Cold Spring Pandemic Dream with Bird / April 14, 2020 by Dean Terry

This hybrid poem/narrative was written 4/5/2020 and performed live online on 4/9/2020.

Cold Spring Pandemic Dream with Bird

I’m wading offshore, water to my waist, watching an island slowly submerge. Almost out of sight you wave to me, and I wave back. Then we forget what waving is for.

…

I enter a fully formed dream where I’m in some kind of institution and am told to watch a movie
in a fake friendly way, as institutions do
A smile that implies a bite
A swallow that follows a chew

It’s about a young man who was wrongfully imprisoned. I leave the building and enter his world. His sister is desperately trying to get him freed to no avail. It is clearly, deeply unjust. One against a mechanistic world. People forming the parts. The feeling sinks in - the outrageousness of it. A Fox CNN MSNBC outrageousness, but unmanufactured.

The unjustness transmogrifies and I become the one about to go to prison unjustly. Why? Insert scene of skating down a hill in a race but with rules like driving - big four wheel skates, bell bottoms, tight ass, tube socks, speed, fuck you - there’s a replay like in sports or court where my infraction is evidence for my impending imprisonment. I am sentenced for an improper skating move. For flair. For speed and fuck you.

Life is over and there’s no out. I’m like a hapless pet trapped in a house, dreaming of creeks and trails and smells and squirrels. I thought I knew what freedom felt like. Did I? We don’t think about time, it’s just a condition of our existence. To us, it appears to have a direction and we arrange ourselves accordingly. Freedom is like that. Social fabric is like that. Once it’s gone we feel what was there all along, what we were walking talking scheming planning making money on.

Prison is impending. No appeals from my new sister will change it. We are birds smashing into fashionable store windows, blinkless mannequins smiling, staring just past us. The looming mass of it is unbearable. “I didn’t do anything” - spoken like someone in blue striped tube socks would.

A full day passes, seemingly in real time. Most of it is lost to a regrettable clarity. The coffee Is kicking in and out the window my neighbor is taking a giant ass palette of Costco toilet paper out the bed of his enormous F250, through transparently transparent glass doors on his neocolonial George God Damn Washington house. (I know, the tp thing is three weeks old but it’s still happening.) The first thing you learn to control is your own asshole. There it is. Whatever else is happening you have that proud white stack.

And there’s a small black bird peering in the window. … It’s gone.

It’s the end of the day and I’m headed to prison, carried by a pushing, pressing momentum. The sense of doom is a slow motion avalanche. Covering, smothering. …. Wake up, I tell myself…. Wake the fuck up.
WAKE UP!

I see the wall the bookshelf the room. In less than a second I was back in our pandemic. Yes ours. Back. The location changed. The weather. Why is it this cold in April? In spring? Never mind. It feels the same. The tone carries furtively from the dream. The same note, two octaves apart. A trap the size of the world, set by the world. And we just walked right into it, speaking and tweeting, thinking our politics and religion and haircuts will protect us. Hallucinations. Ephemeral and powerless.

So I got up, walked around a bit
Or at least I think I did
Went and got water from the garage
Maybe

Our house is lit up with bright night lights everywhere because of my insomnia and frequent walking around in the middle of the night.

Made a few laps of the living room, quiet like I learned as a teenager (imagining I was Native American, as white people do) instead of leaves it was the aching wooden floor, slightly slippery from dust made of shedded skin from weeks spent indoors. If I ran and slid I would skate, like in the dream, but in bare feet. (I just realized “but in” rhymes with Putin, but I’m sure he knows that)

I went back to sleep
Maybe
And I was walking around campus
Trying to get somewhere
somewhere in a hurry. To a class? To pick up my son? Before I had to go to fucking prison again? Now you can see why I questioned whether I actually woke up and walked around. I reentered the same dream in a different location.

I had some electronics with me. Like a phone but more fragile, in pieces.
The pieces fell in a reflecting pool. Time slowed as I retrieved the parts, wet with shiny slimy water. I kept fumbling for things, gathering parts, dropping them. Forever. I needed those objects. Needed them. There was a deadline. Fucking hurry up.

Two engineers said something interesting to themselves about my watery electronics. They mumbled numbers. Their watches were both wrong.

I keep going, losing time, slowing, and the waking world infects the dream world. At once every person around me is toxic. Every being a danger. People who were home, the comfort zone, now minacious, seemingly innocuous, but infectious.
Proximity amplifies tension, touch defiles, breathing pollutes.
They are unwitting demons
like the one I saw in my backyard as a kid one hot sunny day.

… and prison as a metaphor for our quarantine - how weak is that? I know. My unconscious is crude and trying to embarrass me in front of you. Its images primal and trivial. Sleeping mind and waking mind always reconfiguring each other, inhale exhale, mixing mashing. But here the body is the prison - not the house, carried around with you, jangly and iron heavy. No one gets in or near here. You are not a there where I can travel, and I’m not a here where you may arrive.

Dreams aren’t always symbols
Often they are just chemicals - (or a result of them)
And like all dreams they are made up of other dreams. And the daylight brings only the long dream of waking life, also made up of other dreams; little islands of sense that we never look beyond until they start to sink, and we turn our eyes offshore.

We are all offshore now.
Waving and forgetting what waving is for.

A dim, cold light fits itself through the slits in the shades. Dry skin meets drier skin dusting the floor. Words fill my slogged head. These words. Soggy, necessary.

I sit here, writing this, looking for the bird, wondering if my donut is dangerous.

Wait, I hear the bird.

…

Dean Terry
4/5/2020

Performed by Hilly Holsonback and read by Dean Terry live 4/9/2020. Special Thanks to Patrick Murphy.

Available as a pdf here

*Still from livestream performance of Cold Spring Pandemic Dream with Bird 4/9/2020*

Delivery In Light / April 11, 2020 by Dean Terry

A red Ford F-150 drives up. I can see it at an angle through a window that faces the front yard. Rain swollen pollen covers the ground. The sun ignites spring leaves with a brilliant green. A lone elm branch reaches toward the street, extending improbably across the lawn, appearing to defy gravity.

I see the truck through a lattice of leaves and light. The rims are rusty and a woman exits. Slow, deliberate. Her granite hair is pulled back moderately tight. Shorts and shirt, desaturated, worn, and loose. She snaps on blue and pink vinyl gloves and returns to the cab. Puts a mask on. Maybe used. Maybe not.

She removes a plastic bag from the bed of the truck, using her arm as a hanger. She grabs more bags, load balancing on her arms. One after the other, left then right, leaning slightly further each time. This takes several minutes. She looks toward the porch to asses the next task. Eyes back down, over the pollen and the wet green concrete. Three steep steps get her to the walk that leads to the porch. She calculates the weight from our food and supplies in each effort upward. I have time to find my phone, clear a notification from Crate and Barrel, change settings, and angle a clear view. I wait for her to enter the frame. Longer still. I change settings again and reframe. Even in a pandemic my patience deficit is unrelenting. She enters the frame. I take one, two, five shots. We should remember this, I’m thinking. This is a Kodak picture spot in April 2020. As she nears, she reminds me of my mom, who had a series of red F-150 trucks. Who in tough times, when she wasn’t an assistant or secretary, worked as a maid. This could be her.

She disappears from view, leaving packages on the porch. She’s there much longer than the younger people who deliver things for us: the mother and daughter in matching masks, the former restaurant worker. Did she fall? Is she arranging things so they look nice in the picture? So we post a positive review? Did she already make it to the truck? I look and see a shape. No, just reflections of the trees in the windshield. It stormed all night but now the spring light is out and bouncing off everything. Clarity creates its own chimeras.

I lean to look but she reappears on the walk, pulling her gloves off. She wrestles with her phone and points and shoots the evidence that she indeed dropped the groceries at our door. She turns, and heads toward the street. The stairs are there again, and require a recalculation. She no longer carries the weight of our privilege. A lurch left, a slight controlled fall to the right, and on to the truck. I look again, squinting to see a shape inside. Yes, not a reflection, a person. She drives off into the present.

A History of Therefore Part I / February 1, 2020 by Dean Terry

Therefore began in a logic philosophy classroom in the late 1980's. Despite being an undergraduate philosophy major, I was awful at symbolic logic. Plus, I was convinced quite early that logic and reason were a form of artifice, a balm for the human mind in search of order, to have power over the chaos of experience. So, in irony, as a name for the recordings I was making I chose therefore. The three dots are the symbol for therefore in symbolic logic.

I was living in one of a series of garages, in and around a group of artists and musicians that would turn out to be the band Ten Hands. The first 4-track recordings, and my first song, were made in 1987 in an apartment in Denton, TX. Most of the gear I used in those years was borrowed. I fell for drum machines instantly, and found they were things I understood and could master. Like many such devices they presented possibilities within limitations. I spent endless hours with them, these small islands that were capable of generating continents. Once I got my own 4-track in 1988 I was off. For the next seven or eight years I learned everything I could about audio engineering, music production, and synthesis. Before that the only experience I had with audio equipment was cobbling together home and car stereo systems.

The first song was called “Nervous System” and featured a lot of erratic, staccato rhythms made on a borrowed drum machine. The main line was “This is my nervous system” and referred to the jumpy drum parts. Looking back on it, the song featured many elements I would use over and over and to this day: original drum machine sounds and custom patterns, guitar textured and soloing, and spoken word. The song featured the first of several reenacted phone conversations.

Another early song was “therefore girlfriend” which was recorded with guitars and voice to 4-track. This one was recorded as quietly as possible while my girlfriend slept in the next room, so the guitars were directly in to the recorder with no amplifier or speaker. For effects, I used backward recording and speed variations. I also discovered that “therefore” backward sounds like “girlfriend." It seemed to fit.

An early 4-track analog recording from 1988. The voice is the word "therefore" backwards, which sort of sounds like "girlfriend."

A few years later I added synthesizers to the process, and they were love at first sound. Most of my favorite music featured them, and they were, at the time, the new instrument with the promise of creating new worlds of sound.

So early therefore was about recording, inspired by the music I was listening to at the time: Eno, Bowie, Gabriel, Talking Heads, Laurie Anderson, electric Miles Davis, art rock and electric Jazz. Expressive, organic electronic sounds with complex rhythmic elements with poetic, artful, smart words and great performances were what I was interested in. Bowie’s “Always Crashing In The Same Car” is maybe the pinnacle of this.

I played guitar obsessively then, inspired by Robert Fripp, Adrian Belew, Andy Summers, John Scofield, John McLaughlin, and others. Anyone who wasn’t making the traditional rock and jazz sounds. If I wasn't going to be a visual artist I would be a guitarist.

The first cassette was mostly a collection of fragments and noises. After, I would work to make eight to ten songs on drum machine. When I left for graduate school in Claremont, California I would lose the borrowed drum machine so I programmed dozens of patterns and recorded them to cassette for future recordings. I used those patterns all during the next two years in Claremont until I managed to use student loan money to buy a used Alesis HR-16.

In Claremont I lived much of the time in the art building on an elevated 4x8 piece of plywood. There I slept and made recordings with my cat and 13” television. Though it was art school I spent the majority of the time making recordings for installations and cassette releases. The rest was spent on VHS video art and roaming the city and surrounding desert.

Club Silence / Throat Ocean (from the archives) / August 22, 2019 by Dean Terry

From the Archives: Club Silence / Throat Ocean

Jasmine wakes up in Barstow behind the Bob’s Big Boy.

Club Silence / Throat Ocean began in March 2010 at SXSW and ran until the following Spring. It was a multi platform transmedia art & performance piece that was centered on twitter and the then growing awareness of location in mobile platforms. It was one my earliest projects that attempted to use alternative approaches to online platforms for creative projects.

Character. The character, Jasmine Silence, was a “geonervous” sleepwalker. She ran a club called Club Silence that, on the surface, appeared real. It was a place where no sounds were made. She lived above it but generally slept on the roof. The name Jasmine comes from David Bowie’s song “Always Crashing in the Same Car” which had a tone similar to what I wanted for the project.

Sleep disorder. The character would allude to a sleep disorder that was fantastical. She would be in one place, checking in, and then a few hours later be in an entirely different place, often obscure places. I also found a way to use Google’s street view in a simple, cinematic way. There was a way to post a link to street view in Twitter so that when opened, the virtual camera view would go from street level to straight up to the sky / sun. So if she woke up in Barstow, behind the Big Boy as in the image below, it would be as if you were in her place, waking up and looking at the sky, in a first person perspective. This was a glitch (since fixed) and was difficult to replicate but is an early example of using accidents and exploits in software for a creative effect.

Locations. Club Silence had three locations. Each was a made up address in between two real addresses. Each location had a phone booth so that calls could be made to or from the location. The image below shows the address in Los Angeles, based on Google street view. These locations also had Yelp listings with fake (and a few inexplicably authentic ones).

Platforms. Twitter was the primary platform, and other posts and activities from other platforms would be cross posted there. Twitter was primarily used for micro poems, poetic/oblique statements, and interactions with others. Yelp was used for location reviews of the three imaginary clubs. Foursquare was used for checkins. Foursquare was a startup that encouraged “check-ins” in locations. For a year or two, early adopters would checkin in wherever they went, sharing their location with friends. This was the first widely used location aware social system, long since integrated into most everything now. Google maps was used to track the character and to create a visual effect when opened from a link.

Plants (insiders). I had several people who were on the inside and were aware of the project. Otherwise it ran like a mockumentary where very few knew who was behind it. Those on the inside would make posts pretending they were at the location. Others would create faked photos.

An insider leaves a message at Club Silence Austin.

Enemies list. This was the first instance of the enemies list (vs friend lists which were what the internet was doing - and unquestioningly very proud of - at the time). The enemies list mostly consisted of well known new age and pop psychology figures who had found a new home and audience on twitter. Some of them, like Deepak Chopra, I would just reverse their tweet in a mini project called #quotehack. Most of their sayings can be reversed and make the same amount of head nodding nonsense.

Collections. The character would ask for things from her followers - the kind things that were generally only possible using the platforms at the time. In a mini project called Words That Hurt, she would ask for people to tweet the last word that someone said that hurt them. She also asked for recorded screams. People would call the Club Silence phone # (a google phone number when it was a thing) and scream into it. A number of beautiful scream made in bedrooms and alleys from all over was received and collected. She also asked for the sound of the moon from wherever they were, which people would leave on the voicemail. All of these digital artifacts were part of her “collection” - these were things she (I) collected. Collecting things like screams, words, and silence were part of the project, and a kind of alternative data collection vs the kind that advertising profilers were gathering.

Poetry. My primary motivation for creating Club Silence / Throat Ocean was as a writing exercise. The trans media and platform experiments were interesting creatively but the real challenge was speaking differently using (mostly) Twitter, which was still newish at the time. By the end of the project I had a database of one or two line poems and sayings - another form of collection.

Fin. In the end the project functioned like an online fantasy. An imaginary character appeared, made slight marks in one of the infinite numbers of little corners on the internet, and disappeared. It was about countering the pedestrian, self promoting, matter of factness of twitter. At that time almost no one was questioning the platform, the way it kept data forever, the value of constant updating and interruption, and the distortions of online, text centered identity. At its her best, Jasmine would say something that would break the flow of tweets about food, talks people were giving, cats, and the rest of the forever ephemera that exemplified the halcyon days of twitter.

The project ran nearly a year and expanded from one platform to several. Several online relationships were established via the character. The tone remained consistent. And then it changed names and faded out just as it faded in. The archive is still online (though many of the embedded links have expired) at @ThroatOcean.