Stephen Vincent's blog

Michael Davidson, poet, professor and critic, and Susan Schweik, professor, both gave talks as a continuation of the Nonsite Collective’s discussions of the poetics of disability/disablement, and the fourth in a series of events in the Aesthetics as Somatic Practice series.

My 'haptic' drawing in response to Michael' talk, can be seen on my blog.

This Sunday evening, at least, I cannot begin to paraphrase either talk, other than to say both pieces were ‘loaded.’ Michael’s talk began with a focus on the implications for queer theory for a man who actually became pregnant and brought the baby to term. Susan’s focus took off from her just out, The Ugly Laws from NYU Press, which she describes a social and cultural history of an ordinance adopted by many American cities in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The law prohibited “diseased,” “maimed,” and “deformed” people from exposing themselves to public view.

Both Michael and Susan are professional academics, the former at UC San Diego and the latter at Berkeley. The audience of poets and some artists, some of us who teach periodically, at least, are not professionally identified academics as such and included folks as various as Norma Cole, Beverly Dahlen, Michael Palmer, Michael Cross, Taylor Brady, Amy Trachtenberg, and others who I know only by first name, Amber, Neil, Petra, members,formally or not, of the ‘disabled’ creative community. Many of us - and I suspect that is part of the role of the ‘Nonsite Collective’ - live critically thoughtful, creative, and productive lives outside the regulatory, etc., boundaries of academic life. A kind audience, as well as the speakers, for sure, but, as many might suspect, the source of implicit tensions and/or expectations between the two worlds.

Is America and will America remain a “leaf-blower” culture? If not, how not? It may sound odd from afar, but that was a question that was (in part)raised today. Portland was in town, that is two poets and interesting thinkers from Portland, Oregon: [http://www.nonsitecollective.org/node/546 Kaia Sand and Jules Boykoff.]This afternoon they jointly led a talk at a South of Market studio on Natoma Street. Actually, this question was raised in the context of a larger question. What are some of the ways that poetry as a practice can intervene and become integral to public space(s). Examples were given. Susan Schultz ’sidewalk blogger’ in Hawaii posts hand-painted signs on various public sites that question the war in Iraq. Kaia Sands showed a tape of a walk in a Portland neighborhood that, among other histories, was the launching site for sending Japanese residents to internment camps. She speaks the history - sometimes in company with other Portland poets - at different stops along the route.

The spoken language of her piece is used to remove the ''benign appearing skin'' from the site to re-imagine its buried, communal memory, in this case, an unhealed wound, its ceaseless burning, the ghosts that remain on fire.

It is also ''an act of community'' among fellow walkers and poets. Its the way one steps out of historical dormancy to become conscious of landscape as a practice, ''and to act in response to it.''

''Community'' which brings us back to the ''leaf-blower'' of which Jules Boykoff has learned that six million of these devices have been sold for use around American homes, and, of course, ''public spaces.'' He points out that the curious fact about the leaf-blower - apart from wretched noise and substantial combined carbon emissions - is that the machine does not gather leaves to be redistributed, say, for compost or to the dump. The machine blows the leaves off one’s property - usually on to the street - presumably for a public street sweeper to gather, or for a wind to blow elsewhere. In other words, ''the leaf-blower'' is the way the suburban dweller, for example, blows off any civic or personal responsibility for ones personal or family detritus. The character of the machine becomes metaphor for an atomic citizenry, where no one participates, where public space is all but been eliminated, including the sidewalks, and where ''walkers are viewed as strangers,'' as sources of suspicion and threat.

One imagines Bernard Madoff shamelessly ''blowing off'' most of his alleged friends and colleagues. A self-serving greed is regnant. The neighborhood is dead.

Much of the thinking - whether on loss or the reclamation of public space - is not new, though often buried. The generation, this afternoon, is new. The energy and tactics are fresh.

Not spoken - though the technology was present and in use - was the fourth and public dimension of ''virtual space.'' That’s a story for another day. Yet, crucial to the discussion will be the ways in which the virtual realm is already or may be integrated into the service of urban and natural landscapes. How - instead of divorcing us - may the virtual reconnect actual neighbors back into the actual neighborhood? In what ways will the virtual cooperate to turn off the leaf-blower - that wretched. ear searing noise - and privilege the sound communication of actual voices? Remake ''binary'' into the concept of citizen, instead of isolated, atomic. ''Counter dystopic.''

(Local example: Dolores Park (San Francisco) - once a little sparse in use -except for dog walkers, sun bathers and parents with children - is now flooded with “users” - the Internet diversifies and attracts different kinds of use - hoola hoopers, tight rope walkers, anarchist bicyclists, drum circles, Tai Chi classes, friends gathering, & public events including the launch of political demonstrations, Mime Troupe performances, Guatemalan coming of age ceremonies, a celebration of small presses and a huge Slow Food banquet. Amazing.

And here we have, clearly struggling against huge odds, a new President, by training, a ‘community organizer.’ A term the previous Administration and its side-kicks so actively despised! The leader is going to have to be given and respond to community pressure, much of it. Those ’side-kicks’ are going to keep kicking and trying to ''blow us off'' as hard as they can.

David Buuck, urban poet explorer/pioneer image & thought maker was working his magic this evening in a basement lecture hall at the San Francisco Public Library. Took the gathered on a “49 mile detour” about the City via Powerpoint with a questioning voice layered over, under and inbetween past, present and futurist metropolitan visions. A work of counter-surveillance, metaphor and broken metaphor; a search for and revelation of sculptural and body manifestations of a body politic in erruption, individual and group injection and struggle with and against template architecture, corporate branding, ‘public art’, civic, military and police imposition. Wonderfully ironic and subversive - like Mr. Magus here - at work to invoke a gestural vocabulary in which momentum and power is restored to the citizen maker/player & actor en communicatus. It was an under the skin - individual and public - kind of night. Wish you had been there. Not to worry, David will variously reappear, no doubt playing on a real or magical keyboard, to manifest more visions and thoughts in the playland of the local real.

Cross-posted from stephenvincent.net/blog/.