you have to not try hard.
Just look around. You don’t see anything.
It’s a happy state of mind.
Stay alert.
Then it just comes into your mind.
What to do.
Inspiration is much better.
You say, “What can I do?”
Then, you wait.I’ll have to sleep on it… the busy intellect… Beauty
is the representation of perfection, in life. …beauty
is the mystery of life. Awareness of perfection in the mind.
We see perfection. We see beauty. Perfection is easier
to see than beauty. Beauty illustrates happiness. There
are an infinite number of different kinds of happiness,
all illustrated by beauty.…the spiritual has been so messed up. I have my own.
I object to being called a mystic. No, you’re not a mystic,
when you respond to beauty… absolute trust.. a precious
gift.. Humility. sweet. smiling. uninterrupted, free.Lately I’ve been naming my paintings. I’m interested
in illustrating abstract emotions. I’ve been working
on the same theme for 10 years. Life gives you choices
about how to live. Negative… Positive… Only
the positive choices count. I don’t criticize.
Stay with what is pleasant.Stay level.
…Not worrying about the mistakes of others… I paint
with my back to the world.
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- Agnes Martin [My Back/World]
