Monday September 6th, 2010
The sketch for this was based on one of the exhibits at the natural history museum, in the room with the big blue whale.
And the text was taken from this Diane Wakoski Poem that’s been stuck in my head.
The Story of Richard Maxfield
The Story of Richard Maxfield
He jumped out of a window.
Or did he shoot himself?
Was there a gun
or was it pills?
Did anyone see blood?
Was he holding water in his lungs?
Or was he right about the CIA conspiracy and killed by one of them
because he knew their plan?
Richard was an electronic composer.
He wrote a piece called ‘Cough Music’ made up of the coughs
of hundreds of people at concerts.
He was brilliant and well organized.
And then he fell apart.
He was homosexual and took drugs.
He was brilliant and well organized.
I loved ‘Cough Music’ and could not see how such a fine composer could
fall apart as Richard fell apart.
This is the story of Richard Maxfield.
He died in California.
It does not make me as sad that he died
as that he fell apart.
We all die.
We do not all fall apart.
‘Cough music’ was a beautiful piece of music.
I went to a
concert tonight
and heard many people coughing,
especially during the encore, which was a piano piece by
Debussy, delicate and sparse,
like a dress you can see through,
and everyone seemed to have to cough during the piece.
If you cough very hard,
do you think you fall apart?
I once had a bad cough
and now realise that for two weeks I coughed during every
poetry reading and concert I went to.
I wonder if anyone recorded my cough?
I wonder how many readers and performers
not only did not feel sympathetic towards
my bad lungs and the symptomatic cough
but also wanted to shoot me for coughing?
A fortuneteller once said I would die of TB. I wonder if that’s
why I like ‘Cough Music’?
Perhaps I should have my lawyer
write into my will
“I would like to have ‘Cough Music’ played at my funeral.
Someone would think that in bad taste.
No one likes to think that after you die you still have
bad taste,
Even if you had it in life.
What bothered me about Richard Maxfield was that
he had the bad taste to fall apart;
dying after you fall apart is actually a rectification
of bad taste.
Richard was so brilliant and well organized
I could not imagine how he fell apart.
And ‘Cough Music’ is just one of his very beautiful concrete tapes.
They say the men he loved destroyed him.
But he was brilliant and well organized and I find it hard
to believe some not-brilliant and poorly organized man could destroy him.
You see, the story of Richard Maxfield is one I do not understand.
But I have always loved ‘Cough Music’
and when I heard the beautiful Debussy tonight
and thought of a man I love
who for many reasons I cannot see or be with
and I heard the audience coughing, flashing every once in a while
like light catching a strip of aluminium which blows on a fruit tree
I understood that I would never fall apart,
though I did not know why,
and for a moment I thought of the involuntary action of
coughing, and I understood perhaps
why he jumped out of a window
though I knew that just as I would never fall apart,
I would also never jump out of a window,
and I also refrained from coughing, though just at the end of the
Debussy,
I wanted to/ maybe just to join the whole crowd.
There are many ways to die,
but none of them is subtle.
Why do people cough so much
at concerts?
I cannot touch the piano.
I cannot touch you.
If the King of Spain gave a concert
no one woud cough.
The story of Richard Maxfield is one I do not understand,
but I thought of it tonight,
listening to people cough their way through Debussy.
It was not music.
Only Richard Maxfield made music out of coughing, and he is dead.
Richard Maxfield is dead.
-Diane Wakoski
-
Ursula Viglietta-
October 7th, 2009
To get out of this dry spell I’ve made up a new game. I’ve solicited assignments and I’m required to complete one every day until I’ve gotten through the list. They don’t have to be good, but they have to be done. Aubrey’s Boy and Owl was the first, and a pretty good start, I might even make that one into a color piece.
I finished this one yesterday:
As assigned by kate.
And this tonight:
A portrait of Hayley, as per her request.
More to come. And I’m still taking requests.
-
Ursula-
September 14th, 2009
There’s a broken clock on the wall of my 2:30 class on Monday afternoons. I noticed it on the first day I had the class, for the whole hour and twenty five minutes the clock claimed that it was 10:43 on a wednesday, the ninth. The second hand is bright red and it just ticks in place between 36 and 37 seconds. The second hand is what caught my attention at first, on every tick it jumps lightly in place, but on the tocks it jumps more forcefully, as though it’s really hoping that on this tock it’ll finally break free of it’s 37th second prison. I spent most of the first class watching the clock, I was curious if the minute hands would actually make some attempt to tell time, but they didn’t budge.
When I came back the next week, at 2:30 once again, the clock claimed it was 4:25, still on wednesday, the ninth. The second hand though, hadn’t moved from it’s spot between 36 and 37, and still jumped lightly on the ticks and forcefully on the tocks…. Why do I find this interesting? God only fucking knows. But I spent the whole of that class watching the clock again, trying to catch the minute hands in action, to no avail. THIS is what I waste MY time doing, watching clocks that move without moving, trying to catch them in the act.
I was back in that room again today. It said it was 5:40, still wednesday, still the ninth. Although, the wednesday is only half visible now, which makes me suspect that next week it may finally be thursday. The room is obviously stuck in some sort of time warp where, conceivably, life is moving at a much slower pace. Today I started musing about what wednesday of what month of what year it was that I was visiting while I sat in the room. My teacher asked why I was smiling, and I quickly made an excuse and a mental note to control my facial expressions for the rest of class.
-
Ursula-
August 29th, 2009
I haven’t been art making lately, but I have been reading- boring for you, important mental hibernation for me. I like this:
“When Thomas Mann was very young, he wrote a naïve, intriguing story about death. In the story death is beautiful, as it is beautiful to those who dream of it very young, when it is still surreal and enchanting, like the bluish voice of far-off places.
A young man, mortally ill, gets off a train at an unknown station. He walks into the town without knowing its name and takes rooms in the house of an old woman whose forehead is covered with eczema. No, I do not wish to go into what took place in the rented rooms. I only wish to recall a single minor occurrence: walking around the front room, the ill young man had the feeling that “in between the sounds made by his footsteps he heard another sound in the rooms on either side – a soft, clear, metallic tone – but perhaps it was only an illusion. Like a golden ring falling into a silver basin, he thought…”
That minor acoustic event is never developed or explained in the story. From the standpoint of the action above it could have been omitted without any loss. The sound simply happened; all by itself; just like that. The reason I think Thomas Mann sounded that “soft, clear, metallic tone” was to create silence, the silence he needed to make the beauty audible (because the death he was speaking of was beauty-death), and if beauty is to be perceptible, it needs a certain minimal degree of silence (a perfect criterion of which happens to be the sound of a golden ring falling into a silver basin).
(Yes, I know. You haven’t the slightest idea what I’m talking about. Beauty has long since disappeared. It has slipped beneath the surface of the noise – the noise of words, the noise of cars, the noise of music, the noise of signs – we live in it constantly. It has sunk as deep as Atlantis. The only thing left is the word, whose meaning loses clarity from year to year.)”
-Milan Kundera<
-
Ursula-
