God is Afoot, Magic is Alive

Yesterday I gave my end-of-residency presentation along with all the other members of the In(ter)ventions: Literary Practice at the Edge program at the Banff Centre for the Arts. I showed a bit of work from the past (eros/ion, with mIEKAL aND), more recent past (Flaxen for Jen Bervin and Raw Power/Kill City for James Williamson); then I showed my blog (this blog) and read a bit of it, as well as the Aleph Mem Shin x-stitch, which is almost finished by now. It was a headlong rush through the material and I was winging it on a very pleasant adrenaline high that was part informality and partly exhilarated nervousness. It was the last of a series of resident presentations, all of which were both brilliant and piquantly in-process and there was a good feeling of artistic community.

Afterwards, at dinner, Paul Seesequasis, a gracious and generous human being, gave me an amazing gift: a first pressing copy of Raw Power in mint condition. I needed to lean on J. R. Carpenter in order to not have my knees completely buckle under me. I was still on the adrenaline rush and that gave me another wave of it.

Stay tuned for further musings on how the Iggy and the Stooges fit into this saga, this yarn of text and textile, this intermeshing of tactile praxis and cerebral spinnings. As I wrote on my FB page, there is no end to Stooge Magic. James Williamson noted that it (the receipt of the Raw Power gift as somehow karmically appropriate to this creative journey) was poetry! and it was indeed poetic justice. It seems to happen when I simply go towards the doors that are opening. Stooge Magic, I'm calling it for now, though it's got lots of names. God is afoot, magic is alive, as Leonard Cohen wrote (in Beautiful Losers) and Buffy St. Marie sang.

Intertextile, Text in Exile: Shmata Mashup...

... is the title of a performance piece/long essay-poem (poessay?) that Adeena Karasick and I have been working on, starting last February. I've been collecting and generating texts and textile pieces for my Text, Textile, Exile project for a few years now, and when I went to New York a year ago (Feb. 2010) I met with Adeena and learned that she too had been working along parallel lines. While reading the entirety of a book we both had essays in (Radical Poetics and Jewish Secular Culture), she had discovered a marvelous pun: shmata (Yiddish, "rag") and shma'atta (Hebrew, "the text at hand") and we were off and running.

We had worked together before, having presented a collaborative closing lecture, "“Simultaneous Jewissance: Performing Critical-Creative Mutual Influence,” for a conference sponsored by the University of Minnesota's Department of Theatre Arts and Dance in 2006, and it had been a gratifying experience, well-received as well as enjoyable, so we had a precedent for working together. We feverishly generated text and then at the end of February debuted our piece as it then was to In(ter)ventions: Literary Practice at the Edge, a conference at Alberta's Banff Centre for the Arts where, a year later, we are both residents in a program by the same name, in which we hope to further our collaboration. We also gave the presentation in slightly altered form at the Post_moot Convocation of Poetry and Performance in April 2010, at Miami University, Ohio.

Now we're back here at Banff; I'm working on this blog and also on our piece (x-stitching the letters Aleph, Mem, and Shin (the three mothers); Adeena is working on a video and also on our collaboration.

The photo represents the MEM under construction; i'm adding a gold metallic luster-crust to it to make it a little more interesting.