#I am physically reeling at the background; it is gorgeous

[pastelaspirations]

Okay, I... I don't know what, I can't- W a i t, o k a y. I'm not even screaming right now or. Even in the process of losing my mind. I have already lost it. It's gone. My mind has left me, a shell of a person, as I ascend into the heavens as I am essentially dead in all manners but physical.

Would even saying "I'm not okay" be accurate to my situation??? It would be more akin to holding up a severed arm at the scene of a car crash, giving a skeptical look to said car crash, then addressing every horrified and disturbed individual that you, in your professional opinion, think that the person who used to own the severed arm is in fact, not okay.

Can I. Come back maybe. Reblog this when I have found my lost mind somewhere and can be more coherent.

O k a y. How do I. Even express what I feel right now.

My heart is in shambles. Utterly d e s t r o y e d, I tell you. I don't think there is a way I will ever possibly recover from this.

We laugh and we laugh at my lighthearted jokes of me crying over fan art. And while I was over the moon, delighted beyond the words that I so poorly tried to use and express the absolute joy I felt, I wasn't actually crying. Of course, there were times I came c l o s e, just from the sheer overwhelming joy that my tiny heart is not accustomed to feeling, but I usually was able to contain myself. The happiness cancelled out the tears that would have fallen. I'm sure this isn't a surprise, very often things said in full capital letters and repeated instances of the same letter at the end of words are said in hyperbole.

T h a t s a i d. I did actually cry from this. I promise, I am telling the full truth right now. To make matters brief, I had a very rough awakening due to an emergency and I had been stressed the majority of the day. S o, uh, I suppose that weakened the usually fortified walls I have up that prevent me from actually crying at things.

I don't know why, man. I'm just. So overwhelmed with so many emotions, I can't. ALL THE EMOTIONS YOU INFLICTED WITH THIS ARE ALL GOOD, I SWEAR, THEY'RE JUST. INCREDIBLY POTENT AND POWERFUL WHEN USED AGAINST A WEAK HEART.

I know how incredibly difficult animation is, even if I haven't attempted it myself yet. It takes so much practice and patience, and there are many who give up before they become better at it because of the unforgiving amount of time and perseverance it takes. So, that may be partly why I am so incredibly honored and humbled to have someone do all that for a story I made.

It just means so much, I don't know how else to express it. Never, in a million years, did I think when I created this fic three years ago, that I would be getting fan art, let a l o n e fan animations. If you were to tell me that three years ago, I would have looked at you like you had lost your mind.

That's what I wanted to do when I first started writing. I thought that if I inspired someone else with a little story that I created, then it would be worth it. ;_; So, to see all these incredibly talented people like you be so inspired to create something new means the world to me. It's just so incredibly flattering and overwhelming that it is over a story that I made. <3

OKAY, I'M SORRY FOR ALL THAT, I JUST. I'm so moved and touched and I'm not sure if I can even express how exactly I feel in words, but I tried. I promise, I will love this until the end of time and it means the absolute world to me <3 <3 ;_; ;_;

their first meeting . Based on the fanfiction "Perseverance" by: @pastelaspirations

[onceabluemoonwrites]

Viper Tresses (Gorgon Gorgeous)

Viper Tresses (Gorgon Gorgeous)

Fandom: Assassination Classroom (Ansatsu Kyoushitsu)

Summary: Karma is afraid of drowning and so, so in love. (Medusa!Nagisa)

Warnings: Implication of rape.

Disclaimer: I don’t own Assassination Classroom and all of this is my lovely enabler @i-w-p-chan’s fault (yes, she’s the one you can hear cackling in the background).

Also on AO3 and FF.net

There are snakes in your hair, slithering between the tresses.

I didn’t know before, but I think I felt them.

You just sat there, in the middle of a greasy fast food restaurant, the world bleak and grey, except for you. Always you. Blue hair, blue eyes, the calm waters, you are. Shore, your name means, and aptly named you were.

You are colour, the rest is grey, and suddenly, I realized the shore wasn’t safe. You were too easy to drown in- and what hid in your depths? What was there, fathoms below?

Your enormity left me reeling- gasping, clutching my arms, digging my nails into my skin until I bled (red, my colour), to shake myself free from you-  a nightmare within a dream, you are.  What’s the difference anyway? I can’t tell anymore.

(The ocean is in your eyes, and I know not what monsters lurk in you, but I can feel them gliding beneath your skin, caressing you. You are the sea, I want to hold you. You are the sea, stay with me. You are the sea, the wind, the tsunami. You are the sea, and I don’t dare to swim too far from shore)

You could drown me.

I walk away and try not to listen to the siren song you sing behind me.

If I turn, if I keep my ear open to those naked, begging, vulnerable notes, I will look into your eyes and turn to stone- forever by your side.

You are wounded. I left you to rot.

Colour disappears from my world. Loneliness is black and white, forlorn in shades of grey. Dressed in shades of self-consciousness that do not suit me, I feed my confidence, my ego.

There is an aching hole where you used to be, jagged edges all around.

Why did you leave me shattered?

Why did you smite me down?

Oh.

Wait.

That was me.

(Mirror shards are sharp, my dear, and I can only see you in reflections, or else, I’ll turn to stone.

A statue of my affections.

Isn’t it wonderful?

Sculpted so well, with starlight hatred and a broken heart I broke on my own)

Here we are. An octopus in front of the class. It reminds me of you, only friendlier.

No- not friendlier. Less abused, perhaps.

There is a polite distance between us, and I hate it, but every step I take closer to you chokes me with glass shards tearing up my throat as I spit blood everywhere.

(You throw your own life away so easily, too easily. You are a Gorgon, your sisters are immortal, so are you not too?

Darling, darling sea. You are not.

You are the shore, made of what is eroded, demolished, ruined by water.

Did Athena cradle your broken body in her lap, when the water was done with you? Was she the one who, in anger, in devastation, in despair, morphed your lovely, lovely hair? Was she the one who saw your ravishing form for the curse it was and gave you a gaze of stone?

The snakes, the vipers, though. They always were there. They just broke the surface when the time was right, venom at ready.

Waiting all along, they’d been.

I felt it. You must know that)

You are not fussy about gender. At least, as long as no one refers to you by ‘’she’’.

I should have known. You are Medusa, you do not want to be a woman. Women are vulnerable- and now, you’ve found men are too, and your vision of stone (women’s gift, the gift of your goddess, the Maiden one) is gone. You are defenseless, or so you thought, because there are snakes in your hair, snakes in your heart, and gods, you are beautiful.

I can see your wings- they rested on your shoulder blades the entire time, visible when one looks at you from the corner of the eye, and now you spread them noiselessly.

To be or not to be, that is the question. To kill, or not to kill. After all these years, you want to save someone? Medusa, Medusa, my blue-haired Nagisa. You bound your vipers, put the tresses up high on your head.

Perhaps because you remember what it felt like to be headless, to be used even in death by the man who cleaved your head right off your shoulders. I catch sight of viper fangs, venom-dripping, bound, unleashed, however you want them, however you are, and my breath hitches.

I drown, drown and drown, and how, how could someone have killed the sea? How could someone have killed the home we all want? How…

Never mind. This is no time to ask questions.

I am red, for it is my colour, and you are blue, like the sea (not the water, you hate water, the water took what you would not give and though you rose from the ashes, rose from your corpse, rose from your death like it was nothing, you flinch, every time you think of it.

Do you cry at night?)

I want to reach out, cradle you and never let you go. I want to bury my head against your stomach and be shielded from the world by you in turn, because your hands are deadly, as are mine, and something about that just belongs together.

You have me on my back, choking me physically for once, murder arms around me, wings so high up they cast us in shadow. This fight was not meant for daylight.

A glint in between the leaves. My knife, my dagger. I scramble for it, hand closing around the old, leather-worn hilt. I raise it in the air like a crescendo, higher and higher, louder and louder, until it’s near impossible to hear, but I can’t crash it down like I should.

I am not you. I am no wave. I am vicious, to all, except those close to me, and you, with your chokehold around my neck, warm breath in pants against my skin, your sweat mingling with mine… You are the closest.

The closest ever.

I cannot bring myself to cut your wings off, even though you left your back unguarded, and with a thud, the knife falls, back to earth.

Gorgons have a peculiar quirk- the blood on one side of the body is deadly, the greatest poison one can drink. The other? It heals even the death.

I look at you, look at the sea, and perhaps… No, I’m certain, as much as I can be, that I’m ready. Sink or sail, if I drown, I drown in you.

Perhaps you’ll drown and save me both.

Not such a bad fate, Nagisa.

‘’I yield.’’

[warholiana]

On August 1, 2017, at the Swiss Institute in New York, I sat down to watch all five hours and 21 minutes of “Sleep,” Warhol’s first serious movie. In 1963, Warhol filmed his boyfriend John Giorno sleeping; in 2017, I committed to staying awake to take minute-by-minute notes on the whole thing. (Click here to read my similar notes on Warhol’s eight-hour “Empire”.)

  00:00

–  Begins w. shot of nipple – could almost be female. Hard to read. Establishes possible heterosexuality. (Somewhere Warhol is quoted saying he was afraid Sleep would be read as gay.)

So very tender: Watching someone sleep is the ultimate maternal act. (I wonder if the story about Julia Warhola watching her son Andy sleep is true. It was told after the movie was famous)

Note how close we are to Giorno’s nipple. So absurdly intimate.

–  I start to notice rise and fall of the chest, giving away the subject. Also, white crumpled sheet visible in background.

–  So very tender – watching someone sleep is the ultimate maternal act. (I wonder if the story about Julia watching Andy sleep is true. It was told after the movie was famous)

–  Vexations by Satie playing in background at Swiss Institute, as it may have been (or may not have been) in an early screening. Does its sweetness push the tenderness of the footage too far? There should be a stronger edge of painful boredom to the piece. But this is after a bare few minutes. May yet get painful.

–  Nipple still there. (Surprise-not-surprise.)

–  Actually seems less tense than Empire, where you actually thought something might happen. Here, the sight of the chest rising and falling gives a rhythm to the scene that makes it play out more easily over time.

–  With Empire, you thought that you might almost be watching a still. Here you know absolutely that you aren’t. Two pieces always seen as cognate are actually more different than one might think.

–  Nipple has now disappeared into darkness. Was there a change of lighting – and film reel – that I failed to notice? The problem with taking notes is that it distracts you from the events in a film that is supposed to be event-free.

00:07

–  Going to spend two minutes NOT typing

–  Nope: Gotta record that a change in reel led to change in exposure, so nipple is again visible. But nothing else seems to change. At a time when everyone was familiar with the basics in film technology, and the three-minute reel, would audiences have understood that the action was continuing across film changes? Would that have added a pacing to the film that we’ve lost?

00:10

– Two minutes not typing again.

00:11  

–  Nope. Too much I want to write, at least early in the process of watching.

–  Note how CLOSE we are to Giorno’s nipple. (Would ppl. have known it was Giorno?) So very, very, absurdly intimate.

- Change of reel, and exposure, and slight change of angle.

–  Looks as much like a landscape as like a body (cf Venetian nudes-in-landscapes, almost a cliché). Close-up is so extreme that this feels like a fully

modernist exercise in form, a la Weston. A denial of the intimate, sexual nature of the piece – useful to in-the-closet Warhol – but also sets it right into the modernist tradition that Warhol has such great training in, and that he never ever jettisoned. I think Edward Weston’s photos were shown in Pittsburgh when AW was young. Gotta see if they were the nudes. (Do the dates – late 1940s – make that possible?)

–  Back to darker exposure of the nipple. Is AW looping some of the same footage (as I know he did, and as some early watchers knew) or have we really moved forward in time with the sleeper?

00:11

–  From almost its first public appearance, people have said – ads for it have stated – that Sleep was eight hours long. That’s how powerful the cliché of the eight-hour-night turns out to be. We want – we need – Sleep to be even LONGER than it is. (I’ll see if I feel that way in five hours.)

–  Sorry to be watching it on projected video. Not at all the same thing as film (as I watched Empire.) The click of the film projector, and the need to stop to change reels, would have

00:20

–  Hold that thought. Radical change of angle. Now camera is looking up Giorno’s body toward his chin and face. Meaning we must be down at his crotch.

00:21

– More angle changes, to indefinable but vaguely public spots on his body.

00:22

– Now his face, in Hollywood-style closeup. Can’t tell he’s breathing, so could be morgue shot. Plangent and commemorative. Ties to history of portraiture – Fayum funeral portraits? Roman funeral monuments with sleeping/dead hero? Meleager – most famous of gorgeous dead guys.

00:23

– Another angle change. Now top of chest and part of jaw, and ear, visible in close up. Nb links to the LOOK of the first American avant-garde films that AW saw in P’burgh – Maya Deren etc. This new shot reads as about surrealist dismemberment and collapse.

00:25

– Back to the up-the-body shot. DOES make us pretty sure that some shots have  been repeated/looped. Hard to imagine the camera going back to precisely the same positions again and again.

–  Very COMPOSITIONAL – against the grain of its moment’s most radical, anti-European thought.

–  AW gets it much more right in Empire – this film should be a continuous shot, or at least truly sequential shots of the same scene.

–  Must have been VERY tedious to keep reloading the camera every 3 mins.

–  Now back to the “pubic” shot of earlier moment. Such a strange shot that we KNOW it’s the same footage, repeated.

–  Was anyone at the premiere watching closely enough to take any of such subtleties in?

–  Strange shot of…. Giorno’s thing? Can’t tell. Sexy regardless. More sexy for being hard to read.

00:29

–   Back to the face shot again.

–  Back to thinking re video vs film projection. At very least, I want to see this video at some absurdly high def where the artifacts of video simply disappear. The new scanning being done of Warhol films should allow that. Here, I can see the little “pixels” that the projector’s LCD image is made up of, competing with the original film grain.

00:32

– I really do want to hear the film-projector sound. Makes one aware of the physical side of the film – that shooting the piece involved someone manipulating physical film through a physical camera, in the presence of a physical body.

00:35

– But would the sound of the projector have been salient in 1963, or a background phenomenon read-through as cognitive noise.

–  Funny that I feel very worried about any minute that I’m not attending to the film. (Someone just came in from the street, and asked me about the film. And it made me very nervous to be missing seconds or minutes of … Giorno sleeping. As though there were any chance of him actually doing anything!)

–  I thought of asking the gallery for the remote, so I could take a break if needed. (As now, when my glasses need cleaning!) So glad I didn’t. The film needs to move forward relentlessly, without the viewer having any control. The FILM time and VIEWER time need to be very different, even out of synch and in different realms of control.

–  Film time is Warhol time, controlled – at least originally – by him. And I have to see how much I want to bring my time in synch with it.

00:40

– Also glad I didn’t ask for the WiFi code for the gallery. The 21st century permits distractions and multitasking that the 1960s didn’t. Does that make us feel even more stranded in Giorno’s sleep, since we aren’t used to EVER surrendering to one stimulus?

00:41

– Screen goes to white, as at end of a reel – for first time – now footage of what looks to be part of a pimply rear end, with very Modernist geometricization.

–  Were there Modernist precedents for the MALE nude body being reduced to geometry?

–  I notice, as I am supposed to, the scratchmarks running down the film and the bits of lint flickering across it. But I think it takes Modernist training to (want to) truly become aware of such things.

00:45

– Same shot, but seems to have been a change of film reel – after the 4 minutes that are supposed to elapse between reels.

–  Still the same bum-shot.

–  Nb that four people have just walked in. Having them chatting (loudly) in background is probably MUCH more like the orig. experiences of watching the movie … but I kind of want a more laboratory experience of silence. Is my duty as a historian to recapture original viewing experiences, or to zero in, autopsy-style, on the art object in question, so as to understand it fully?

00:50

Still that bum! (If that’s what it is.) Reaching that point where the image on the screen starts to lose its salience. The brain assumes that it’s no longer “signal” worth attending to. Nb that Warhol’s durational films – like durational music by Satie or Yves Klein –  is almost a psych experiment on attention and perception and how they interact.

–  Funny, Alva Noe’s notion of “embodied consciousness” should be relevant as I stay conscious of a body, but I’m too aware of Giorno’s body as representation.

–  I guess I am aware of my own body, as I shift in my chair. Wish I had the Factory’s famous “couch” to watch this on.

00:54

– New angle! Looking from behind at Giorno’s rear, as he lies naked on his side. Could almost be a woman’s body …. Except for the visibly hairy bum and back.

–  Utterly sexual, as the film hasn’t been until now. I was about to write that only a gay filmmaker could have done this shot … but then realized that I ought to be able to imagine a woman having shot it – but our society doesn’t leave much room for such “scopic agency” (sorry) even in the 21st century.

–  Camera records the bedsheets as so bright white as to seem like a fashion photog’s prop, rather than normal everyday sheets.

00:56

–  I suddenly realize how BRIGHT Warhol’s lights must have been, to allow such exposures on movie film. Could Giorno have been such a heavy sleeper, as is claimed, that Warhol’s shooting didn’t wake him up? Or should we imagine him complicit in the shoot?

–  If we imagine him complicit – and why should we imagine him asleep in ALL the shots? – then he is “suffering” the same duration, and possibly boredom, as us. He is us, but worse off because he really has nothing to look at!

–  And of course, as with all representation, we are also Warhol looking at Giorno at the time of the shoot. (Is it at the time of the shoot, or some present “now”? Does representation always situate the viewer in some past time as well as in some alternate space? I’m not sure…)

–  About one hour gone by. Pretty quickly. Not so bad. Pretty easy to imagine staying six times as long.

–  No seats (normally) in the Swiss Institute show. I had to borrow one specially. Can curators simply not IMAGINE someone staying throughout? Are we assumed to have such short attention spans? Nb that “durational time-based work” is now a staple of contemp. art, and we assume that we are allowed to give it the glancing attention we give to a painting. Whereas in 1963 the absolutely ruling paradigm for film was the auditorium (or loft) screening of a film that would be watched, sitting down, from end to end.

–  Inviting the possibility of casual, interrupted, non-continuous, painting-like viewing of film is one of AW’s most radical artistic moves. The resistance to AW’s films partly comes out of the failure to assimilate this new model – until fairly recently.

–  Some camera shake/motion at one cut in the “bum shot” – makes us doubly aware of Warhol (or someone’s) presence as the camera operator.

–  “Bum shot” rhymes with “cum shot” – of course absent from this film, but always there as a possibility because of the OVERWHELMING assimilation (in 1963) of this film to porn. In 1963, I bet most people’s most likely encounters w. 16mm film might have come via illicitly circulating, mail-order porn.

1:11

– Sudden cut to almost illegible shot of … corner of an eye? Nope – it’s the top of Giorno’s bum-crack, but seen horizontally because he’s lying on one side. Truly fetishistic to see this much sustained attention to one (potentially) sexual body part that is completely passive and immobile.

1:13

– Warhol is always billed as a passive observer, but here he’s met his match in a partner who’s so passive, he’s actually unconscious. And Warhol’s looking doesn’t seem passive at all, but determined and almost aggressive in its relentlessness. The aggression of a private-eye determined to crack a case.

1:15

– Another face shot, this time a different angle, w. Giorno in near-profile, looking up. Is he really asleep as AW looks on, or is he faking his inattention?

–  Giorno looks absolutely Roman (ancient) – a perfect Roman pugilist’s face. Slightly prognathous jaw.

–  Amazing! Giorno moves! I genuinely said “Woa!” when it happened, after more than an hour of immobility.

–  Wait – does anyone move as little as he has while sleeping for the last hour? Does that prove that this footage is to some extent faked? Someone give that man a FitBit, so we can record his sleep.

–  My own rear end hurts from sitting – I want Giorno’s bed!

1:19

– Going to stand up while I watch, w/o keyboard. Funny how much I’m worried about missing something.

1:21

– Back already. Wanted to record that the way the projection is installed is totally 21st Century, perfectly filling the big end wall of the gallery from wall to wall and floor to ceiling (wall runs straight to floor and ceiling w/o baseboard or top molding). This would have been an unknown presentation in 1963. A screen would almost always have been involved in the showing of the piece, whether in a cinema or a loft or the Factory. It would have felt closer to a Hollywood movie than to a gallery painting.

–  Giorno moves again … with exactly same motion as earlier. Anyone paying any attention would twig to the fact that the film has been looped now and then, and is NOT recording a true session of sleep in real time. Moves again … with exactly same motion as TWICE earlier.

–  Nb hard shadow of Giorno’s head on a wall next to him conjures sense of him in a small, bohemian space, on a single bed. If the bed isn’t narrow, AW would have to be lying on it next to Giorno to get the close-up shots he does.

1:28

– Does the slowing of the original footage to “silent” (3/4) speed also slow the familiar (visual) pitter-patter of the film grain? Certainly feels like it does, letting us KNOW that the film has been slowed. (Jonas Mekas, first and greatest fan of AW’s films, claims Stan Brakhage, AW’s rival in radical film, hated AW’s durational works when shown incorrectly at normal speed, but loved them when slowed.) So we end up, weirdly, with a slowed vision of something/someone who is already necessarily static. What does that mean?

–  Am I (is anyone?) sure that Sleep was always shown at slow, “silent-film” speed? I really doubt that in the wild-and-wooly sixties Warhol or anyone else would or could or would have wanted to guarantee such consistency.

–  Suddenly felt a slight wave of sleepiness – for first time! You’d think that would hit much sooner, given the subject and form of this film!

1:36

– New shot (or have we seen it before) sliding up Giorno’s body from below, framed to cut off all but the top of his pubes/bottom of his belly. Camera has to be about level w his (naked) crotch.

– He shifts and moves and breathes deeply.

–  Nb that, as with earlier shots of his cheek, if you stare at any one pale patch of skin you realize that the grain artifacts of the film actually turn its tone into something like a roiling pit of lava. Very strange since it ought to look ivory-smooth and immobile.

–  Nb that the hairy Giorno presents a “normally” masculine image of the homosexual male that was almost absent from 1950s and early-60s discourse. Even the (tiny) pro-gay literature – “One” magazine; “The City and the Pillar” by Gore Vidal – was obsessed with the “problem” of the swish, effeminate queer. (I.e., Warhol)

–  I am barely hearing the Satie – but it is also clearly making the whole experience more mellow and pleasant.

–  Compare Sleep, screening w. Satie played on the piano (by whom? On a record? What are the details of that narrative? Do they make sense?), with Rauschenberg having Feldman piano pieces played lived during his Egan Gallery (cct?) show.

1:46

– Giorno has been on his back for quite some time now, w. camera in same position. That’s what we (falsely) think of as the unchanging status of the entire film. In fact Sleep has (even) more event in it that Empire does.

1:47

– Foreshortened body, although not seen at full length, evokes Mantegna Dead Christ seen from his feet. Warhol must have known that from slides (I should check his college textbook) and once AW saw something, it NEVER seems to have left his memory bank and tool kit.

1:51

– Long period of white “leader” (as I guess it’s called), for second time that I notice in the film. Is that left in the digitized version to evoke the change of reels that would have been required in an original screening? Does the film survive as a bunch of 3-minute reels, as shot, which were then spliced together to fill six one-hour (?) reels for projection?

1:52

– Two hours gone by, more or less. I (guiltily) check my phone, which I realize I couldn’t have done in 1963. What distraction might I have had then? A visit to the concession stand for popcorn and a Coke?

1:54

– Reminds me that I’ve read early reports of Sleep screenings, and the anger that people felt in watching. (Famously, one wag went up to the screen and yelled “Wake up!” into Giorno’s ear – but actually, not sure if there’s any moment in the film when his ear would be thusly available to a standing viewer.) Most people walked out – some were angry at the “no-refunds” sign proudly posted – but some 50, the reporter said, stayed to the end. I have a feeling that in the (druggy) 1960s, more people might have watched straight through than now.

–  What would be the drug of choice for Sleep-watching? Speed, to increase one’s focus and to keep one awake, or pot to help one relax and go with the flow? Or acid, to add incident and excitement to the subject matter?

2:01

– Funny how representations never commit us to the size of the figure seen. Here Giorno is projected some 12-feet tall, from just the waist up, but doesn’t read as any bigger than if we were to see the same shot reproduced as a 3inch high still in a book.

2:02

– Screen went black for maybe ten seconds, then leader-white, then back to footage. Why?

–  Would even a bare hairy chest have been almost beyond the pale in 1963 Hollywood terms? How often did one see a naked man’s chest on film? I think Newman’s chest is bare in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.

 –  Was homosexuality so very very forbidden in that era that some or many original viewers couldn’t have conceived of a homoerotics? I’ve certainly interviewed people (women, mostly) who said they had never heard of queer love until quite far along into their adult lives.

–  Now typing so much I’m in danger of lying if I say that I’ve “watched” Sleep for all 5.4 hours.  If only I could touch-type and never look at my computer screen, only at the movie screen and its image instead.

–  By almost always being below Giorno’s head, is AW’s gaze somehow “subordinate” to Giorno’s? Is Warhol establishing himself as a “bottom”. (I hate that silly, limiting terminology; also, I’m aware that it was EVERYWHERE in gay talk and writing in the 1960s)

–  This is almost Warhol’s (later) Blow Job, but from the position of the blow-er. Once you think of that, it’s very easy to think of Giorno as being a rather impassive blow-ee, feigning sleep.

–  Seems like we’ve been on the same few (looped) shots of Giorno’s torso from below for a LONG time. The normal notion of what Sleep is supposed to have been.

–  In a world of utter distraction like ours, what a pleasure to concentrate, in isolation, for so many hours straight!

–  Is this the ultimate in Arden Reed’s “Slow Art”? (Did Arden make a MoMA appointment to watch all of Sleep? He must have said, but I can’t remember.) The subject is the ultimate in slow (not still, like Empire, which is a different thing), and it forces slow looking. But of course its near-static subject also allows itself to be adequately “got” in a single glance, making the piece in fact fast. Is a two-hour action flick in some ways inherently SLOWER, since it forces close watching, with no wavering in attention, for longer?

–  There’s a wonderful, almost comic rhyme between the slow in-out breaths of Girono, as he sleeps, and us as we sit watching. Has there ever been as perfect a mirroring between subject and viewer as here, across the plane of the cinema screen? (Just realized that that effect is even stronger in Warhol’s Screen Tests, where the Test-ee looking out is perfectly mirrored in us looking at them.)

2:23

– Funny, screen is now perfectly bisected by long black scratch – which arrived when in the history of the footage this is based on?

–  How much does anyone, or did anyone, think of the material substrate for this film, and what it was and has been. It was shot on “direct reversal” (ie, slide-type) film, as it could have been edited and then watched for the first time in AW’s studio, and must have been turned into an inter-neg later so it could be printed for distribution to cinemas. In the digitized version now being screened, which artifacts are a product of which stage in the process? And of course some are artifacts of the digital transfer, and then the digital player and projector at the Swiss Institute.

–  Warhol said his slow films should be treated like a cozy fire in a fireplace, ie as background effects in a room, rather than as subjects for contemplation. (And I think I have him, somewhere, talking about them as paintings we look at now and then – at least I’m certain that a curator once asked him for permission to treat his films as paintings, to be shown alongside paintings in the gallery.) But the problem is:

a) That Warhol very often said things that he absolutely didn’t believe, for effect or to please a listener.

b) That we may not want to care about how Warhol wanted us to contemplate his work, when it’s in fact our turn to watch it.  Who is he to tell us how to look and attend? I assume that most artists, working in any medium, may have spent very little time attending to a piece once it was done. They are most normally in the presence of the unfinished. Does that (mostly) make them lousy elucidators of their own finished works?

2:38

– Looking at a strange bald patch in Giorno’s stomach hair, I’m reminded of that shot, in the long-ago Sensations exhibition of YBAs, that showed a hole in someone’s hairy head where a bullet had gone in.

2:40

– Funny, but a big black scratch that bisects the image, during certain segments of the piece, would have had to be a scratch on the interneg (scratches on the original positive would have been white) – so how is it that the scratch is repeated on different parts of the film that AW edited together? Wasn’t the interneg made in one go, from the entire film in its completed edit? (Greg Pierce, oh master of film stock, where are you when I need you?)

2:46

– Almost three hours in, and I’m acutely aware that the note-taking that allows me to attend for so long is also not true attention to the sensations of the film. I am, basically, attending to the contents of my mind, with occasional prompts from the work of art. But is this always and especially the case with slow art? Do I like slow art because it conforms so well to my model of the work of art as a “machine for thinking”? – that is, as occasion for thought and talk, rather than as freestanding sensation with its own inherent qualities independent of what we use them for. (Not sure what the “inherent qualities” of a work of art would be, except for its physical attributes, and why we would care about them outside of the effects they have on us and the thoughts/sensations they trigger.)

–  I guess I’m arguing for (or prone to) valuing the thoughts triggered by works of art over the pure sensations or emotions they trigger – even though I guess you could argue that the sensations and emotions are in some way (but in what way?) more inherent to the work and its qualities. Thoughts can wander a long way from the work, whereas sensations and emotions are triggered more directly.

–  Of course the range of possible emotions and sensations so triggered is more limited than the range of thoughts – and, most especially, can’t really be shared. Whereas the thoughts inspired by a piece can be shared and used and revamped and updated by an entire community of lookers.

2:55

– Back to LOOKING, Blake.

2:56

– For Beyond the Fringe fans: “Mine brother Giorno is an hairy man, but I am an smooth man.”

2:58

– Very weird skip in the footage. I wonder how it came about, and how it entered the history of what we now see in this digital version of the piece. The digitizers must have chosen to leave the skip in, even though it would have been trivial to remove it.

–  Seeing basically the same, almost identical (two? three?) shots of Giorno for a long, long time now. I wonder why or how Warhol decided to introduce more different shots at the beginning of the piece, then allow it to settle down to a more passive sleeping form later on.

3:01

– Precisely as I wrote that, image cut to a close up on Giorno’s sleeping face, in profile, that I don’t think I’ve seem before.

–  Feels very different from the footage of his entire torso.

3:03

– Funny glitch in the digital signal, so that some info about the HDMI source appears for a sec. Funny how the digital is no more foolproof and flawless than the analog and physical. I almost miss the old days when the film would get stuck in the projector and you would get to watch it burn and melt.

– Same profile shot as before is now lighter, as though Warhol adjusted his camera exposure, or the exposure that the interneg was printed at for this portion of film. Few minutes later, and it’s darker again. What gives, Andy?

3:06

– Giorno, in profile close-up, for some reason looks Brando-ish. The same funny combo of macho and tough and somehow slightly fay.

3:07

– Funny little thing, but I just noticed the perfectly squared and shaved end of Giorno’s sideburn. Reveals him to be the well-groomed former stockbroker that he was. Love to think of him visiting the barber in anticipation of Warhol’s arrival to film him. “Mr. Warhol, I’m ready for my close-up now!”

–  Come to think of it, a man as hirsute as Giorno would have had to shave before bed to appear as smooth-shaven as he does in “Sleep.” More extreme artifice in a film that seems entirely without any.

3:11

– Although I find Giorno very attractive in this footage, I’m struck by how essentially chaste, almost disinterested my reaction to him is, as a straight male viewer, and how different that must be from the reaction I might have if I were gay. Anyone who tries to play down the importance of sexuality to culture and art is ignoring how fundamental that difference really is, and how much it can affect the act of looking. (Even if you choose to ignore or repress a sexual response – as I might do when confronted by an image of a gorgeous naked woman, or by an image of a naked woman who wasn’t my “type” –  you are still aware of that act of ignoring or repressing, and your response is affected by it.)

–  Is this in any meaningful way Pop Art – even to the extent that Pop Art is a meaningful or useful category?  The four-square approach of the Campbell’s Soup is here too – the refusal of commentary or editorializing, and the presentation of subject for subject’s sake. That’s one of the most important features and innovation’s of 60s art, and extends also to abstraction (think minimalism’s “specific objects” and Stella’s “What you see is what you see”) and to photography (the “observational,” putatively anti-formal tendencies in photographers like Friedlander.) It’s my “ostensive” function of art, turned into an esthetic principle.

3:30

– Not sure why, but all of the sudden the cropping of one of Giorno’s eyes and cheeks by the tight close-up on his face seems violent, like an amputation.

3:31

– A section of underexposed footage makes the buzzing grain read very loudly as incident. Funny how mobile the surface of a projected 16mm film can be – like a Pollock! Would such a comparison to the previous generation have pleased or displeased Warhol and his fans in 1963?

3:34

– Giorno’s lips now seem very present. He’s shown on his back, as though awaiting a kiss (from Warhol). It’s so important to get rid of the myth of an asexual Warhol. He wanted and enjoyed love and sex as much as any (or at least many) of us. I worry that the culture has desexualized Warhol out of a kind of puritanism (and homophobia) that prefers not to think of greatness and sex (and most especially gay sex) as going together.

3:43

– Again, seems impossible not to conflate John sleeping with John, dead. I guess we have much more powerful precedents and models for images of manly men who are passive because dead than passive because asleep. (A nice piece of “quantitative art history”: Take a representative sample of Western paintings and sculptures and see how many show men asleep versus women, and ditto for men and woman who are dead. Also, I wonder how many images of sleeping men have automatically been categorized by art historians as images of male corpses.)

–  Always that rhythm of Giorno’s rising and falling chest, always visible if you take care to note it.

–  What would it be to watch this without taking notes? Just to be a completely passive observer, trying to truly take in the footage without actively reacting to it? How dull would that be?

–  Note how much less boring I find Warhol’s almost-static “stillies,” compared to his semi-narrative later films, which I find much more trying. Is that because the truly non-narrative can’t ever be failed narrative? And it’s narrative failure that produces frustration and boredom…

–  I have a feeling that most people who watch Sleep and Empire bring with them the narrative expectations of (Hollywood) film, and are annoyed when their expectations aren’t met. Whereas if you told them to look at, say, a painting of a sleeping man for five hours, they might refuse or even resist, but they wouldn’t somehow be annoyed at the work itself for not having narrative motion.

3:56

– When you turn away from the screen for a moment, then turn back, you’re struck by how much it feels like you’re seeing the close-up shot from a Hollywood film – and then you’re surprised simply by the fact that it doesn’t change to another shot as you watch. The fundamental semiotics are from Hollywood (unlike, say, in the films of Brakhage), so there’s an appropriation that matches the appropriation in the Campbell’s Soup cans. (Although, interestingly, that’s much less true of Warhol’s silkscreened paintings, where the subject – Marilyn or Liz or a suicide – is taken from pop culture but the fractured visual structures are fairly high-arty.)

4:01

– 5470 words written so far. Even if I post them, how many people are likely to read the whole pile? In an ideal world, would I actually write so much during a screening of Sleep that it would take a reader the full 5:21 to read my words?  Which of course would mean that I’d have to manage the impossible task of writing faster than someone can read, thereby turning a slow-art experience into a mad race.

4:04

– Suddenly aware of how the overexposed parts of the digital image go to a pure, bright white in a way they don’t with film.

4:05

– Another moment of all-black then all-white as some (fictive) projectionist changes the reels in Sleep. (How often would an underground theater have had the two projectors it takes to assure a continuous flow across reel changes?) I wonder if, in digitizing the piece, they should have included a track of the sound of the film projector, as I’ve sometimes come across with digitized art films? It would have been fake, sure, but there’s something unnerving and sterile about Giorno’s sleep unreeling in utter silence.

4:09

– Just about an hour left – and this has really not been hard or boring at all. But maybe that’s just because I love the sound of my own … thoughts.

4:11

– Was Warhol keen on the enlargement of his own love and lust for Giorno to movie-screen size? Sleep is really quite the act of commemoration – of a love and a lover and a love affair. Not one of the Old Masters managed to paint a lover’s face so it covered an entire wall.

4:14

– It’s almost impossible for most of us to remember or imagine how utterly formalist most thought about art still was right through the 1960s. It was very very difficult for most highly-trained viewers to see subject instead of pattern in a work of art. (I remember actually finding this hard, as a kid raised by diehard Modernists.) I wonder if Sleep was meant as the ultimate challenge to that old way of thinking. Was Warhol daring viewers not to see a man sleeping in his film? The hints of motion and action in the film make it that much harder to read it as a formal array; its near-total stillness, and its assimilation to painting, invite the failed attempt.

4:22

– All my notes until now have been taken from close enough to the projection that it just about filled my field of view – just because that’s where the gallery put my chair. I’ve now pulled back to the distance I’d be in a cinema, and the effect is very, very different. The piece felt very much like a painting, when seen from so close, but at this distance it feels much more cinematic – much more like a fine surrogate for the presence of a man really sleeping. Funnily enough, from the greater distance Giorno actually feels more present, at least as a cinematic subject.

4:25

– I wonder if the black-and-white of Sleep now feels more obviously and thoroughly old-fashioned than it did in 1963, when a good proportion of first-run movies, and most art-house movies, were not yet in color. The footage now feels very Golden-Age-Hollywood. I wonder if it did then? (Somehow, Warhol’s slowing of his footage seems to contribute to a nostalgic effect. Does the past always somehow feel in slow motion?)

4:28

– Aha! I think I just saw motion from Giorno I haven’t seen before, and new camera angles. Sounds trivial, but actually feels very notable, after so many hours of watching.  And feels surprising – you think you know Warhol’s tricks and procedures, and then he alters them.

4:30

– Giorno’s face now in close-up, facing the camera as he sleeps on his side. And now he’s back on his back, with his arm raised to present his underarm.

– Just noticed that Giorno has the little rings around the flesh in his neck that Renaissance men found so appealing, at least in women. (See Parmigianino, Madonna of the Long Neck.) There is a kind of “beauty-shot” effect in this film, or it’s like the Renaissance paintings of exemplary beauties.

–  Come to think of it, Giorno looks shockingly like the figure in a great Renaissance male portrait. I think it’s by Mantegna, but might be by Bellini or just maybe Antonello da Messina. Nice for once not to be able to look something up – as no one could have done, anyway, in a cinema in 1963.

–  Current shot (which has been looped a bunch of times, now) is really lovely – a giant, especially loving close-up on Giorno.

–  He moves his mouth as he sleeps the way a little kid does. And of course watching someone sleep is an inherently parental act, and the more tender for that.

–  How many people know that Warhol made several (half-hearted, more like quarter-hearted) attempts to become a father – by adoption, at least.

–  Giorno had a very lovely, sensitive mouth. Part of his beauty comes from its contrast to his notable, distinguished, Roman-general nose and jawline.

–  And such long eyelashes

4:42

– A new, strange shot, of Giorno sleeping with his arm over his head, with dark shadows hiding his eyes. Warhol seems to introduce just enough new shots to keep a pretense alive that the film is really continuous footage of Giorno sleeping, and changing positions.

–  With his eyes blacked out, he looks more dead than not. V. strange.  

–  Someone, somewhere, has obviously done a shot-by-shot diagram of the structure of Sleep.  I’ll have to look for such in my Warhol books – or wait for the catalogue of the films to appear. Like a dissection that lets you understand how a creature lived and moved.

4:49

– Yet another new shot (I think).  Strange enough in its composition (Giorno’s arm beside his head) as to seem almost Bauhaus.

4:51

– Giorno has such strong, identifiably Italian features that it’s hard not to see him as appealingly familiar to Warhol, the Slav who grew up among fellow immigrants. (One of his best childhood friends in Pittsburgh was Italian. She’s still in the family house, just doors up from Warhol’s.)

4:58 – OK, so I am indeed losing my concentration now. Have to ask, as my rear-end falls asleep on my hard chair: Is the experience of watching four hours of Sleep any different than watching five?

4:59

– But had I left just now, I would have missed yet another new shot of Giorno sleeping! Not a closeup on his face as he sleeps with one cheek against his pillow. And would my knowledge or understanding of the piece been any different had I not seen that shot?

5:00

– The difference between leaving early and staying throughout is that if you leave early you don’t have the certain knowledge of nothing happening that watching the full movie gives you. If you leave early, you can’t know for sure that there wasn’t some amazing, radical action that you missed.

5:04

– Seems almost as though Warhol deliberately lit Giorno so his eyes would be in deep, dramatic, funereal shadow. Warhol was capable of such planning (he was a much better technician than he let on)  but also quite capable of trusting to luck – and maybe, just maybe, to our willingness to find excellence in whatever he did.

–  Worth remembering that Warhol had only had one year of attention, of any kind, when he made Sleep, and was not yet the giant star he would become over the next few years. (The Silver Factory and its freak-show was still months away from coming together.) So Warhol was truly taking risks with his film, and daring to push a wary audience.

5:09

– Deeply weird new shot of Giorno’s face from above, camera now looking down his nose, with glints of sleepy tears in his one visible eye. Not at all a normal position from which to approach or view a sleeping person or friend or lover. It’s as though Warhol were peering (leering?) over the bed’s headboard.

- From this strange angle, the face seems somehow dismembered – becomes a congeries of features, with the (beautiful) mouth as the main identifiable item.

–  Talk about formalist, Bauhaus modernism, but with a Surrealist edge. Could really be a shot from Bunuel – or again, from Maya Deren.

5:16 

–  Film just  nearing its end – interesting that AW chose to end on this strange shot, and nb that there’s notable camera shake and movement, signaling a camera that’s clearly hand-held. Warhol is there at the end, as a palpable observer of his lover.

TA-DUM. Over. And out.

  (Installation photo of "Andy Warhol: SLEEP AND OTHER WORKS,” at the Swiss Institute, by Daniel Perez)

[ccassen]

One year ago, I was two-and-a-half months into my solo travels around Europe and, very unfortunately, found myself in the middle of the attempted coup d'état in Istanbul, Turkey on July 15, 2016. Close to 300 people, both civilians and soldiers, died that night. I initially wrote the following during my July 16th flights out of Istanbul, while the details were fresh in my mind; I didn't want to forget, but I never have forgotten and I actually did not look at this again until now. It's emotionally difficult for me to recall these memories in such detail, but I never formally shared my experience and I now want to do that, on the anniversary of that horrific night. I'm a better, stronger person for it, who can attribute this experience as one of many that have taught me to listen to my instincts and trust my intuition... ----- I have since read The Alchemist, a book that really feeds my wanderlust soul: "Intuition is really a sudden immersion of the soul into the universal current of life, where the histories of all people are connected, and we are able to know everything, because it's all written there." ----- What was supposed to be a quick visit (both unexpected and welcomed) to Istanbul, Turkey, en route to Portugal after spending a beautiful three-and-a-half weeks in Italy, turned into a nightmare that shook me to my core. Traumatic and terrifying, I was reeling from the experience for some time afterwards and, if I'm being honest, I still carry it with me and the effects linger to this day. Early on in my travels, I had been very much anticipating seeing Istanbul based on friends and other travelers' rave reviews, but I had decided against traveling there due to security concerns of its close proximity to Syria and especially after hearing about the June 2016 terrorist attacks in the city of Istanbul and at the airport. I had reluctantly agreed with my intuition that it just wasn't the time for me to go to Turkey, that is, until I was looking at flight options to make my way from Sicily, Italy to meet my good friend, Steve in Lisbon, Portugal. I found affordable flights on Turkish Airlines with layovers in Madrid for an afternoon or Istanbul overnight. My gut told me that Madrid was the safer option and I'm sure it would have been a lovely few hours there, but spending a night in Istanbul was tempting, especially when I didn't think that it would be in the cards for me at all. And, to boot, Turkish Airlines offers a free tour or hotel stay with a long layover in Istanbul. After consulting with my Dad the pilot and agreeing with him that lightning doesn't strike somewhere twice (...right? After all, Istanbul just had their share of attacks in June and security should be beefed up following such events... Please note: needless to say, I hold nothing against you, Dad). Against my better judgment, I booked my flight from Sicily to Lisbon through Istanbul for an overnight layover; I was so excited! July 15, 2016 My flight arrived in Istanbul in the afternoon without any fuss. I checked in to the Marriott hotel provided by Turkish Airlines, which is near the airport, and took the relatively long airport shuttle, plus train ride to downtown, almost 14 miles away. I beelined it to the Hagia Sophia, to marvel at this incredible church turned mosque turned museum. I even made a wish that day for good, safe travels in the so-called "sweating column," which is believed to be miraculous based on legends associated with the drops of water that have appeared to flow from this particular marble column. I met a nice French girl there, who was a student at UC Berkeley and in Istanbul for a few days for a wedding; we planned to meet up later that evening for a drink. I then donned my head scarf and visited the gorgeous Blue Mosque, walked through Gülhane Park and the gardens outside of Topkapi Palace, before walking over the Bosphorus strait via the Galata Bridge. I was awed by the Galata Tower, beautifully lit up as the sun went down. It was near the Galata Tower that I met an English-speaking local, Turkish guy who offered to walk with me and show me around the Taksim Square area, which happens to be his neighborhood where he is from and lives with his family. We ate kebab together for dinner and then met up with my new French friend for a drink. It was Friday night and the general feeling on the streets was one of merriment, people out enjoying the start of their weekend. While strolling around the Taksim Square area, though, I couldn't help but vaguely remember what I learned in history books about the landmark's background of demonstrations and unrest. It was getting late and I realized that I would be cutting it close to take the train back to the airport, in order to catch the last hotel shuttle. I bid farewell and my Turkish friend offered to walk me back to the Taksim Square subway station. It was a little past 11:30 P.M. when we were walking through Taksim Square towards the subway entrance; I don't know what it was exactly that first caught my attention, but I felt unease that something was wrong. A group of armed men in fatigues, a dozen or more of them, were marching through the square in our direction, first in formation, then they broke apart as they started to yell in Turkish and train their guns ahead of them. People in the square scattered and started running away in all directions. I was startled and asked once "what's going on?," then continued with this question repeatedly as my friend grabbed my hand and directed us to run, out of the square instead of to the metro station below. He responded to my distress immediately to tell me that everything is okay, this is normal, but I could tell that something was very wrong with the way that he guided me as we were running, starting and stopping, all the while he was scanning our surroundings before we hurriedly continued on. It seemed like he was looking for potential shooters and, though there were no gunshots in the square yet at this point, I pictured being shot right there as we ran around the corner of a building to leave the square. It was one of those moments where your life flashes before your eyes and I found myself thinking of my loving parents. After running from Taksim Square, my first thought was to cover my head with my scarf. The last thing that I wanted to do was stand out as a foreigner to anyone who might intend to do me harm. There were people everywhere, we saw and heard helicopters circling above. As we walked aimlessly with no idea what was happening, I turned my cell phone on to get service with the intention of calling my Mom, to say goodbye, in case it was the last time I could speak with her. I had already received a few messages on my phone from her and friends (including my French friend who told me that she was safe in an apartment), asking me if I was okay because there was an active coup d'état being reported in Ankara and Instanbul. I told my friend what I was hearing and he asked me to explain this term to him; I frightened myself as I defined our current situation of the Turkish military's intention to take over the government by force. My friend expressed disbelief and seemed to refuse to comprehend. It couldn't be true; these things don't actually happen and especially not unfolding before our eyes, right? Conversations that my friend had with people passing by were in Turkish and, although I could not understand what was being said, I could tell that no one knew what was happening nor what to do. At one point, we scrambled down an embankment and my friend spoke with a couple who were headed in the same direction. They saw my look of fear and perhaps thought they were helping when they said in English, "it's going to be bad." It was then that I started to lose it, panic-stricken, crying and hyperventilating. It was mayhem; we learned that the bridges were closing and we watched traffic become a mess, cars and motorcycles drove down the street only to have to turn around and drive the wrong way back with nowhere to go. We knew that we should not get on public transportation as it may be targeted and taxis were not taking passengers. I had no way back to my hotel by the airport (which we learned was seized by the military) and my friend could not return to his home near Taksim Square, where fighting between soldiers and civilians had broken out. We realized that it was not safe to continue to wander the streets as we watched the news blaring from storefronts and learned that martial law and a curfew had been imposed. I knew that my priority needed to be to get somewhere safe and stay inside. My phone died and luckily I was carrying a charger that day, so I asked to charge it in the lobby of a hotel that had no available rooms for the night. I went online to find a nearby hotel with availability, quickly booked a room and as we walked there, we heard gun fire in the distance and planes continuing to circle overhead. I considered how long we might need to remain inside and necessary sustenance, but when we tried to go to a market on the way to the hotel, it was crammed with people trying to do the same thing. It also seemed that there was a similar run on the ATMs. We checked in to the hotel in the Besiktas neighborhood and sheltered in the room that very long night of watching the news of disturbing footage of military versus police conflict and many civilian men fighting in the streets and on the bridges. The news was in Turkish, of course, so I really wasn't understanding more about the situation and instead I became more afraid. We each reached out to our family and friends to confirm our safety. I spoke with the U.S. Embassy and Consulate to inform them that I am in Istanbul and learn what I should do. The planes continued overhead and what sounded like nearby bombing may have been sonic boom (or, as I learned later, military tactics of flying at high speed to break the sound barrier, causing a loud raucous without doing any physical damage). Little by little that night, I understood that a faction of the army plotted the coup in order to protect democracy from President Erdogan, who has been known to crack down on free media and is seen as authoritarian. President Erdogan was on holiday when the coup started, so he used a FaceTime broadcast via the news to urge his citizens to take to the streets and resist the military. TV stations were then raided by soldiers; my mom told me that she watched Turk CNN forced off the air by soldiers that night. It was difficult to understand who were the "bad guys" in this situation, the President and government or the military. Troops surrendered to the civilian resistance overnight and the government declared victory in the early morning hours. I have since heard an interesting perspective from a Turk who thought that it was unwise for the president to call civilians to the street to resist the military coup, which could have started a civil war. It seems to have worked in the end; who knows what could have happened if there was less resistance to the military's coup attempt than the combined police and civilian forces, all those people who gave their lives. I couldn't sleep at all that night and, as the sun rose, my focus was to determine if my scheduled flight out of Istanbul would leave as planned later that morning and how I would get to the airport, which was still being reported as closed. It was difficult to choose to leave the safety of this hotel in order to try to get to the airport hotel to collect my passport. After no one would respond to his request for a taxi, the hotel owner agreed to take us himself to find a taxi. We climbed into his car and drove to a taxi stand, where there was a taxi in the middle of the street that appeared to have been bombed and was turned on its side. The hotel owner was growing impatient and stopped his car at one point to indicate where I could walk to get the train to the airport. I refused to leave his car to try to take the train on my own; after all, I had no idea the state of public transportation and my own safety doing so. We eventually found a taxi driver who agreed to take me and I thanked the hotel owner, and especially my friend, profusely for all of his help as he went his separate way to reunite with his family. This taxi ride was surreal. There were men waving red Turkish flags, standing on tanks and abandoned cars parked on the highway. I couldn't help but be paranoid and leery at this point, feeling that I was unsure if the taxi driver was going to be able to deliver me safely or maybe he would turn me in to the hands of terrorists. There were, after all, concerns of ISIS using the attempted coup event to launch a terror attack. Happily, though, I arrived to the Marriott airport hotel, reunited with my passport, took a shower and had my first meal since the previous evening. Turkish Airlines finally turned their phones back on and I was able to speak with someone to rebook my cancelled flight to Lisbon, by way of Barcelona. I now had a ticket for a flight to depart that afternoon, but it was still not clear if the airport had been yet reopened. I was so determined to get out of Istanbul that I decided to push my luck; I would go to the airport to see the situation for myself and be ready the moment my flight would be able to depart. It was pure chaos at the Istanbul airport, hundreds of passengers sitting around on the floor; there weren't even airline employees working the check in counters. I was very fortunate to have my boarding pass from the day before, so that I was able to get through airport security. My flight finally departed Istanbul that evening. I had to run through the Barcelona airport to make my connecting flight to Lisbon, pleading with anyone who would listen that they hold my flight, which they did... the kind people of TAP Airlines assured me that I was safe as I ran up to the gate, sobbing, and they welcomed a broken down, emotional mess of a passenger on the flight to Lisbon. 24 hours after running from Taksim Square that night, I finally felt that I was "out of the woods," could breathe a sigh of relief, and express gratitude for my safety. Epilogue In the days following the attempted coup, I learned much about the situation in Turkey. From my understanding... Coup attempts are not uncommon in Turkey; this is the fourth and bloodiest attempted military coup since 1960. Since the attempted coup, Turkey is more divided than ever between supporters and opponents of President Erdogan. Tens of thousands of people have been detained in prison for suspected participation in the coup plot, without formal hearings or charges, and many more suspects have been investigated and fired or suspended from their jobs. Since the constitutional referendum last April, President Erdogan has expanded his own power and reduced parliament authority. The state of emergency imposed by the government following the coup is still in effect today, which allows these raids and arrest to continue. To mark the anniversary since the attempted coup, opponents organized "justice marches" and a mass rally in Istanbul. The Bosphorus Bridge has been renamed the July 15 Martyrs' Bridge. Following Istanbul, after I spent some time in Portugal and Spain with friends, I decided to go home at the end of July for a break from my travels. Traveling can be stressful as it is, but it is a whole other story when you have to worry about your physical safety, shelter and food in an emergency situation in an unfamiliar place with people who speak a foreign language. I was feeling exhausted and reeling from my experience in Istanbul. I wish that I could say I don't regret going to Istanbul last year in July... But, I still feel that it is a beautiful city and the Turks are good people, and someday I hope to return. In the meantime, it makes for a good story.

[grubhivemind]

RYAN: -it's been another long day at work, but the walk from the shuttle stop to her apartment feels even longer as the white noise of city life in the background offers little distraction from the worries buzzing around in her head. sometimes drowning it out with music helps, but tonight she isn't really feeling it and simply lets it all happen during her trek.-

JACK: -Ryan seems so out of it she might not even notice the hobo guy sitting at the top of a city mailbox like he's riding a horse. He's not homeless exactly, but he is wearing his trenchcoat and crocs combo. Jack looks like he's kind of... people watching? Impossible. This man is blind. No way to prove his lost whatsoever.-

RYAN: -yeah right, like there's any way she's going to miss THAT. she does have to do a double take as she passes, though.- ... 

RYAN: jack. :thinking: -doesn't really question his being there, just observes it. that's him alright.-

JACK: -was in the middle of guzzling a handful of trail mix.- Hm? -turns his head as if to listen closer.- 

JACK: God? Long time no hear from you, bud. You sound attractive. Love what you're doing with the voice.

RYAN: yep. its me. gorgeous and deserving of worship. :sparkles:

RYAN:  just popping in to ask... whats goin on lil dude? having a nice sit down on that mailbox there? think theres room for a little divine intervention so to speak?

JACK: In the wise words of lyrical poets come and past-- maybe. Just maybe. You'll gonna be the one that saves me. 

JACK: And after all. 

JACK: You're my Wonderwall. 

JACK: -scoots forward and invitingly pats the space behind him.-

RYAN: -snorts and shimmies over to take a seat on the mailbox, sitting back to back with him.- its always refreshing to hear a devout young man reciting hymns. 

RYAN: -kicks her legs as she dangles them off the side, looking all around at the city.- this is an interesting new vantage point.

JACK: Wouldn't know. But I think there's a perfume-slash-soap store upwind. 

JACK: Guess I am enjoying the sights in a way.

RYAN: -she thinks she peeps the soap store. confirmed.- you do look like you have your eye on something.

JACK: I'll try to reel that in a little. -munches some granola.- 

JACK: I'd ask what you're doing out here but... 

JACK: That seems a little inappropriate.

RYAN: uh yeah. -peers over her shoulder at him with a brow raised.- considering i live a few blocks away.

JACK: Hmmmm. 

JACK: I guess that explains a few things.

RYAN: ... jack. 

RYAN: are you lost?

RYAN: and if you answer that with some cryptic witticism im gonna shove you off this mailbox.

JACK: That's asking a lot. -Grunts. But he doesn't really feel like explaining himself so he leaves it that.-

RYAN: -sass is definitely MUCH WORSE so she just looks ahead again, irritated.- 

RYAN: i guess it doesnt matter either way.

JACK: You're probably right about that. You're so... -makes a point of picking through his words as carefully as possible.- 

JACK: Understanding.

RYAN: -feels her cheeks burning suddenly. maybe she's just tired after a long day, but she's feeling more defensive than usual.- are you being sarcastic?

JACK: No. You're not... 

JACK: Doing anything wrong. -brushes his hands of granola. It's free for the birds now.-

RYAN: -shoulders slump as her frustration fizzles out suddenly, but her head still feels hot and a little dizzy.- 

RYAN: ... its hard to tell sometimes.

JACK: It's not your fault. -he could swear under his breath.- But maybe that's the problem. 

JACK: God. 

JACK: I should elaborate. -rubs at his face with a deep sigh.- Neither of us know what the hell we're doing. And it doesn't help when... 

JACK: Neither of us know whether what the other is doing is bad until it's too late. 

JACK: I've just been taking note of that that familiar creeping feeling where... I've been absent. But I don't realize I'm doing it til I'm walking circles in the middle of fucking nowhere and the only reason we're talking right now, is because you came out here by chance. 

JACK: ... 

JACK: Why are you the one looking for me but it's never the other way around? And why... 

JACK: Why are you putting up with that.

RYAN: -the dizziness is making her stomach churn at this point and all she can think to do to settle it is draw in deep breaths. it takes her a second to think, to really think of what the answer might be.- 

RYAN: maybe cuz i think its some way of repenting? i dunno. 

RYAN: you know when i left i... left this giant mess. everyone worrying about me. and burned by me. i just... 

RYAN: i guess i dont blame you for not wanting to be around me because nobody really does. 

RYAN: and i keep hoping i can make up for it if i try to reach out to people. and try to fix it. but you... 

RYAN: ... 

RYAN: if im really not at fault here like youre saying then that theory is gonna get me nowhere fast huh? suppose it already has.

JACK: I just have to ask you. 

JACK: Why it's worth compromising letting people treat you like hell. -fingers grip at the metal below.- 

JACK: I'm not... 

JACK: Helping you be a better person, Ryan. I'm not helping you at all.

JACK: I'm selfish, I'm mean, I'm--- 

JACK: Fucking crazy? And all you ever do is try and try your damndest to make me feel like a real person. 

JACK: When I don't. I really don't. 

JACK: So why do you end up with all the crap?

JACK: Don't you see how wrong it is??

RYAN: -a tight stinging throat adds to the plethora of unpleasant physical manifestations of her awful emotions. why does this have to keep happening this way? it really seems like she falls into the same habits over and over. and it always blows up in her face.- 

RYAN: i dont know??? 

RYAN: i mean is it???? yeah maybe i dont feel like i deserve it but at the same time i have all this evidence stacked against me that says actually ryan in some ways you kinda do deserve to go through hell to get even a sliver of heaven. 

RYAN: it just. it fucking sucks. -pushes at tears that she can't keep back any longer.- 

RYAN: because youre right. i dont know what im doing any more than you do. nothing i do makes any sense to me. nothing ever seems to work out. everyone around me ends up distant and more often than not im the one creating the distance. 

RYAN: the only thing that ever seemed to make any sense to me was how i felt when i was with you but thats-- thats not... 

RYAN: enough. is it?

JACK: N... -faulters a moment, unsure of his answer.- I don't think so. 

JACK: I just... 

JACK: Can't be someone who gets away with this crap. Who can't even pull his shit together enough to make you feel like-- 

JACK: You're supposed to feel when you're together with someone. Like all this struggle and strife is worth it because... 

JACK: At the end of the day, you're a better person when you're with them. But between us... Fuck. 

JACK: It's just not true. -he takes a deep shaking breath, hating himself with every minute.- Ryan... 

JACK: Why'd we get back into this. We really... were not ready for it.

RYAN: -she's trembling too, still slumped slightly against his back and savoring the touch knowing exactly how this going to end. she laughs, an awful aching, watery laugh, before she answers his question, rhetorical as it might be.- 

RYAN: we did it cuz were stupid. 

RYAN: we dont know whats good for us in any other aspect of our lives so-- fuck! -the nervous smiles crack into sobs. but it's still funny, because after everything she's gone through lately, this is the first time she's really let herself hurt, or let herself cry.-

JACK: -He's just... shitty. He feels it happening as they speak. He can't face her or do anything but let her lean against his back. Somewhere in all the heavy, Jack's hand reaches to find hers.-

RYAN: -she grasps back, entwining fingers and holding tight. it feels desperate, but she can't deny that it helps her calm down... after she lets herself cry a little bit longer, anyways. she tilts her head back against his shoulder to look up at the stars.- 

RYAN:  -it used to be that she'd stare at the sky and only want to flee far away from any kind of pain or confusion. but for once, she feels tethered to the earth, and maybe that seems she's finally grounded herself, if only a little. maybe that means progress. it's hard to tell with an aching heart, but with jack holding her hand despite everything, she feels like maybe healing is still possible for her.- 

RYAN: ... -sniffles.- you should go home.

JACK: I will. 

JACK: Just felt like the fresh air was doing me better than sitting in one place. -just keeps holding her hand-

RYAN: okay. cool.

RYAN: ... yeah. 

RYAN: i agree. -well... she's not letting go either.-

[rexylafemme]

si no me visitara tu imagen nocturna, jamas podria conocer el sabor del sueno

there's a reason i felt so differently between wednesday night and thursday night—seeing a beloved emerge friend's flamenco show with some emerge dears versus going to the emerge/laundromat project mixer on thursday. a profound difference in the ways we could meet each other in each space, a difference between connection versus networking. also, there was something about the actual spaces we were in, too, and what they alternately could allow for in terms of intimacy—a performance space in the basement of a church on the LES across from tompkins square park versus a crowded hipster-y bar on e. 8th st. there was nothing wrong with thursday, it just was a different vibe—more cerebral. it also brought out a different energy in me, more restless and unfocused.

during the flamenco show, it was like my physical and emotional responses were projecting outward from me in this invisible, kaleidoscopic, multidimensional landscape--different moments of experience and self criss-crossing over each other in various textures of time. i was physically present—taking in our friend's voice, watching her, being impressed by her ease and emotion, knowing her in such a different way personally than in this moment, holding space for that and thinking about what i’ve come to know of her through the program, watching the men in the band, being interested in the ways everyone moves—their bodies, their facial muscles when they play or sing, also very aware of the emerge folks and audience around me— seeing in my periphery their responses, the rapt faces, the upward-turning eyebrows responding to longing, love, dreams, pain through sound.

i have,  as maybe others do, this synaesthetic subconscious impulse to attach a memory of a performance to the first, most compelling scent i experience in the space, so when i recall it later, my brain initially remembers the smell, which is something i usually can't verbally describe. but i’m very aware of it throughout whatever i’m experiencing, and i connect my feelings and the way i build the memory of the event to that scent. i can close my eyes, put myself into wednesday night and smell and feel it.

keying into the all the layers of consciousness i have obvious access to, i’m thinking back to sitting at la planeta, the love & support around me, how opened up i felt, how i had internalized a feeling that this was a space i wouldn’t ordinarily find myself in, a community of people i wouldn’t ordinarily find myself around, and yet i felt comfortable, in the right place. sometimes life moves gracefully in that way, makes you feel like you’re experiencing exactly what you’re supposed to. feeling enamored by that feeling and the support around me. our workshop instructor to my left, his sweet trickster, soft paternalism very palpable to me even in his indirect connection with me as he took in the music. m. & her niece visiting from egypt who i had an extended conversation with before the show sitting in front of me—feeling newly threaded to her, l. and n. sitting out of my view to the left, having walked in late.

& then the music itself, forgetting & remembering where i was, where i’d been, re-experiencing and newly experiencing my affiliation with flamenco and spain—these quick reels cycling through my inner vision. 12 years ago when i was in an immersion program and my mom did whatever she had to do to get me there, i had a partial scholarship but when you are poor partial is not enough so god knows how she paid for it—she wouldn’t say and i didn’t ask. i recall how lucky i am for all she’s done toward my dreams though she would deny she’s done anything.

i was drawn to flamenco’s form because of its concurrent rawness and elegance, its wild attentiveness to feeling, desire—palpable & feral, also its fluidity & craftedness. when howling is formal, when stomping is a genre imperative. the expectation for contortion, your face made ugly by the sound of your feeling. sometimes adroit fury and sometimes deliberate, slow accumulation of agile tension.

just being enchanted by a talented friend and her beauty and courage. being also quelled by the way she closes her eyes when she sings because so do i and i’ve felt self-conscious lately as i prepare to start singing in public. watching the guitarist and the way his hair cascades his face. pretty, scruffy, long-haired quiet beauty. l., n., and i all determined later we had a crush on the band as a collective and we also had our stand-alone #1 crushes and he was mine. ugh, hate/love for gorgeous men who i make no sense to and maybe more importantly make no sense to me. i was telling l. that i ordinarily would never be interested in his crush, our friend’s former teacher, he’s just so not my type, but the way he sang—his face twisting carelessly with feeling and the two-toned shakiness and clarity of his voice was oddly captivating. i guess it was his emotiveness that was attractive, how immersed he was in it, how nothing beyond that mattered and it showed. how i am generally aroused by feeling, which makes me this big gushing heart walking around, touched and kinda wounded by humanness, ugh so annoying. anyway. n. was into the virtuosic pianist who our friend kept calling guapo onstage—erratic, nervous energy, hunched over his keyboard, shuffling through his music. young and pretty and it’s clear somehow to me that he knows it and doesn’t question it, which makes his beauty considerably less interesting to me. l. said to us, “well, we have no competition! we all like different ones!” ha. there’s something about flamenco that is so sensual and erotic in these ways that are hard to describe, but are totally enveloping. and this way it draws out attraction, but in this way of psychic magnetism rather than anything related to the ways we want people egotistically. it’s not about sex, necessarily, or wanting it, or even really about wanting the musicians. it’s something more complex and intriguing than all that. i think music always brings this sense out in me.

one of the heartwarming things about their performance was how thoroughly encouraging they all were with each other and how lovingly connected—no competition or ego involved. they egged each other on, improvised palmas and pitos and oh-ing and –eyyy-ing at each other’s solo moments, infectious responses which flooded the audience, too. mutualism that spread out to us. a wave of appreciation and embodiment and improvisation that we all took part in. connection and gratitude and generous virtuosity, humble genius, love, respect. it felt familial, like we were being let in to their circle, asked to share in their experience.

simultaneously within their and our element, i was inside my own. recalling cadiz, sevilla, malaga, granada. the unbearable heat of july in landlocked sevilla—53 degrees celsius—seeing the air rise in waves off the old, old pavement. dance anyway, walk anyway, long anyway and especially, in line with the agonizing heat.

recalling why i compartmentalized that time away somewhere not to be revisited, which had everything to do with the shame of being young, queer, in love with a close friend who loved me but couldn’t claim it ,was afraid of it—who broke my heart, came to hate me for her own hatred, shunned me because she couldn’t accept her/our queerness and what we were to each other—it was very secret, weird, very classic, very all over me, very pissing in a river, very youthful lovely/tragic. could i pursue a fate so twisted, could i crawl defeated and gifted? i was also embarrassingly infatuated with two of my teachers—my spanish teacher / cross country coach in nyc and one of the co-directors of the immersion program. which, looking back, was all totally normal and not shameful at all, even if silly. more normal in the scheme of my life than being in love with betty, actually. but, also the other resonant influences—family trauma, being something other than queer, too, and the way that my queerness/trans-ness was implicated in this monstrous way through my friend’s rejection of me. the first time in my life outside of the family structure that every intimate thing i’d shared would be used against me maliciously, spread around the school, tiny pariah. the awkwardness and pain of coming into myself through this, excelling anyway. but, to deny myself of that entire time period’s memories because of the shitty parts meant i also deprived myself of this other passion that was so fully my own, independent and private and separate, which i had shared with these three people, but weren’t innately connected to them. having become fluent in spanish because of the love of the language—how it moved and how it worked, the complex histories and experiences held within the language, the cultural, political, social geographies and backgrounds attached to it, the process of humbly learning about all that, coming to greater understandings and being very grateful for it. i think during the show, i started both grieving and being brought back to that lost enthusiasm. and also realizing the privilege i had in dropping off and picking up as i wished.

i remembered something that’s been constant in my life—my ability to be very comfortably singular and myself, even when tied to someone or wanting hopelessly (& kinda to my own detriment, as i was at the time and through my childhood and adolescence, being constantly infatuated with unattainable adults/mentors/teachers as i felt very disconnected from my peers and was always weirdly friends with adults/mentors/teachers, also being attached to my precociousness--something left over from growing up around adults, treated as one, and feeling detached and/or protective of other children around me). and i thought, how cruel to myself to not value how hard i go for things that spark me--my passions just because of the associations around them, to be ashamed of who i was then because of loving people and being made to feel it was wrong or crazy, to be ashamed of how i feel deeply and can appreciate many types of people while also keeping myself, being in my own world. people strive for this singularity and ardor and it’s always been central to who i am. trying to appreciate it finally and shuck off the old shame.

enamored by cadiz, small peninsular beach city, morocco straight across the water. the music of andalucia , how tied landscape was to flamenco and the language. how tied violence and erasure were, as well. gobbling up and taking everything in—the palimpsest of the landscape—violence, resilience, colonialism, appropriation, artistry, lineage, mad hope. the immersion program i was in was not about sugarcoating or denying the truth of spain’s colonial history and present—genocide, violent misogyny, extreme racism, anti-semitism, islamophobia, homophobia, anti-roma/gitano sentiment and violence that the country was built on and still breathes through actively—it was palpable, hanging in the air, visible on the street socially among people, living in the bricks of buildings that generations of people were violently disappeared and displaced from. the thread of power through time of the catholic church in spain, too. fascism and franco. how when i was in granada, we were very close to the location where federico garcia lorca was murdered and thrown in an unmarked ditch, never found. the last gasps of fascism in spain currently (as of 2005-6) and our teachers (many of which were politically radical, some were not, many of which were queer—how lucky i was!) explaining the continuing, lingering influence of it in parts of society and culture, as nothing ever really goes away.

i remember going to a flamenco performance in a garden courtyard in sevilla late in the evening. the audience was arranged around the dancers and musicians. they danced through the aisles of us and there were dim blue floor lights lining the aisles and lights woven into trellises covered in ivy and vine plants. it was ethereal and beautiful and strange and sad. heart gushing with everything, silly infatuations, wanting to escape my family and nyc forever, yet loving them so thoroughly and feeling some sense of belonging still--poor/working class irish/italian catholic mess that we were, and betty, so similar so different, coming from a middle/upper-middle class east african and irish american catholic mess. us, that night: was i feeling preconceived loss or just hopelessness, or after-the-fact heartbreak, i don’t remember—all a wash now, all was happening at once anyway, as usual—the having and the losing. but, flamenco is all hormone rush, all torturous, longing agony, all hunger & confusion, all that teenage stuff. the simultaneity of past, present, future desire compounded and layered on each other—loving someone in real time, loving someone from a point of expected future loss—inevitable? loving someone before you know it, or before they know it, or when they sense it and you don’t or vice versa, loving someone though it’s over, trampled, or it would never begin or it made no sense, the foolishness, the invitation of suffering that loving anything brings to you. being human together. feigning indifference & requiring attention, walking toward and running away. the choices we make. how flamenco unapologetically announces all of these things and requires being fully expressive of the truth of your heart and your body, no judgment or time to analyze, and it feels cellular almost, as well as really huge. and you don’t have to be in love with an actual human or to ever have known “romance,” to know the feeling. and flamenco is expansive in its holding of romance, sexuality, eroticism—it can actually have nothing to do with being or wanting to be coupled. it’s mostly about living and feeling and suffering, loving whatever it is moves you to regardless of how perilous it can be to do so. but especially how natural and life-changing it is to do so even if it explodes.

that otherworldly experience and everyone feels it. men no less passionate or full of emotion than women, actually sometimes more so. men who can’t eat, who lose sleep for love, men who suffer. i didn’t know men like that. i knew hard men, stoic, belying emotion. women who wait and wait, who will accept love’s bare minimum, who do whatever they have to. i knew many women like that, was already that since childhood and was becoming that more as time elapsed. but also women who could destroy you, could destroy themselves because it was all too much—i was experiencing that and i was that. voices thrown across the courtyard in rageful anguish til they hit a wall and broke into a thousand sharp pieces everywhere. irrevocable. 

forbidden love and feelings—every love i’d ever had or dreamed of & every love i ever would, in some sense. not fitting molds, wanting to destroy any concept of what was right or pure. but the experience of withholding, love & death & falling apart, the harm of others’ addictions & intimate violences that eat at you forever and keep your eyes narrowed at intimacy. how you know love is not an escape from these truths and shouldn’t be treated as such—how you learn to not make that mistake, but you can’t control how others act. memories whose feelings came back to my body in spain 2005, 2006 and in nyc 2017—the feelings, but not the images. i don’t really know who or what hurt me first, if the beginning matters, how all of that filters into my growing experiences with relation. details are so vivid and obvious, some are just completely burned out. and origins probably aren’t the key to the truth or to the future anyway.

flamenco bringing out the fire i set in my head. the crazy femme, the lover of everything, of home—a sense i try to find everywhere. her own house, where it all started, s/he can’t stand anymore for what it means to her history, her future. burn it down, even with its first origins of joy, its mementos of togetherness. the sickness too overwhelming and too deep. needing its influence to be taken, engulfed, extinguished. natural. the noble thing about impossible loves, right, about family and anything really��to be so dedicated and loyal. setting fire to that and striking out toward something else, loyalty only if it’s earned. to learn to say no, for what you allowed for a long time to be eaten by flames, parts of other people, parts of yourself, parts of home. the things we reproduce. to approach the unknown, newness, a whole other way of being written over what you were, while still holding the innate truths of yourself, that core sense of connection you crave between yourself and everything, over everything else. faith.