Prague Day 1

Reading Kafka to each other on the train. We arrive and are sprinted across the city to the royal gardens with its peacocks and faux cave wine cellars. We looked out across the city peering down the hills that communists used to ski over and over like Sisyphean athletes because they weren’t allowed to leave.

Prague Day 2

Our synagogue marathon day was disrupted by a marathon. We went through old cemeteries and crowded the tight walkways that snaked around, annoying people with strollers and dogs. There were hands on headstones and possible mis-hearings that aristocrats were to dirty to enter or touch . Disposable yamakas were handed out at the synagogues to help male tourists feel closer to god. Then a Kafka fun house and with a Kafka translator who spoke about the tediousness of language and collaboration. The day finished with one of the best meals of my life and a bird named Gustav.

Prague Day 3

We ate in the breakfast dungeon and set off to Radio Free Europe. A reporter with the last name Serafim spoke about jazz, liberty, and the western world; relations with the east mediated through Hendrix, Pink Floyd and Miles Davis. I kept asking myself what was being obfuscated on the tour. The reporter wanted a certain kind of question to be asked but I couldn’t tell what. I tried to prompt a conversation about the multiplicity of ways to define freedom and the limits of western bourgeois freedom becoming a universal standard, especially when it is hard to find even at its origin. Of course this was at the last minute and we were shooed back through security before any conversational momentum could build.

Untying the Mother Tongue Conference //12//5// Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry

Hélène Cixous

Notes taken as follows

Perpetual returning of tongues/Mother tongues are a kind of mood/’The delight of painlessly foreigning oneself’/Soul searching states/angst-with willow wisps-prehistoric cities/Dream-Traum-Trauma/Using the word yesterday even when it has been months since the moment was recorded/Spirituality crisis—she can touch it/Fluidly/She can speak of her own experiences while somehow also talking about so many critical ideas and open it up to allow another’s experience and emotion to enter in the moment/’When I go down into languages I am touched/By contact/By rhythm’/I need to derive pleasure from using language/The more we return the more the Subject gains Strength and Power/Inhabiting/ This is a memoir/’These places are so saturated in Phantasms that they are impossible to see/Here everything is lost so let us hold onto the lost.’

Met the real Avant Bard. Riding the edge between corn-ball and complicating political and sociological nuanced songs. Explaining things after singing seemingly didactic, transparent lyrics never felt like too much information because there was actually a lot going on. The talk after divulged into the mechanical and digital complications that occur when trying to re/produce a piece of music. Small record label owners are more collectors are more collectors and curators than people running businesses, it is difficult to say they are even capitalists as it is such a rare thing in that world to accumulate any sort of profit.

Location: Humboldthain Park, sitting on a bench next to a friend sitting on the bench.

We walked and sat down together. Looking in front of us we could take in a particularly nice clearing. On either side the paved path connected to darker parts of bush and strategically laid behind us was a partially overgrown storage shed or restroom for the park. The street as we knew from the walk in, wasn’t too far off from us or the clearing.

He set a timer for 15 minutes and we closed our eyes and started hearing around. First was farthest away as possible, I didn’t know how exactly to gauge distance and the farther I tried to hear the more I got this sensation in my head and sinuses that kind of buzzed and made me feel a bit high so I reached for longer than what I should have just to sustain the feeling. I noticed that is was easiest to not attach a source to the sounds, if I tried to hear them all simultaneously. My friend sitting beside me said that he imagined himself into a white room in order to abstract the sounds from any sort of source but then he failed to keep his eyes closed because the white room full of noise began to lull him to sleep. We didn’t describe the textures or colors but more so the way they were organized to us and the different ways we ‘failed’. When doing any project that involves sustaining sound as perceived noise, there’s always a promise of failure. We agreed that the birds were the most difficult not to distract from others sounds as well as trying not to hear it as a ‘bird sound’. After reflecting we noticed that because we had sat still in the same place long enough the squirrels had come out and were just acting like little nut-balls not so far away form where we sat. We watched them until they ran up too far in the trees and walked out of the park.

We began by the fruits. I unfortunately don’t get very much out of this tour initially because I already had an idea of what it was going to be like and had created a kind of front of shield in my head that disallowed me from taking any kind of critical or interesting lens in those moments. I became aware of this cool front, which on the real is never really cool at all it just makes one miss out on things, and starting talking to Katy Wert about it as she seemed a couple steps ahead of this mental state. We realzied it is much like when a teen i in public with there parents and their fear of being associated with their family is so great that they have to somewhat subtly announce to the public sphere that, ‘No’ they are not hanging out by choice and thereby actualizes their own embarrassment by acting out in an embarrassing way.

After somewhat getting over this hang up I started beginning to feel more engaged with the tour. Usually I prefer more straight-up tagging style or at least character/symbol based scribbles to what we would label as ‘street art.’ I love and hate the cockiness pervading street art and tagging so much so that it keeps me locked into a dialectical stutter with my thoughts whenever I try to assess it. I did really like the last mural we saw on the tour of  A human made up of and eating itself by an artist named Blue. The moment I looked up at it reminded me of Marx’s congealed labor, or the worker abstracted into labor power. I did wonder what the reason was that all of the people making up the figure were peach and pinkish colored and if it was perhaps because whiteness is a assumed neutral and universal color of skin. It was a question that snuck up on me after the tour was over and I wished that we could have had some kind of dialogue on it in that moment.