Today the Street Preacher testified on the bridge near the Crab Deck™ as I scoured the habitat islands in front of the fish prison for migrant songbirds. The Preacher mounts his megaphone speaker on the railing and broadcasts his inspired word salad to everyone in the immediate area. His litany rises and falls, often trailing off into incoherence. I heard the words ‘drugs and alcohol’ and ‘prison’ uttered several times during today’s testimonial. While the Preacher mumbled through the megaphone I observed an ovenbird, a white-throated sparrow, a gray catbird, a common yellowthroat, and other less interesting birds. When I turned around to face the world again the Preacher was gone. I don’t know if he has a permit (probably not), so maybe the cops ran him off. At one point a couple was politely listening to him or perhaps just observing the spectacle. As I walked back to the office several German adolescent boys rode around on electric scooters in a maniacal manner. One of them wore a Tori Amos tour t-shirt and had bleached blonde hair. Another one almost crashed into the inexplicable chain barrier surrounding the Very Important Stone Etching of the Chesapeake Bay Watershed. These days there are almost more people riding scooters than walking around the harbor. I wish the Street Preacher would sermonize about the evils of cheap plastic scooters clogging up the city sidewalks. I might actually stop and listen.
field report – 5.7.19
Posted by sean on May 7, 2019
https://lostgander.wordpress.com/2019/05/07/field-report-5-7-19/
the suddenness of their movements
There was a suddenness to all of their movements, as if all the electrons in their bodies surged toward the surface at once. It was dizzying to observe so the scientist looked away. Whilst the scientist was looking away the bodies began moving past the circular laboratory at great speed. The scientist stayed in place and attempted to measure their speed with a rudimentary monitoring device of unknown provenance. But their speed exceeded the recording limits of the device. Thus transpires another futile effort by the scientist to obtain data supporting the most recent hypothesis.
Following this failure the scientist considers locking the laboratory and obliterating the key in the smelting furnace next door. But what would be the point. The laboratory is the beginning and the end of the scientist’s existence. Without it there is nothingness. With it there is at least something, although it is not always a good something, and in fact it is often, as in this most recent case, a bad something.
By night the scientist dreams of sleep-sweetened first encounters and thrilling unproven theories. Mornings usher in a monochrome world. In this pattern there is a perfect crystalline structure—one easily shattered by the light tap of a rock pick, a tool notably absent from the scientist’s laboratory.
Outside the bodies continue their frenetic movements, even as the scientist slips into anhedonia, manipulating the lab instruments with mechanical disinterest, testing long-proven theories over and over again in a grotesque caricature of the laboratory’s past glory. Soon the resultant contrast between fast and slow, outside and inside, generates a frictional energy against the surface of the circular walls. The laboratory suddenly begins to rotate as if it has become an enormous centrifuge. Standing flat against the inner wall the scientist ponders this most recent twist of fate. Mental calculations are made—a hypothesis begins to form—the game is on again!
Posted by sean on April 11, 2019
https://lostgander.wordpress.com/2019/04/11/the-suddenness-of-their-movements/
iron triangle
Iron Triangle
dir. Nate Dorr & Maya Edelman
2018, 16min, digital video.
Iron Triangle from Nate Dorr on Vimeo.
A vibrant industrial neighborhood thriving despite city neglect. Immigrant workers, documented and undocumented. A city plan for massive redevelopment: malls, business centers, hotels, condos. Self-serving developers. Eminent domain. A destruction. A limbo. A renewal?
Willets Point is an industrial wedge of northeast Queens consisting for most of the last 70 years of almost entirely autobody shops and scrap yards. Despite city neglect, pitted streets, and a complete lack of storm drains that cause frequent flooding, as of 2006, the neighborhood provided the livelihoods for 1400 to 1800 people, mostly immigrants, many undocumented. In 2007, the City of New York set in motion a major redevelopment plan which would entail displacing nearly all existing businesses in favor of malls, conference centers, and hotels, and over the last decade much of the neighborhood has been bought out and razed. Blocked as an improper commercial use of public land by the New York court system, part of the area continues on, while much has been left as concrete desolation, its future uncertain.
This film, shot spanning the major “urban renewal” operations from 2014 to 2017, documents the conversion of a vibrant, singular small business district into a wasteland, and envisions a different kind of renewal unlikely to be allowed by developers and city officials.
Made possible in part by a residency with Chance Ecologies.
[best viewed at full screen with volume on]
Posted by sean on April 11, 2019
https://lostgander.wordpress.com/2019/04/11/iron-triangle/
the nocturnes – aokigahara
Posted by sean on April 9, 2019
https://lostgander.wordpress.com/2019/04/09/the-nocturnes-aokigahara/
excerpt from alejandra pizarnik’s diary
June 1, 1965 – Buenos Aires
The open walls, the walls have been beaten, the cracks, the fissures, the holes – who will close them up? This question, easy to formulate, is impossible to answer. The self in the form of the open slated shutters of a house in children’s stories. Those same shutters, closed, would form a green heart with small hearts which are crevices through which the air passes. But they cannot be closed. Or if they are closed, then something happens to the crevices, since the air doesn’t pass through them and the dwellers of the little house in the forest die asphyxiated. No. No one suffocates since they can’t be closed. Rather they’re injured, injured but not dead, although they would very much like to be dead; they are injured by the sharp wind. I don’t know if it’s because of the wind or because bandits have entered and injured them, stripped them of everything, and abandoned them to their bad luck. They dream of the green heart and of small hearts through which the air was coming. At the beginning it had to be like this. They were not going to be spared sorrows but those sorrows were going to be different from this one, so poor and so humiliating. It is not terrible to suffer but only to suffer for humiliating causes, since this robs all the beauty from the ceremony of suffering which, at first, didn’t differ from the other ceremonies.
Posted by sean on April 2, 2019
https://lostgander.wordpress.com/2019/04/02/excerpt-from-alejandra-pizarniks-diary-2/
the return of gil orlovitz
Rick Schober at Tough Poets Press continues his admirable efforts to introduce the work of Gil Orlovitz to a new contemporary audience. He previously raised funds via Kickstarter to publish a collection of Orlovitz’s stories, poems, and essays. With this latest campaign, he hopes to raise enough capital to reprint Orlovitz’s long out-of-print novel Ice Never F. As of this writing the project is over a third of the way funded, but it still needs support. [Update: Now fully backed and then some!] This book is virtually impossible to find on the used market, so Tough Poets Press is doing a valuable service to the many readers who in recent years have become interested in Orlovitz’s contributions to avant-garde writing in the 1960s. Now is your chance to be part of experimental literary history! Help fund the book’s publication and your name will appear in the Acknowledgments. More important than that, though, you will be assisting in the resurrection of a true American original writer.
Posted by sean on February 9, 2019
https://lostgander.wordpress.com/2019/02/09/the-return-of-gil-orlovitz/
the phantasmagoria of the mist
Unconsciously, but still of free will, he had preferred the splendour and the gloom of a malignant vision before his corporal pains, before the hard reality of his own impotence. It was better to dwell in vague melancholy, to stray in the forsaken streets of a city doomed from ages, to wander amidst forlorn and desperate rocks than to awake to a gnawing and ignoble torment, to confess that a house of business would have been more suitable and more practical, that he had promised what he could never perform. Even as he struggled to beat back the phantasmagoria of the mist, and resolved that he would no longer make all the streets a stage of apparitions; he hardly realised what he had done, or that the ghosts he had called might depart and return again.
—Arthur Machen, The Hill of Dreams
Posted by sean on February 8, 2019
https://lostgander.wordpress.com/2019/02/08/the-phantasmagoria-of-the-mist/
thoughtworm in the library of congress
I recently discovered that an issue of my old zine Thoughtworm is now held by the Library of Congress. Apparently, artist and writer Matt Dembicki, whose comics I dimly remember writing a review of long ago, donated his collection to the library in 2016, and Thoughtworm #11 was included in it. This issue has particular significance to me, as it was the first one I created a linocut for in order to print the covers. Linocut would become my cover design method of choice for the remaining issues of the zine. I also later had the linocut design, which depicts my favorite tree, the American Sycamore, tattooed on my left arm. I made a few extra prints of this one, too, and distributed them to friends. While Thoughtworm has made it into quite a number of public and university libraries over the years, I never thought it would end up in the Library of Congress. Pretty cool.
Posted by sean on February 7, 2019
https://lostgander.wordpress.com/2019/02/07/thoughtworm-in-the-library-of-congress/
bob sloth’s inter-dimensional crisis
Whilst traveling between two dimensions, vinyl siding salesman Bob Sloth noticed a loose thread in the fabric of space-time and, without even remotely considering the implications of his actions, idly began pulling on it. It happens to the best of us: one moment you’re just trying to get from point A to point B and the next you’re trapped in a state of inter-dimensional liminality with no one to blame but yourself.
In his defense Bob had been going through a recent rough patch—he’d come in below quota on his sales figures from the previous month and his boss Phil Hesher wasn’t too pleased. Then there was the dismal economic state of his town Largesse. Ever since construction of the inter-dimensional bypass, Largesse has been in a slump of epic proportions. Finally, his one-man show ‘My Life Feels Like a One-Man Show’ was flailing at the box office due to his understudy Bob the Sloth’s bombed performance.
Now here in this nowhere place in nowhere time Bob contemplates the vast wasteland of his life up until this point. It has always seemed to him to be one long sequence of continuity errors—some committed with great intention, others on a whim, but none, so far as he could tell, had been accidental. No, he alone was to blame for each and every one of these disruptions in the status quo, these deviations from the norm, from the general forward movement in the name of progress. ‘Two steps forward, three steps back’ has always been his unofficial motto (as assigned by astute observers and unbeknownst to himself, that is). On the contrary, his official motto, that is the one he assigned to himself, has always been ‘To what end, Bob, to what end’, with the second repetition enunciated at a slower, measured cadence in his head, eventually dropping off to the point of an almost-whisper, though still coming to a firm, audible full stop after the second ‘end’.
There could not be more appropriate circumstances for this contemplation. It is as if his life has been paused and he is hovering in a void, neither losing nor gaining momentum. A chance to catch up has been granted, perhaps—to take stock, as they say. Thoughts of how to escape, to transcend this space between dimensions, have not even begun to coalesce. Will they ever or will Bob remain entombed in his interstitial hidey-hole indefintely (forever?). Only time will tell…or will it, seeing as it has no bearing on events transpiring in Bob’s current locale….
Posted by sean on January 20, 2019
https://lostgander.wordpress.com/2019/01/20/bob-sloths-inter-dimensional-crisis/
solid space – a darkness in my soul
Posted by sean on January 3, 2019
https://lostgander.wordpress.com/2019/01/03/solid-space-a-darkness-in-my-soul/
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