earthling's signalings (vol. 2)
The Window pt 60
Signs (and banners, flags, tees and license plates) of the times, cont’d. (Part I HERE):
For paths to liberty the beauty the beast feed
glorious mysteries let the lied heavens lead
yesterday you were mysteries glorious
child take status because just like us
just like us will will rise next
only the brave state state reject
changed my life where to will you go
yeehaw my country you know
status because of take
you were yesterday matters state
bruised never broken
compare yourself to the person
women pornstars raptors men
Earthlings then.
For paths to liberty the beauty the beast feed
glorious mysteries let the lied heavens lead
yesterday you were mysteries glorious
child take status because just like us
just like us will will rise next
only the brave state state reject
changed my life where to will you go
yeehaw my country you know
status because of take
you were yesterday matters state
bruised never broken
compare yourself to the person
women pornstars raptors men
Earthlings then.
NOTES:
This is Part Two of the “Earthling’s Signals” set from “The Window” series; go to Part One if you want to treasure-hunt the image-sourced words in this grouping. Hint: “earthlings” can be found somewhere in the images above.
“OF detected / opinion rejected” is the couplet on the graffiti’d car’s hood. “OF” stands for Only Fans. The detected/rejected part is a meme rebuttal to someone — an Attentioneer — suspected of only posting or commenting in order to pull people to their (for-pay) OF site or IG influencer account. (Note on the car the license plate “Waifu”, a Japanese loan-word meaning wife. That will show up in a future photo series from The Window: a license plate love story).
Flags in the photos: LGTBQ Pride: rainbow; LGBTQIA2-S Progress: rainbow + black & brown & blue & white & pink stripes + chevron + yellow circle; Transgender Pride: blue & pink stripes; Heterosexual Pride: black & white stripes
Bonus “Earthlings” image below
Brion Gysin (who influenced William Burroughs) invented the cut-up writing technique, slicing by accident through layers of newspapers and noticing interesting phrases in the resulting word jumble (then going on to actively combine book pages cut vertically in half). Except that the dadaist Tristan Zara invented the technique a few decades earlier when he plucked words randomly from a hat to make poems. Except that TS Elliot kinda did it before that using newspaper headlines and other quotes in his works, and maybe Lewis Carroll was doing a version of cut ups in the 1800s (“For first you write a sentence /And then you chop it small; / Then mix the bits, and sort them out /Just as they chance to fall…” from “Poeta Fit, Non Nascitur”).
I bet the cut-up technique started as far back as moveable type, which was invented in China during the Song Dynasty, 1040 CE (Gutenberg was 1400s). Ideograms (each a full word) were carved into individual clay blocks. After firing, the hardened ideograms were laid out in a massing for selection for the typesetting and inking. The printer/artist would surely have noticed all sorts of meaningful but random word or concept connections in the massed pile, or while sorting. (The Window images — modular, many, and recombinant — function much the same way as moveable ideogram type.) Perhaps not coincidentally, Zen koans also originated in the Song Dynasty era. “What is the sound of one hand clapping?” might as well be a cut-up phrase.
artificial intelligence is the cut-up artist nonpareil, reassembling the lexicon and image bank of the infinite internet.
William BurroughsWillAIm BurroughsChatGPT: “write a cut-up poem about poems in the style of Gysin”. Because it synchronistically includes “window” and “endless” (last word of the Phillip Larkin poem in the Verticality II post), here it is, poetry or poetryish?: Paper burns, its ash shapes a language of smoke. Each phrase: an unfinished room. Each word: a window to nowhere / Cut the frame into shards, scatter syntax like sand. Poems eat themselves and spit— a mouthful of shadows. Who speaks? The voice is a mirror. What’s left is the ghost of a sentence, a line hanging in air, threadbare but endless.
ChatKIA:
stumbling over gapsbetween words, poetry is
rough river’s stepstones
re: cut-ups, see also sampling, scratching, & collage songs, like this one: “Rashomon” which micro-samples 30 songs by Shinjuku Zulu & K.I.A. (Listen as the noise introduced at the beginning resolves into a song at 1:17 and especially at 4:17. The problem with lots of art music is that it’s really just… art noise. Trivia: Zang Tumb Tuumb — title of the famous Marinetti sound-poem mentioned in Part One — is also the name of the record label for the band Art of Noise).
“Writing is fifty years behind painting. I propose to apply the painters' techniques to writing; things as simple and immediate as collage or montage” *- Gysin, 1958
While in Paris writing together in 1958, Gysin says that rather than be occupied with editing the monster manuscript Naked Lunch “Burroughs was more intent on Scotch-taping his photos together into one great continuum on the wall, where scenes faded and slipped into one another…” (The Window photo series/installation is basically that^):
BONUS IMAGE:
PREVIOUS POSTS
* PS > Cut-up and resequenced weather (using found-wind from 5 places) from the CRISPR painting series (mixed media on paper on panel):
K.I.A. art: www.nu4ya.com (spliced paintings, recombinant sculptures, weatherworks, and the kitchen sink)