To become accustomed to the sound of the cricket stuck in the apartment since night before last. To dream of pizza stains on white bedding. To find that the center is about loss. To kiss with a chipped tooth and forget to wait for acknowledgement. To light the kettle only to walk into rooms forgetting what you came in for. To turn on the radio because frequent static. To greet the dried leaves found in the morning bed. To rub in sunscreen to no avail. To the pink city on your right, the mounds in front. To kneel on the carpet for the to-do. To continuously turn the wheel, snap the blinker to the diachronic dance of the 405 N cars.
At seven past dusk, the purple truck passed me by lit with what seemed like life. No, that shade of Purple is what is german for the Sehnsucht of our life longings. We like to be redundant and, despite knowing this, I write on without words. The cars in which women change into shiny clothes for the club now the [covid] streets of Detroit summers. Back on earth, it is only in this present presence of expanse that greets both activities of slumber and/or secret. We don’t question the dry foliage the wind brings in to our beds. A uselessness that weighs. But it weighs contrary to the sensitivity in regards to the passing of things. Heavy Transience. But it’s getting late now. There’s a man in a van on Tuesday AMs in my neighborhood park. He reads with the newspaper spread on old knees. He snaps to the jazz playing out of his stereo. As if the absence is counted by snap. That subject of loss, dis-acknowledgement as such, echoes into the ether, bouncing back into from the stereo. It is the only good thing that has happened to me on my walks. Hoping this isn’t coming across as a justification for a means to an end in itself. If there is any truth to the words I say, the water it looks as though I pour into the ice tray is not congealing. In fact, it is undoing itself as if melting against totalizing tongues. Instead of melting of, I pray when I first see the moon. Then I hold it in my curved hands gesturing upwards: a genuflected dexterity. This is the type of thing I would write about, not live. Like, in the manner of drawn flames on discarded tissue papers. I want to be poetically productive here. I am screaming. I am screaming! And what of what came before? On the phone, I ask my young brother to tell me about the old days. It is only said with a certain inflection of the voice. He refuses the extreme and limits to 2005-2003. For me, I continue on in life saying I will film the people of Los Angeles in their cars, as a perverted voyeur captures apartment window scenes of banal intimacy laced with impenetrable desire. The moth, now, finally, imitating my earthly gestures, vanishes into the flame I draw.
by Perwana Nazif
Supplementary to the screening are texts from Jake Nadrich, Grace Denis, Kersti Jan Werdal, and Joan Lee; images and research from Perwana Nazif; and the following film selects for online viewing only:
→ Alice Coltrane (Black Journal Segment) by William Greaves
→ Intensive Care by Hatice Güleryüz
→ Trailer from the Navajo Film Themselves (from A Navajo Weaver, 1966)
shapes and anything by Majeed and Perwana Nazif, edited by Gillian Garcia and Perwana Nazif (below)
Excerpt from Table for One 12.24.2020
I sit at a table for one, gazing at an agitated sea, in cognizance of the fact that bodies which shine do not cease to emit light merely because night falls. Light too burns in the night, and I become once more an exhausted star. I think about Vela, the star that died 11,000 years ago that we continue to encounter traces of. Scientists found evidence of a radioactive surge in the trunk of a tree in Tasmania that indicates the death of this star. Love must be like a star; it dies and we continue to expand in harmony with its extinction, our bodies becoming some sort of physical ode to departure and simultaneously an archive of arrival.
I romance the empty seat, embracing the fact that it belongs to none other than my echo. I inoculate myself with my own song, harmonizing with the hymn of isolation. If I were to subscribe to one force, I would tether myself to the cult of change in the pursuit of infinitude. I exist in ardent enamourment with my annotations. Has this life I constructed become a footnote to the nebulous “I” ? Or rather, am I the footnote in and of itself ?
I dream about mountains full of rotting fruit that forget the pungency of their own flesh.
by Grace Denis
At seven past dusk, the purple truck passed me by lit with what seemed like life. No, that shade of Purple is what is german for the Sehnsucht of our life longings. We like to be redundant and, despite knowing this, I write on without words. The cars in which women change into shiny clothes for the club now the [covid] streets of Detroit summers. Back on earth, it is only in this present presence of expanse that greets both activities of slumber and/or secret. We don’t question the dry foliage the wind brings in to our beds. A uselessness that weighs. But it weighs contrary to the sensitivity in regards to the passing of things. Heavy Transience. But it’s getting late now. There’s a man in a van on Tuesday AMs in my neighborhood park. He reads with the newspaper spread on old knees. He snaps to the jazz playing out of his stereo. As if the absence is counted by snap. That subject of loss, dis-acknowledgement as such, echoes into the ether, bouncing back into from the stereo. It is the only good thing that has happened to me on my walks. Hoping this isn’t coming across as a justification for a means to an end in itself. If there is any truth to the words I say, the water it looks as though I pour into the ice tray is not congealing. In fact, it is undoing itself as if melting against totalizing tongues. Instead of melting of, I pray when I first see the moon. Then I hold it in my curved hands gesturing upwards: a genuflected dexterity. This is the type of thing I would write about, not live. Like, in the manner of drawn flames on discarded tissue papers. I want to be poetically productive here. I am screaming. I am screaming! And what of what came before? On the phone, I ask my young brother to tell me about the old days. It is only said with a certain inflection of the voice. He refuses the extreme and limits to 2005-2003. For me, I continue on in life saying I will film the people of Los Angeles in their cars, as a perverted voyeur captures apartment window scenes of banal intimacy laced with impenetrable desire. The moth, now, finally, imitating my earthly gestures, vanishes into the flame I draw.
by Perwana Nazif
Supplementary to the screening are texts from Jake Nadrich, Grace Denis, Kersti Jan Werdal, and Joan Lee; images and research from Perwana Nazif; and the following film selects for online viewing only:
→ Alice Coltrane (Black Journal Segment) by William Greaves
→ Intensive Care by Hatice Güleryüz
→ Trailer from the Navajo Film Themselves (from A Navajo Weaver, 1966)
shapes and anything by Majeed and Perwana Nazif, edited by Gillian Garcia and Perwana Nazif (below)
Excerpt from Table for One 12.24.2020
I sit at a table for one, gazing at an agitated sea, in cognizance of the fact that bodies which shine do not cease to emit light merely because night falls. Light too burns in the night, and I become once more an exhausted star. I think about Vela, the star that died 11,000 years ago that we continue to encounter traces of. Scientists found evidence of a radioactive surge in the trunk of a tree in Tasmania that indicates the death of this star. Love must be like a star; it dies and we continue to expand in harmony with its extinction, our bodies becoming some sort of physical ode to departure and simultaneously an archive of arrival.
I romance the empty seat, embracing the fact that it belongs to none other than my echo. I inoculate myself with my own song, harmonizing with the hymn of isolation. If I were to subscribe to one force, I would tether myself to the cult of change in the pursuit of infinitude. I exist in ardent enamourment with my annotations. Has this life I constructed become a footnote to the nebulous “I” ? Or rather, am I the footnote in and of itself ?
I dream about mountains full of rotting fruit that forget the pungency of their own flesh.
by Grace Denis