13 Personal Notes From A Recent East-Coast Ghost Hunting Trip, Compiled Upon My Return To Los Angeles

In a nutshell: Ghosts are cameras photographing a smaller space then a bigger space around it. The space has people in it. I am crazy about them. I have decided to write a book about the ones that are missing.

*****

I chose the East Coast because it is where an S and I started by traveling far, looking for little marshes and stuffed quahogs, doughboys, but ended up following each other to the bathroom so as not to be alone. Also the first glimpse of N – another dominant species of GHOST.

*****

I don’t have any weapons, because that is how you catch ghosts. I am staying at the old grounds of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s estate. Edna had a pool and tennis courts. It was the first underground pool in NY and her guests were only allowed to swim naked. They were also only allowed to play tennis naked.

*****

I spent the third evening peeling sheddings of an S out of an N out of an M out of a D out of an E, watching them stick by parts to each other. Plastic glove fingers, each one of them with a nose that sneaks back. “Shut up,” I say. “Sit down over there and take a good look at me.” I have to resist the urge to take the E’s nose off, peel it off leaving a thin sheet of stretchy skin. I have to resist putting certain baby ghosts (M2, D2) on the couch – they were not there! Outside there are Robins, deer, black flies and apparently a black bear with a 25 mile radius. In the field there are things to sand down. I have to make space in which to catch the big ones – the full-grown ones. Space.

*****

Edna St. Millay left a bottle of morphine bottles and some gin bottles in the woods. This is a clue. Christine says that addiction stems from a problem that someone else termed “co-dependency” and I think I agree. Bell Hooks says “I painfully admitted that I did not feel loved in our household but that I did feel cared for”(AAL 7). Kate Bush says “It’s me, Cathy - I’ve come home. It’s so cold”(WH). The Decemberists say “if you don’t love me, let me go”(TED). Tracy Thorn quotes The Monochrome Set and says “when he’s making you off… goodbye”(GJ). Love is an action, says Bell Hooks. The map to Millay says “bushwhacking is recommended for some parts of this trail.” For a hand to turn to glass it has to start at a place – fingertip? A spray in the palm turns to glass, and after that it is increasingly difficult to turn to another person for a good conversation.

*****

More about the ghost - When the ghost speaks she hears me me me me me me me, but what live people hear is you you you you you you you. Her back is covered in little handprints. Her face is covered in little footprints.

*****

There is a germ. Also I have sensed a ghost in the room that keeps tabs. I believe that she is a M, is a D, the two that have been reported jumping off bridges.

*****

Notes On Their Movements: left, right. Vine. As of planks. A marine sway. A babble. As a population/individual. While taking notes. While marking the path with a knife. With paint. Alone or with a friend (population). By yourself or lonely. On the road or through the meadow. Through the woods. With or without bug spray. With headphones. Without headphones. With or without a hat. With or without a pen. Ant-like. Stalking. While smelling. With internal logic, as a cat.

*****

The tab-keeping ghost has grown and is straddling the barn in tulle. There is a single bird on the tree – grey and brown. I brought an Eastern Birds book by Frank Shaw down from the main house, but it is useless – organized by species. “Loons and Grebes, 9. Petrels and Shearwaters, 13.” Bird books should be organized by color and size. “Both sexes show plain face,” (EB, 168).

*****

“whip-poor-will Identification: Grayish nightjar, considerably smaller than Chuck-will’s widow.”
*****

“Movements: Summer visitor”(EB 164-165).

*****

I have caught two, but am not sure what to do with them. An S just snuck into my wide gray margins. “Tiny bill is diagnostic”(EB 129). The not small specter slipping around in there, bloating. He doesn’t go on the couch – he goes on the chair. Also I am taking the N off the couch and putting him somewhere comfortable – a cot. I want to apologize to the N for catching him – I have been warned about this. I am trying to get over the pattern I am instantiating by standing over the S’s chair and judging, non-stop for hours. What I really want is for the S to continue desaturating – only out of my view though. This is different. When I pass one next at the Farmer’s Market, my personal goal is to not be able to see it at all.

*****

Personal question: If no one ever climbs into my heart pit again, will it salt up? This is a question we should all be asking ourselves. What would it feel like to salt up? To crack? On the flip side, what would it feel like to give birth to a ghost – a ghost of any variety?


by Allison Carter

Coffee Calisthenics

Today birds veer left suddenly. Coffee spills over trees and rooftops. It’s a jungle. Here is steaming rain – or sun, but wet.

A bird goes left of where it seems to go.

Beyond these toes, the balcony edge of tiny pebbles stops in mid-air. A bird cuts left. This face leans against the plastic palm trees strung on tiny lights wrapped around the banister. Something easier to draw a picture of: jungle’s on one side and sea on the other – but leaning against the balcony with sunshine-sipped coffee, both are on the other side of the railing. Not the rooftops.

Birds tip left and right, dip, flutter – jagged angles avoid steaming coffee falling from the sky. Bird feet are light/meatless enough to use bobbing leaves under raindrops to take off. Or they’re shot out of a water pistol in the trees.

Eyes and pores, ceramic clicking teeth, or hard water drops slap edges, falling between canopies of leaves; street urchins fall, stealing avocados too big to carry home – taken up, destroyed by cracking croquet mallets, splashing fruit, seed and skin in mud puddles.

If this fills a watergun with coffee; fills it with birds, will the raindrops cut left? So this aims right. Do birds grow from small to big to fit through the water pistol’s tip? Or should it say cannon.

Raindrops flick leaves. Branches keep a whole tree from tipping over, dipping up and down slightly. The tree’s still, pulled in all direction.

Today raindrops realize their bubbles are full of coffee. Today trees stood still, bound by balconies of leaves shooting birds out of water pistols, or cannons; birds expand from small to big.

Birds are shot out and, quickly, dip left and right ambling in a general direction to avoid coffee pouring out of the sky. The birds cut left.

A small red chair and small green table soak grey mist on a balcony – on the narrow, longer than a bathtub but only a little bit wider, balcony. Under a concrete canopy.

Can’t hear the hardness of the railing, a plastic palm tree pressing this face, but, it’s there, because if it were not – when suddenly the coffee stops raining – we’d fall in the alley between here and the neighbor’s concrete fence. Possibly into the crack on the ground beyond toes, beyond the balcony below. The crack runs the length of this apartment, from balcony to front door.

Unlike leaves, the balcony must fall through the balcony below, for us to fall through like a raindrop or a street urchin with an avocado on a canopy.


The neighborhood squirrel appears, galloping along the cement fence with something in its mouth. When it stops, coffee bounces out of these hands, shot by a water pistol, and spills all over the balcony.



by Daiana Feuer

AN OPEN LETTER TO MARIA FUSCO 23 JULY 2008

Dear Director Fusco, “Is anyone in an Art School imagining its Future? Or are we all trying not to think about it. When I summon it up, it seems to come furnished with ‘hot-desks’, to be comprised of seamless, temperature-controlled scenarios for ‘knowledge transfers’, generating ‘learning outcomes’. Even within the province of the imagination, on a hot afternoon, this imagery of heat, material extrusion and contract-residue gets nowhere near the sensual. No. Although something is clearly being exchanged, in those corporate, carpeted spaces. But this terminology does take me as far as the comic, with its scatological productivity rhetoric. And maybe there is hope in that. In the future Art School we will still laugh.” [1] But is laughter enough? Is the comic enough? Here I think even the author of the above passage would answer – no, it is not nearly enough. What exactly is it that the laughter conceals? What does the comic portend? Enter Slavoj Zizek: “there [are situations where] a horror [is] so deep that it can no longer be ‘sublimated’ into tragic dignity, and is for that reason approachable only through an eerie [laughter]… the passage from tragique to moque-comic… every dignified, ‘noble’ position turns into its opposite – the truth of the ‘noble consciousness’ dedicated to its sublime ethical task of serving the Good is the manipulative, servile, exploitative ‘base (knavish) consciousness’”. [2] Think of Heath Ledger as The Joker. And Harvey Dent’s passage from noble civil servant to the corrupted, monstrous Two Face. Is not art school in a similar predicament today? The degree to which we cling on to French Theory for the goal of ‘knowledge transfers’ and the aim of ‘learning outcomes’ – is indeed comic. No? I’d cry if I could only stop laughing. Whatever dignity Deleuze and Guattari once conjured, the emerging artist’s widespread idealization of the dynamic duo has put out, stamped out any inkling or trace of ‘the sensual.’ For shame. But how can we snap our emerging artists’ out of the Deleuzian siren song? Guattari’s mirage? Enter Chris Kraus. Her book Torpor pushes French theoreticians off their pedestals, drags them down the ivory tower, to reveal them for what they are, “that the sublime Grail will reveal itself to be nothing but a piece of shit.” [3] “When Felix [Guattari] throws back his head and laughs, which something that he does quite often, his wire-rimmed John Lennon glasses slide down off his nose. He is so comfortable within his tubby skin, with nothing but contempt for the young… He goes to cocktail parties with the president… No one expects Felix to be anything but what he is: a great philosopher and clinician; a 1960s guy with lots of influence and money. Sylvie isn’t bothered by the conversation in the loft. She knows that she’s invisible to Jerome’s French friends. She knows that even if she spoke the language perfectly, they wouldn’t speak to her because she isn’t anyone to them. Her opinions wouldn’t matter.” [4] Hopefully they will matter now. As the new Director of MFA Art Writing at Goldsmiths College, I hope you consider Torpor as one of the first mature examples of Art Writing in the short twenty-first century. Perhaps it is about time to finally throw out our copies of A Thousand Plateaus, Anti-Oedipus and Soft Subversions. And clear out some shelf space for Aliens & Anorexia, I Love Dick, and Video Green. Here may reside the future of Art Writing – but what about our original query? Is anyone in an Art School imagining its Future? Exit Thomas Hirschorn, exit relational aesthetics. Enter Gina Clark, enter utopic performativity. Imagine Clark’s July 18, 2008 Betalevel, Chinatown performance for the Los Angeles book launch of One Break, A Thousand Blows (BookWorks 2008). She is literally inside the proverbial cardboard box. The intimate crowd watches as every puncture and cut from within emphasizes the manual nature of the artist’s work. A pause, an injunction: out of every slit, orifice – a dozen fish of every size and wet variety pour out, hitting the floor of the artist-run space. The smell of day old cod and flounder permeates Betalevel. A flood of associations: Viennesse Actionism? English Neoism? An authentic act in between Time and Eternity? Laughter. Admiration. And suddenly – an explorsion! “[T]he prisoners have seen a ghost – neither the resuscitated obscene ghost of the past, not the spectral ghost of the capitalist present, but the brief apparition of a future utopian Otherness to which every authentic revolutionary stance should cling.” Hope resides here, I think. Yours sincerely, Maxi Kim

[1] Elizabeth Price, Goldsmiths BA Fine Art 2008 Catalogue, London: MacDonald Egan.
[2] Slavoj Zizek, The Fragile Absolute, London: Verso 2000, p. 44.
Ibid., p. 26.
[3] Chris Kraus, Torpor, Los Angeles: Semiotext(e) 2006, p. 103.
[4] The Fragile Absolute, pp. 159-160.

by Maxi Kim
Photo by Gerard Olson and Daiana Feuer

Exercise Plan

I chop wood and listen to loud music. With this much wood, my fire will burn through the whole winter.