Born a Sandpiper

Did I ever tell you, dear, I was born a sandpiper? I had a white underbelly, my back was speckled, and I was always happy.

But there's this one image I can't get out of my head. There's nothing there, but I know one day I pulled my beak up from the ground, sand caked at the base of my mouth, sand caught in the crease of my beaktip, and looked at the holes I had made.

The was one rock sitting, and smaller holes, and little paths that a worm could have made, and suddenly I felt my heart beneath my feathers.

It's so stupid.


by Eric Lindley
photo by Daiana Feuer

Never Don't Feed Them Spaghetti

There are certain people that rely on you. Not now, of course. But there have been. At the beach, living in the sand, remember? Every day, you would come to the shore with a bowl of spaghetti and feed them with a knife and fork, twirling the noodles around the prongs and lowering the utensil gently to their mouth, in the sand. Only their mouth and eyes stuck out. And only when you came around. The sun was too hot for prolonged exposure. Your thick flesh was envied, in those days.

Everyday, with spaghetti, you would say, "Care for another bite?"
And they would say, "Yes."
And you would say, "Some night, I'll come down here with Paul's shovel and take you home to watch Frankenstein...and the Bride of Frankenstein on my VCR. Some night, I'll bring you fresh berries and a ukulele. There will be nights, soon, where I will be romantic to you. I will make you sick from my romance. I'll do something precious and you'll say 'that is just too precious' and you'll puke until you're about to drown. And I'll kneel down, wipe the puke away and kiss you. And that will be so romantic that you'll puke again."
And then they would say, "I love you," or something nice like that and you'd stick your lips down close to the sand and kiss their eyelid. Sometimes, maybe, down near the tidepools, crabs would be eating dead things.

Afterwards, you would walk back up the beach to sit on your sofa and look at naked pictures of celebrities or exterminators. Or maybe you would stretch out on the sofa and watch a movie about robots. You are always so pleased. Things are going so well. Things are going to be great. The future is really happening.

Some days you would believe in the future so much that you would forget about spaghetti or the beach and maybe drink beer instead.

Down on the beach, they would say, later, "I missed you yesterday." And you would say, "I'm sorry, I was believing in the future and drinking beer. It will never happen again. Someday I'll feed you turkey dripping in gravy. Someday, I'll find a shovel and dig you out of there. Someday, I'll bring you sunglasses."

There was one time where you believed in the future for a whole week straight. You watched Wolfman so many times that the VCR broke. Sometimes, while thinking about the future, you would think of their mouth poking out of the sand. You would think about spaghetti. Or crabs. You would go down there and their eyes would be sad and hungry.

"I brought you some spaghetti," you would say, "Stop looking so hungry. I am so good to you. I am romantic."

You would feel resentful that they couldn't eat animals that washed ashore, like the crabs did. Why couldn't they? You only had so much spaghetti to offer.

"Stop focusing on the stupid past," You would tell them, "Believe in the future. We need to think about the future. It's going to be really great. I'll take you on a boat, or something. I'll get a shovel. I'll dig you up. It's going to rock. Okay?"

Then, the fog would start to roll in and you'd get chilly and say, "I'm going to go, now. I rented a movie about zombies that eat everybody's brains. Be cheerful. Don't make me feel so bad about things. I could just eat all the spaghetti myself, but I don't because I'm romantic all over you."

And for weeks you would believe in the future. You would hope that their tongue would get long and ropelike and be able to lasso small critters that tasted like sushi. You would hope that you'd never have to put pasta to boil again. You would think about the day that the phone would ring and you'd answer and it would be Paul and he would say, "Hi, I have a shovel, I'm going to bring it over and we can dig up your person and you can go and collect seashells with them and sing songs about the moon or some shit." You would think about the phone ringing. And Paul coming with a shovel and it would make you feel so sick that you'd put your beer aside, nestle your head between your legs and spit.


by Gerard Olson

Dying Backward

Have you ever looked out of your dining room window and seen the view from when you were a child, though you live in the city now, and somehow the rain could wet the mountains but never reach the field, so you spent your young days being cut by yellow thistles and rolling in dusty muck before you even realized that the green hills one day you reached weren't a backdrop? Yeah, me too: it turns out while you were growing up I was dying backward, and went from your great-grandparent in the 20's, to your child in the 70's, and now you're slow and your breath smells like honey and grass, and the water is leeching out from the mountains but the weeds have forgotten how to soak it up. You'll be buried in a mudslide, and I'll crawl into the punny earth as a fetus. Good god, good god! We'll sing together in a blended voice so hoarse and slimy, at a frequency so clear, in a register so unholy.

If I'm ever lonely on this earth, please point to my hands and let me marvel that there are hard nails growing out of them.

by Eric Lindley
photo by Daiana Feuer

AN OTAKU MANIFESTO: THE EMERGING ARTIST, POSTPOSTMODERNISM, & THE NAÏVE POSITION IN THE EARLY XXI CENTURY

A NAÏVE DREAM OF A COMMON PSYCHOGEOGRAPHY FOR OTAKUS & EMERGING ARTISTS WITHIN & ALONGSIDE THE (PARA)INSTITUTION(S) – This manifesto is further effort to build a naïve (para/post/non)political(?) myth(?) unfaithful to ‘feminism’, socialism(?), and materialism(?). Unfaithful not as blasphemy is unfaithful, there is nothing intrinsically negative about reverent worship. The postmodern, hyper-ironic position is not the only game in town. Reverent worship has always seemed to require taking things very seriously. I know no better stance to adopt from within the conservative, traditionalist gaze of Harold Bloom (and/or his students), including the gaze of aesthetes such as Donald Kuspit (and/or his students). Reverent worship can protect one from the moral majority within, while still insisting on the desire and need for community. Reverent worship is apostasy. Inhabiting the naïve position is about contradictions that do not resolve into larger wholes, even dialectically (in other words – actually), about the ease of letting go incompatible things because both or all are unnecessary and untrue. Inhabiting a naïve space is about humour and not-so-serious play. It may not be a rhetorical strategy nor a political method, but I would like to see it more honoured within (para)institutions such as University of California, University of Greenwich, CalArts, Goldsmiths College, and artist-run utopias in and around London and Los Angeles. At the centre of my naïve postpostmodern faith, my reverent worship, are two images: the Otaku and the emerging artist.

And now, the touch of Paprika. The otaku came before the cyborg. If a cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction (and dreams) – then, the otaku is the naïve, childlike creator of this cybernetic organism – for the otaku lit(t)erally created the technology to dovetail the real and the unreal, to actualize the impossible. Liberation does not simply rest on the construction of consciousness (or the unconscious, for that matter), but the imaginative apprehension, of the “unconscious not as the preserve of wild drives that have to be tamed by the ego, but the site where a traumatic truth speaks out. [Anime is effectively that site] Therein lies Lacan’s version of Freud’s motto Wo es war, soll ich werden (Where it was, I am to become): not ‘The ego should conquer the id’, the site of the unconscious drives, but ‘I should dare to approach the site of my truth.’ What awaits me ‘there’ [Gina Clark’s 7 March 2006 & 26 April 2007 Stevenson Blanche Gallery performance] is not a deep Truth that I have to identify with, but an unbearable truth that I have to learn to live with.”

Slavoj Zizek, How to Read Lacan, Great Britain: Granta 2006, p. 3.



by Maxi Kim
photo by Gerard Olson

The Assembly Line

The Assembly Line, a yellow dog, with her paisley teeth, stoops over tea and a polite kitchen sink. The room smells of head hot through a fist. Yellow tapers each time, left, right, she moves close enough to tilt subtly across the red dog named Shape. If Shape was me, Yellow might say something like this: "I like the pond, the flicker, how pretty. Look at your lovely face, at your mouth sized paw." Outside dropped a bucket from the sky, bloody paste, her cheek bones reflect in harsh light. And I'm the bare bulb? If the Red Shape was me, Yellow'd turn on me: "I like an alpha naked, not your bulk against the door." Great. Her choice takes the rain instead of taking time, that long toy. Not that I adore the waiting, the ingredients. I do enjoy the tea. In one minute Line will leave a scar on a plaque.

paisley=sharp
paw=breast
bulb=body
alpha=man
bulk=body
plaque=heart


by Shannon Breen

Cruise: WESTERN CARIBBEAN from $399

Two friends, C and S, traveled to sunshine and laid siege to a crooked umbrella and a brief spate of opaque air. Worshippers stretched far into the distance, browned limbs beguiling to some, an overdose of flesh to others. What if you were a decimal point amidst a sea of prime numbers? Would you regret the adamant appearance of prime colors, their bragging version of ripeness at rest?

C is discussing her retirement, and S is listening attentively. C stares across a horizon of uninterrupted human activity, subconsciously multiplying and adding while updating S on certain acquisitions. During a pause, S voices a well-turned question, then nods in affirmation at her friend’s response.

It’s mid-day, and C and S will soon forsake the blistering sand and “take a dip”. The sun is bright, stenciling dwarfed shadows and articulating drawers of ziplocked jewelry that E, a transplant, has set out. S notices a delicate mother-of-pearl bracelet and bends over to investigate. She will slide in on her pale arm, where it will shimmer briefly, before disappearing into the frothy lip of an oncoming wave.

By Therese Bachand