Artist-In-Residence

Again with the creditors.

Savage Lovebird dies:

Should time?

Refrigerator of the abandoned.

Those who have nothing. Ever.

This, no wonder, for being the again and again,
the full stop, is trouble, in trouble.

The trouble say, anyone:

These cities these families teach for days.

No solution—that demand of body,
that demand of looking,
that demand of demanding.

Say, Everything.

Stop humming. Be

Youngsters,

be marxists—no time

to pray for a full

Stop. These cities these families

ripe for warfare—

they don’t look good,
they have nothing,
they have promise.

Not enough for a haircut.

Not enough for a haircut.

Certainly, time is wanted.

Part six in an ongoing series on a poetics of historiography.

To return to ethical questions of reading, investigating and representing: what choices might we make in regard to the modernist romance and normative moralism of representing suspension and statelessness?

Let’s turn to archival recovery of lost property and personhood in two related museum exhibitions: a digital exhibit, The Lives They Left Behind: Suitcases from a State Hospital Attic, and the San Francisco Exploratorium exhibit, The Changing Face of Normal. (A third exhibit at the New York State Museum was Lost Cases, Recovered Lives. The website has a striking picture of the suitcases on display.) Both shows partnered with the New York Historical Museum to display the personal belongings that patients were not allowed to access while institutionalized.

Most patients at the Willard Psychiatric Hospital, a New York state hospital, were immigrants without family ties who came into conflict with someone, such as a landlord or a restaurant owner, during the Great Depression. About half of the patients spent their entire lives in the institution and were buried in unmarked graves.

Most did not have access to the things they brought with them. Hospital staff members labeled patients’ belongings and stored them in alphabetical order, organized by sex. Over four hundred suitcases were found in the hospital attic when the institution closed down in 1995.

As a contributor to the Changing Face of Normal exhibit at the Exploratorium, photographer Jon Crispin documented the suitcases, how they were stored, and their contents in detail. 

Here’s a weird story: When I do the shooting, my digital photographs are labeled with what’s called IPTC information. It’s all the camera metadata stored with each photo, and you can add whatever you want. I typically add my copyright information, and also the names of the Willard patients for my own records. But when I upload photos to my blog, I strip that out.

For one person’s suitcase, I forgot to delete their name. Two days later, I got a call from someone who’s desperate, saying, “Do you have the objects of —?” and she gave the name of the person. And she said, “That is my grandmother. We didn’t know anything about her.” She had Googled her grandmother’s name and came across the Willard suitcases on my site. But even in this situation, the woman had to prove to the state that she was not only the granddaughter of this person, but that she was legally the recipient of her estate. So, in other words, if the grandmother had willed her estate to the other side of the family, this woman would not have been able to get access to her things.

In this website article and this one, objects are beheld with wonder, even love. In contrast, this article imagines the patients as fundamentally dispossessed of will and individuality, and calls the photographs “chilling.”

One of the ten suitcases chosen by The Lives They Left Behind exhibit belonged to Rodrigo Laguda, Patient #15902. (Laguda’s suitcase is absent from the Exploratorium exhibit and Crispin’s photography project. His story is included in a 2009 devised theater production, Echoes of Willard, mounted in London.) The website frames Laguda as a “student activist” and Filipino nationalist.

Laguda’s belongings included correspondence with uncles and cousins in the Philippines; a handwritten autobiography about his American schooling; a Illinois Naval Reserve wardroom boy’s cap; a color postcard from Mackinac Island, Michigan; a handwritten novella; and a photograph of a Filipino student gathering under a festooned portrait of the Filipino nationalist, José Rizal. 

Laguda’s trunk contents. Photograph by Lisa Rinzler

Objects get historiographical value as sources (artifacts or relics) by being possessions, lost or found. Possessions do hard work to represent lives. The narrative frame is a suitcase; narrative is two or more objects in juxtaposition.

Laguda was born in Capiz, Philippines at the turn of the twentieth-century to a politically prominent family. He came to the U.S. in 1907 as a child and came under the care of a Protestant organization for relocated children in Salt Lake City. He performed a reading at the First Methodist Church Children’s Day program on June 19, 1910.

After attending secondary schools in Salt Lake City and Chicago, Laguda did menial labor for an Illinois Naval Reserve ship patrolling the Great Lakes. Without finishing high school, Laguda moved to Buffalo where he worked as a house servant for a prominent doctor. After a romance with a young woman fell apart, he reportedly started to hear voices calling him a sinner and fell into a depression. The employer subsequently committed Laguda in 1917. The doctors at the Willard asylum diagnosed him with syphilis. Laguda spent the rest of his life at the hospital until his death in 1981. He is buried in an unmarked grave in a nearby cemetery.

On possessions and self-possession in the context of the Vietnam War:

Given these epistemological and ontological coordinates, the refugee figure is patently bereft of property — possessing neither interior faculties for the rational and moral calculation of interest and consequence, nor external properties for their ‘right’ exercise in intercourse with others, including legitimate citizenship, proprietary rights, or simply things (‘Clothing, a lot of these people didn’t have clothing. Some of them didn’t have shoes.’). Profoundly dispossessed, from this perspective the refugee has lost every thing. 

— Mimi Thi Nguyen, building on Lowe and Hegel*, in The Gift of Freedom (Duke, 2013), p. 59.

The Willard suitcase exhibitions, maybe in the way of all civic and popular memory, seek to recover what we understand as our common humanity. Our humanness in common.

Next: The life lost

*Addendum on Hegel via Butler: "Hegel is already in the thrall of personification, writing about what Life does, for instance, as if Life were a person, showing how abstractions sometimes require the sacrifice of what is material and finite, but also underscoring the power of property to rob persons of what is most living in them, including or especially the owners.."

I am drafting on a moving, human tablet. This tablet is not flesh, nor is it an actual body. It is digital, at times, but it is, of course, not always. It has, though, been shot in the face while playing Hide & Seek. He may or may not live. It was also stomped on the skull for, allegedly, Photo-Bombing. She died. Yes, I am bombarded. And yes, too, Facebook is my primary, almost sole news source. I am constantly broken by events, ever reminded of important desperations, the need to belong, but all I care about, I realize, or at least, care about the most, is art and life, and their layerings through race, sex, and representation. Form? I know, this is a death-blocky issue, but all I have time to do these days is to make film and to edit, go to meetings, do work stuff, sleep, do yoga, and stay fulfilled. I work hard and sleep hard. I play all the time. Even when I do teach. I am reminded of what's possible of my body. I am working with the idea that I am going to ignore those who feel the need to emote in the smoke, or to invite us into the field of the never ending list. Rank. Poetry? Content? I spend most of my time documenting. I have spent a lot of time thinking and reading about production and playing, learning about the need to layer the experience of art making and sharing, or art giving, and shaping, singing, sliding, between the forms within the forms—a slippery set of expectations reliant on clear analysis and intention—so the question is when and how to unfurl, and what parts to reveal, how much to give, what to show to maintain the energy of the line no matter what? But really, the question is, "no matter HOW?" So what’s form anyway? I think I've pondered this since I discovered mirrors. I am untrained. I am highly trained. How can I not be? My films are “Brown” and “Black.” I do know that I love myself, or at least what I can recognize of myself so all I can do is try, right? To speak in ways that are unfamiliar and not, found, and sharp, embedded, broken, and then there is the streaming, flowing, ever-present narrative that is fun to leap into, and outside. To be beside myself: all to see, all the possibilities in thinking, in making, all to hear, to feel, to record, and to make. And to sweat. I am rarely bored. In the last note, I wrote about how working in iMovie (editing lines of poetry, sound and scene, in between the various visual fields) is form, or is a way of pushing form away, back, back in, at least insofar as it changes poetic perception, method, mode and intention. Accident. Skillz. Form: Video. Yes, I am making Videos. Not Film, for now.

What I am saying is that I am sick of all these lame azz attempts at categorization, and I think somehow this is tied to the failure to risk.¹ This morning, when I was at the hotel pool, I grabbed a pink kick-board, and between sets, left it on the deck at the end of my lane. Out of the blue, this white asked me, not “are you using this?” But “Is this yours?” To which I responded, “Yes, and there are others over there in that bin, but we can share this one,” though I did not want to share, and it was not mine, and she failed to say "thank you," until I left the pool, went to the bin myself, and got a green kick board which I announced, loudly, to which she did finally say “thanks,” though I did not answer; instead I said: “You’re so lazy!” I know, Yatch.

“We are listening,” is what another white said to me the other night when I asked a group at a table to explain what they think about Whiteness! It was a poetry reading. I recorded some of what we said, and I announced that I was doing so, though I have not listened to all of it, yet. One word I do recall being uttered is “amalgam,” and also the phrase: “I don’t know what you mean” – to which I went in on, free-styling, as usual, and for that, I was called "aggressive."

I love being at the center of these battles at times, a default zone, one of my own dial and design. The space between rage and joy. Poetry can act as the force that allows you to rotate near lots of affective centers, but so too, can swimming, kick turns, low pools, where the skull scrapes the low bottom.

I slipped back into the pool and began to butterfly, with care, but hard enough to make waves wide enough to jack that white. How should I explain my slowly selfish actions, my widening activities as an artist, critic, swimmer?

I trail Adrian Piper, who in an essay, “In Support of Meta Art,” moves around the word “Opacity." She meditates on the notion of opacity as a quality that differentiates Art from Meta-Art, her coinage. She argues that

The activity of making art is similar in character to the work itself. It is opaque in the sense that we can’t seem to rationalize the impulse to epitomize our experience. We can justify it in terms of the effects of the work, but I doubt if we would claim as an explanation of motive the wish to deify, beautify, propagandize, and so on, as one might explain one’s motive for being a social worker by one’s concern for society.

So what exists on the other side of this? Where’s the risk in work that begs the not epitomizing, refuses the long lyric line that leads to the indefatigable “I,” who is too lazy or too loaded in the suit to get its own kickboard, or can’t imagine that this is the prop one needs in the first place as forethought, not after-burn. Piper’s notion of Meta-Art is useful as a way of thinking about what’s possible beyond the activity of art in one’s practice that moves beyond deification, beautification, propaganda, etc. Piper goes on to argue that:

Doing Meta Art presupposes immediate privileged access to the impulse, the activity, and the emergence of the art. It is all a piece with these, but in addition requires an epistemic self-consciousness about them, namely, viewing ourselves as the aesthetic objects we are, then elucidating as fully as possible the thoughts, procedures and presuppositions that so define us.

When I shot “Blue” on a pier near the Puget sound, a white construction worker met me, first, in a kind of black drag, in brown heels, Gold Buckles, and what is now, for the moment, a Lebron Mask, Pity, though mine is sparkled. “How long will you be here?” “I will be blasting cement around you,” “I am concerned about your safety.” The same day, as I was TEAR-E-AVATAR in a CLOWN MASK, filming with Black Took Collective, a white security guard told me that I was in the way and that our work was “stupid.” And though I moved, I did tell him that it was not stupid, that it in fact was brilliant, and even though I got the workers to go away long enough to shoot, in both cases, the shots I got are still somewhat troubled. In one, the camera cases are showing. The others, I have not yet looked at closely, but I can always fit any frame, precisely, around whatever it is I wish to reveal, then, and now.

Endnote:
¹  "Blue" was delivered, along with a screening of my short film "Pink," for a panel, "What are we Projecting: American Poetry and Poetics in the Era of the Project," that included fellow artists Bhanu Kapil, Catherine Wagner, and Rodrigo Toscano, moderated by Sasha Steenson at the Associated Writing Programs Conference, Seattle, WA, 2014.

One of the things  I was rendering in an 1800 square foot studio was how to think about what it meant to be cast into/as the role of the object by pushing an actual object, but was this object myself when I escaped its weight?  Let it go.  It sometimes fell.  Sometimes, I ignored it. I was fearful it would crack open my head. In dancing with it, I forced myself to move at, into the object of my disdain, and/or/and/with the feeling of being pushed away by my own force.  But to slide with the object, to avoid being splintered by the object, to force myself to not be wounded by the object, to spar with the object, to run with another object in mind, to swim in the ocean with the object in mind, I had  to forget about the object. I am ready to talk, but I am unable to carefully think outside of the landscape, the sea, my sprinting on the flat shore.  Does this make sense? I wanted to get to know the layers of how I am entertaining the object through another modality of feeling and touch, and I realize that working in video and editing in an application’s time and space does alter the music of language.   The space of the body moving with the object encounters race, the radicalized body, the suspect body, the fat body, the loved body, and, of course, desire.   I don't care if this makes sense, at least the kind I am used to.  I was so happily mad.  Who can afford it, anyway?  To be so digital.  I can, and am taking advantage.  My Ad. This piece is and isn’t necessarily about rendering this feeling, but by parsing out various modes of feeling through editing, not the line in that white space but this one, when the torso comes out of one surface, cut, to the next, all in motion, spun, mine, not yours—there is something else that I am feeling and working toward—I am letting go of having to clarify to the reader what the scene/seen or, for that matter, the sea implicitly enacts, or the mist, the threat of shark or comment, something related to the making of the poem,  in this way, but I want to keep making more of what is pushing me, a force Let's say it's this, before I return to what I have to do before I phone someone else up about coming.

SAVAGE LOVEBIRD: 

RUTHLESS EXCAVATIONS

Organizing Institution: 

Center for Art and Thought (CA+T)

Sole Convener & Participant: Jason Magabo Perez, B.A., M.A., M.F.A., M.A., Ph.D., wtf, smh

Beginning Date: March 10, 2020 

Savage Lovebird: Ruthless Excavations is an intimate occasion for critically McCritical criticism-self-criticism, re-memory, revision, experimentation, contradiction, fuck-ups, re-dos, internal conflict, directionless practice, and aesthetic mappings.

In 2006, Jason Magabo Perez earned an MFA in Writing & Consciousness from the now defunct and under-memorialized New College of California in San Francisco. Somewhere in the material and/or ephemeral graveyard of colleges and universities that WASC has shut down, there rests, un-edited, Perez’s odiously weak-sauced MFA thesis—The Savage Lovebird.

Unabashedly inspired by 90’s-ish white teen media fictions such as Can’t Hardly Wait, Saved by the Bell, Dawson’s Creek, and Degrassi: Next Generation, and instructed by Paul Beatty’s The White Boy Shuffle and Jessica Hagedorn’s The Gangster of Love, this MFA thesis is a collection of unpublished and incredibly unpublishable short stories that initially set out to perform and interrogate the bildungsroman through young Filipina/o American characters, who were all in some way, for some reason, developing radical, leftist, Marxist-Leninist-Maoist tendencies. In these six “traditional” short stories, for the most part based somewhere within the broader cartographies of San Diego, California, a high school playwright and his academic league teammates engage in clandestine revolutionary activities to dismantle their segregated and oppressive campus; a young Filipina lead singer of a garage band contemplates cutting her dreadlocks and leaving her single-parent father and neighborhood full of gossipy aunties for a life in the revolutionary underground; a spoiled and depressed middle-class son of a community eulogist decides that falling in love by the end of the day will be the answer to his problems; a poet and graffiti writer explains in a detailed and extensive letter to his future sister-in-law that she would be better off and safer not marrying into the family; a college-boy grandson returns home to an extended family gathering where he finds himself fighting for the rights over his grandmother’s burial; and an emerging screenwriter relocates from Los Angeles to Manila and witnesses her light-skinned super American boyfriend rapidly become the talk and awe of Manila media. (That last one was published.)

We invite author, scholar, and insecure virtuoso of the doubting of self Jason Magabo Perez to stop trying to outrun these narratives, to stop avoiding these past transgressions, and to re-engage with this historic failing.

We welcome submissions that may or may not explicitly or implicitly address the following questions or anything significant at all anyhow:

-Who do you think you are? What gives you the right? (Michael Scott asks Toby Flenderson.)
-The fuck you think you is, man? (Scene in Menace to Society when Kaydee’s aka Caine’s father, played by Samuel L. Jackson, feels challenged by his friend.)
-What is wrong with a thesis full of seemingly hip, ultra-consumable, and compelling synopses?
-What happens when satire is consumed by an audience that is not your intended audience?
-What are you trying to get away with aesthetically, politically, ideologically?
-What is the objective of such textual irruptions? (This song is absolutely irrelevant; however, when writing the phrase textual irruptions, this is what played in the author’s imagination.)
-What is, in fact, a Savage Lovebird?

Unwilling to subject anyone to unpublishable murk, we invite submissions in the following forms:

-revised and reconceptualized passages
-experiments with and reimaginings of characters and character relationships to other characters, settings, situations, etc.
-“poems”
-“essays”
-“flash fictions”
-fragments
-manifestos
-half-assed academic languaging
-craft criticism
-audio, video
-visual text, i.e. photography, screenshots, collages, etc.
-notes, ruminations, field notes
-more murk
-more garbage
-other.

We look forward to submissions. In this time of uncertainty, what we know for sure for sure is this: All of this overly performative meta-writing and tongue-in-cheek self-ridicule can only last so long before Jason Magabo Perez has to show his true serious and unserious sad boy self. Foolio.

we are between genre in the ether world of over-ambition we author no books win no grants get cast in no roles adjudicate no awards receive no fellowships finish no degrees start no theater companies teach no classes make no touring dates speak at no panels read at no readings get no jobs speak for no one not even ourselves we want it queer we want an instigation we want out we want in to be maximal so until then we wait

fighting tooth and nail for down time allotted for rehearsals and unpaid overtime and re-allocated for exhaustion writing and moderate ambition = no genre of body of work rather our body is ephemera keepsakes valued as junk worth more as ash so until then we wait allergic attaching mostly through grievance abusing trademarked phrases apt to composting on contact doing each other wrong just because we want it queer we want an instigation we want out we want in to be maximal so until then we wait

it's been a somewhat lonely road not really personally lonely but in the realm of writing aesthetics thinking together spaces for sharing of humility humor and abiding people respected for what they already know already live with how they make do and even thrive among moments of wreck we want in to be maximal so until then we wait

none of the API queer poets are Pinay all Pinay poetics are heteronormative but some of us are brave truth? only for the page and not the mic? queer Pinay aesthetics resonance? bodies? illness? sense of place? embrace of being counterfeit? sense of precarity? audience conversants collaborators? readers in common? platforms and projects? will it always be the anthology? we want an instigation we want out we want in to be maximal so until then we wait

On “Make Sure to Add Functioning Vents to Our Future”

On "Anti-Narrative & Refusal"

On "Rethinking Relationships to Texts and Drafts"