Pig Mural
Texts as a starting point for a wall drawing
It took two long months to draw with graphite pencils and powder, it was up for six months, and then, in one day, I had the fun of painting over the whole thing till nothing remained.
In any creative practice, there’s a threshold, where nothing becomes a thing. I’ve always imagined scalpel-silent entropy at one extreme, and symbolic language as understood by humans, on the other. In-between, along a meridian, willfully vibrating irreverent nonsensical sense, a kind of musical brigade offering up sweat and noise coalescing coagulating into trillions of receptors trying like hell to crystallize into symbolic meaning, or die trying. 
If I wasn’t numerically illiterate, I’d figure out an elegant formulaic expression for this kind of thing. But as it is, I only have a bare scrape brimming over under my hands. For my kind, home is along the mouth of that threshold where meaning is literally drawn out of materiality. Following a scent to some microbial little burst expressing itself into a signal with the potential to be recognized by another being, probably human; since we’re rather obtuse about sensing ultraviolet or chemical signals and so on, in our own skins.
I suppose aesthetic gestures don’t seem empty to me, it has something to do with this, a form of stripping down to nothing but gaze.
excerpts of texts –
Porker Parker – by Luke Van Tassel
“Porker Parker was a pig who hitched a ride to California with a caterpillar. Porker gets around using a walker with tennis balls on the legs. When he gets to California he covets the ancient golden xylophone that belongs to the caterpillar, so Porker smushes him.
The xylophone can make songs come to life. When he plays Humpty Dumpty 34 times, suddenly 34 Humpy Dumpties appear. When he plays Mary Had a Little Lamb, Mary and the Lamb appear. The president of California, W.D. Bush, comes to investigate and accidentally breaks
Porker’s
walker, so Porker cracks him over the head with a chair, and an alien comes out. Porker kills the alien with a hammer and hangs its skin outside. In the struggle, however, the
xylophone was broken, and now when Porker tries to play “Paradise City” he only sees brown grass and ugly women. Three years later, the caterpillar comes back to life, so Porker pays a skunk $5 to eat him.”
(story in the car, 20 August 2011)
fragment…
The plane between Miami and Santiago. One side – completely silent nun refusing to my hello, spending the 9 hours absorbed in fashion magazines. Other – young man shaking.
Scared of flying?
No.
Smiled sweetly, said he was scared of something else.
He was a ballet dancer from Berlin, Munich really, traveling to find his biological family somewhere in the mountains of Peru.
They were Quechuan, he was…
How did you find them?
My parents told me about where they found me: a small mission in the mountains. The orphanage isn’t there anymore. But… some of the nuns that ran it should still be in Lima.
He had a couple of names, a foundation director, a nun… and the name of a village. Babies cried. People snored.
He started shaking again.
I don’t speak Quechuan, he said.
Cannibalism and the Common Law –
criminals, idiots, and women
forensic hypnosis intended to be sung but
no particular tune is suggested
Freedom from what? I’m starving on my feet
no woman prefers a pretty mincing puppet
yes, with caution, to deserving paupers
material rewards are ineffective beyond the subsistence level)
During this time she carries a good stout stick with which to ward off
possible attacks from her husband’s ghost
(blew his brains out in Vienna, 1926, after the midwife toads)
admitted sending her imp to destroy one Wardol, a tailor
against chivalry civil convulsion
Love! it wearies and annoys me greatly
mythical as the griffin
that complicated thing which makes us dizzy
dread forgetfulness, fever or ague
inaudible summons
blood-drunk vicious relations
there are no doubts, no suspicions at the coarse and hysterical tone
such an amicable resolution
knocked in his wife’s frontal bone
by striking her with an iron
threw a burning paraffin lamp
at her
turned her round before
the fire like a piece of beef
even to the last gaspe, for her wicked
and detestable life
cut away with his crude razor several tags of mangled flesh
completely shattered the middle-third of the fourth
metacarpal bone
with a hatchet, in the back parlour
while attempting to force her into the oven
the black dog of Newgate: both pithy and profitable
does not appear to have suffered from
his deviant gastronomic activities
summer morning rush, eaves-dropping metro car
subway’s a machine in which our own programs lapse lost.
“no, not that one!”
a flat thrumming on a pivot point.
red musked energy from nothing-
from cut paper, from a green Santa clutching a garbage bag
glancing round to spit at the back of a passing business man.
A smug little girl humming in the hard-cracked stage of scowling confidence:
braid-tossing stance of someone who’s going to get all she wants that day from harassed
uncles.
cold cloud’s tenses
blue black taut cable connects.
tongue. tonsil. tooth. tight to each collarbone.
molecular muttering so loud
all join as a chorus of cogs milled hard.
swallowing oil thoughts coating mild
steel.
Some stranger’s grim primer – the dishes broke the dog’s shat on the couch the supervisor didn’t come to the morning budget meeting
breaking the line for the bus.
can feel his random rage in the halitosis smog of hot tunnels hit
a long blonde buying her smokes craning to see the fat burgundy runners sudden swell of tears in aswim in her eyes with hot street gum
a mouse trap trick to code us into possible grid arrangements: pyramids, Dutch land reclamation,
conscription-forgetting the sea’s boundaries of glass.
Man grabs her wrist.
tells her over her weeping to tell Carlos to watch out-he’s going to get the shit kicked out of him any
day now- she pauses
hot pink hair matching hot pink skirt running up the escalator at Place d’Armes.
